Unwrapping the Best Gift--Travel

Holiday gift-giving is in the air and polls show that Americans would like to be.

Whether flying, driving, backpacking or cruising, Americans now list travel as their ultimate dream. Trips have replaced old luxuries--diamonds, furs and sports cars--as the No. 1 gift wish of 1989.

I understand. For me, travel is an essential part of life and always has been. Even as a carsick child I loved the change of routine, the promise of surprise. Each summer my parents would pack us all into the family car in the middle of America and drive as far as they could in half of their vacation time. Inevitably, they returned home by another route.

After reading that the wise men did much the same thing that fateful Christmas, I figured my parents got their travel plans from the Bible.

They did not think small. One July it was Tulsa, Hannibal, Springfield, Chicago, Detroit, Niagara Falls (both the U.S. and Canadian sides), Boston, Salem, Newport, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Charlottesville, Lexington, Eureka Springs and home.

Or, as I remember it, Mark Twain’s white picket fence, Lincoln’s law office, the windy beach by Lake Michigan, Greenfield Village with Henry Ford’s cars, honeymoon chapels and daredevils in barrels, slices of chocolate pie in the windows of the Horn and Hardart’s automat in Manhattan, the Rockettes, sleeping in a trundle bed near the Mayflower, visiting Paul Revere’s church, lying awake with a head full of ghost stories in a timbered inn next to the House of Seven Gables, and sighing over a Mario Lanza movie on the same day that I saw the Liberty Bell and Ben Franklin’s grave.

I remember cringing as my kid sister danced around the base of the Washington Monument. I remember staying at a fancy hotel that had an indoor swimming pool that smelled just like the chlorine in the basement of the Tulsa YWCA.

I remember celebrating my 14th birthday in the parking lot of Jefferson’s estate at Monticello. I remember staring at the piano in Stephen Foster’s old Kentucky home and knowing that he practiced more than I did.

It was a summer of caves and escalators, big rivers and the Waldorf-Astoria, a crush on a handsome guide with a cleft chin and a pause at a Civil War battleground. There were lots of laughs and root beer. There were parks and merry-go-rounds.

I was carsick often, but never for long. Someone suggested Mother Sills Seasick Pills from a corner drugstore in Missouri, but soda crackers worked best. When parents wonder about taking children on trips, I think of these best of times.

Auto trips make great gifts, but there are longer and shorter holiday notions.

From my mail it seems that a lot of readers have their hearts set on a summer mule trip among the High Sierra camps of Yosemite. They need to reserve space in December by writing to Yosemite Park and Curry Co., 5410 E. Home Ave., Fresno, Calif. 93727.

Others hope that someone will take them away for a weekend at a fine city hotel, or a desert hideaway, or a resort by the sea. Travel gift certificates can be written for a week in London, a dinner in Marrakech, a round trip on the Concorde or camping gear from L. L. Bean.

Small travel items make great looking stocking-stuffers: a Tekna-Lite II flashlight, the smallest of Swiss Army knives, a slim chain for the convention-going business woman who is faced with pinning another name tag onto a silk shirt.

Travel videos (such as Society Expeditions’ new “Project Antarctica”) are winsome presents. Travel books are ever appealing, starting with a world atlas. Michelin green guides and maps add excitement to trip planning.

The opposite of my parents’ ebullient tours--so laced with history and lore--is the old keeping up with the Joneses routine, in which you try to duplicate a neighbor’s allegedly perfect trip. These attempts can lead to world class disappointment. You may not have the same interests as your pals. And they may have glossed over the bad times.

The only Jones I have ever tried to keep up with is a National Geographic photographer named Dewitt, with whom I recently collaborated on a book about California. That research took me to Burro Bend and Sausalito, Murphy’s and Plantation, Lee Vining and San Juan Capistrano.

Like all other trips, it made me eager for more. And now that I sit in the driver’s seat instead of standing on my head in the back, I rarely get carsick.