Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Travel as nostalgia

This piece, which I wrote for National Geographic Traveller India, about revisiting places after a long time away, had been floating around in my head for a while.

Getting older, I realized that, as well as seeing new places, I wanted to remind myself where I had been, the places that had shaped me and my world view. But I often found that when I went back, I would mostly fixate on what had changed, which would bolster my memories about how things had been. It was like a spot-the-difference puzzle.

The intersection in Galway where, so many years ago, I called home to discover my granddad had passed away. I'm sure it's a different phone in front of the old stone building, but standing there conjured the same emotions.
What I left out of the Nat Geo Traveller India piece was that on my 2015 trip to Ireland, where I revisited the site of where I received news of my granddad's death, I also visited, for the first time, the port where the Irish side of my family--my granddad's family--left Ireland for the New World.

Maurice and wife Catherine Riley left Tralee County on the Brig Martin in July 1820, according to Prince Edward Island history. At Tralee's historic Blennerville port, I wasn't able to find records of their departure; it was before peak Potato Famine migration. But in revisiting a piece of my own past in Galway, I was able to go on and act as a proxy for my ancestors, who, never having returned to their birthplace, made me a Canadian.

It's hard to imagine a ship capable of crossing the Atlantic loading up passengers in this mucky spot in Blennerville, Ireland.

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