J and I love to travel. We’ve been to some great places, and have lots of places that we’ve love to go in the future. We’re loving our time in Hawaii right now. We’ve only been shopping for about 15 minutes during the five days we’ve been here, and it was to buy a couple of gifts that some special people at home would really appreciate. We’re not planning any other shopping time during our trip. There are too many sights to see, waves to ride, sandcastles to build (we’re visiting our nieces), and pictures to take. We decided that pictures will be our only souvenirs from this trip. Usually when we travel, we bring back some sort of trinket as a momento of our trip. But we don’t have any more room in our house, so we can’t keep buying stuff everywhere we go, or else every surface in our house will be covered in stuff.
I love to scrapbook, and we take tons of pictures, both at home and when we travel. We have a digital camera; we can delete the bad pics, and we always end up with lots of good ones, so this is a perfect solution. Part of me wants to buy something Hawaiian – but not cheesy or touristy – to put in our house to subtly remind me of our trip. And perhaps to subtly remind our friends and family? That’s a tough one to admit, but I think it’s true. We love to travel, and so do most people we know. Somehow souvenirs from exotic locales feel like a status symbol when they’re on display in your house. Let’s face it, most people would rather have an African carving – that they picked up in Africa – on their wall rather than a poster they bought at KMart. Including myself. But when I really think about the whole souvenir issue, it seems a bit shallow, and flies in the face of my efforts to save money and have a clutter-free house.
We are having a great time here, and it’s a trip we’ll remember for a long time. We don’t need stuff from Hawaii sitting around our house to remind us of the trip. And the fact that we are lucky enough to have family in Hawaii who invited us to visit doesn’t make us better people or worthy of anyone’s admiration. When our friends come over, we can just have a good time hanging out with them, in front of a KMart poster.
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