Bring On the Adventure

When my father was invited to Australia as an engineering adviser, he gathered the family and asked whether we should go. No one wanted to stay behind. The answer was immediate: adventure, bring it on. I lay awake for several nights thinking about the new life ahead of us. At fifteen, Australia was almost beyond imagination.^[1]

In February 1954, I took my first airplane flight, first to Salt Lake City and then to San Francisco. Air travel itself was an event. From San Francisco we boarded an Orient Line passenger ship for the Pacific crossing. The transcript leaves the exact vessel uncertain, and that detail deserves family confirmation rather than a confident guess.^[2]

Because of the arrangements made for the engineering families, we traveled first class. Meals had assigned places and rules, and the ship carried the social structure of another age. We stopped in Honolulu, Fiji, and New Zealand. Each port offered only a glimpse, but together they made the map of the Pacific real.^[3]

The voyage was an education before school in Australia even began. Our family learned to move together through unfamiliar places, to follow customs we had not created, and to accept surprise as part of the day. The farther we traveled from Denver, the more capable the world seemed of becoming larger again.^[4]