Mark McNease

Travel Time is a regular feature at LGBTSr, highlighting destinations, travel suggestions and travelogues for the LGBTQ traveler.

What Venice Taught Me
By Sandra de Helen

The only place outside the United States my mom dreamed of visiting was Venice, Italy. She was entranced by this city built on water. As for me, I wanted to go everywhere, see everything. But we were working class poor, living in rural Missouri. We became even poorer when my father died at age forty-two leaving my mom who was nine years younger with two little girls, one of who wasn’t quite two years old. I was the other daughter, and I was seven. Any traveling we did was through reading. Every book offered another world. I spent my childhood dreaming of those worlds.

My first trip out of state was to New Orleans. I was eighteen. At twenty-one, I flew to Alaska and stayed for two months. Later that year I moved to Texas. Over the next decade, I lived in Alaska, Kansas, Arizona, and Missouri again. By the age of thirty-two, I had visited seventeen states. I was ready to go to Europe. When my credit union offered a chartered trip to Seefeld, Austria for only five hundred dollars for eight days, I placed a down payment and invited a friend to join me.