On Travel as Inheritance

My parents were born in Cameroon. They moved to Paris as students, met at a party, fell in love. They started a family in France, and when they decided to leave, they did not just move to the United States. They went looking for it. They took us on a grand American tour, flying from city to city, region to region, checking places out before they chose where we would land. They chose the Bay Area in California. The choosing itself was a kind of trip.

That is how I learned what travel was. Not as a thing you take a break for, but as a thing you do to find out what to do next.

Even before we left France, my parents had been moving. Weekend drives to Belgium, trips to England, surrounding countries reached and circled back from. And once we had settled into California, the same pattern continued in a different key: every summer, my parents would pack us into a van, and we would set out to explore the coast we had just begun calling home. There was always a next place to see. They were not trying to teach us anything in particular. They were just always going. The result is that all of my siblings and I, every one of us, grew up to be people who travel. The wanderlust was inherited. It was not a thing we discovered. It was a thing that was already in us when we got old enough to notice.

I have a Cameroonian heritage I carry with me always, a French upbringing I will never not be made by, and an American adulthood I have chosen and chosen again. Three cultures running through me at once, all the time. That is what my parents gave me, and they did not give it to me by sitting me down to explain it. They gave it to me by moving.

I built Moments of Sonder because I believe travel is transformative, and I know this not because I read it somewhere but because I have lived inside the proof of it for my entire life.

What travel actually does

Most of us grew up watching travel happen to other people. On television, in movies, in books. In the stories somebody’s relative told at a dinner table. We saw images of places we wanted to go, or we felt something we could not name and suspected we would find the name for it somewhere else.

For a lot of us, that watching was even closer to home. Our grandparents were born in a town we have never been to. Our family came from somewhere else, recently or generations ago. Our roots might be where we are, but our roots are also somewhere else in the world, and there is a quiet, persistent pull toward those somewhere-elses that does not go away.

People carry these wishes around with them. Always wanted to see the Northern Lights. Always wanted to go to Antarctica, or Patagonia. The Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China. The town where Grandma was born. The streets Audrey Hepburn walked in Roman Holiday, just to walk them too. These are not trivial daydreams. They are deeply personal, and most of the people carrying them have no idea where to begin.

That is who I built this for.

What travel actually does, when it is done well, is harder to capture in a brochure than the places themselves. It deepens the connection you have with the people you bring with you. It opens the possibility of new connections with people you have not yet met. It changes you in ways you do not fully understand until later. You go somewhere as one version of yourself and you come back slightly altered, and the alteration accumulates over a lifetime of going.

I have learned things about myself on trips that I could not have learned at home. I have known for a long time that I love a live sporting event, despite the fact that I could not be made to care about sports the rest of the year. I will go to a baseball game on a Tuesday night for no reason. What I did not know, until my brother and I went to the Paris Olympics together, was how much. We traveled around France, ended up at a soccer match in Nice, and spent the night talking to people who had flown in from another country to support their team. The camaraderie in those stands, complete strangers who had come so far to be there together, was infectious in a way I had not encountered before. It cemented something. This year I went to Talladega for a NASCAR race, in April, even though I could not tell you a single driver’s name in any other context. I went because I wanted to feel the ground tremble under the cars and stand in the middle of a crowd that cared about something together. It was extraordinary.

I would not have known any of this about myself if I had not gone.

On the kind of gift that stays

I have been thinking, over the past few years, about which gifts actually last.

I have received many beautiful gifts in my life, and I have cherished them. What I have come to believe is that the gifts that have stayed with me the longest are not the ones I unwrapped. They are the ones I lived.

A few years ago I was working in Seattle, and I loved it. The water, the neighborhoods, the way the city sits on its hills. I knew my mother would love it too, but she kept finding reasons not to come. There was always something to do at home, always a next weekend that would work better. So I bought her a plane ticket and told her she was coming. She nearly talked herself out of it. She came anyway.

We spent the weekend in the city she had never seen. We had dinner at Ivar’s. We went shopping in Bellevue. We walked the streets of downtown Seattle and at one point she turned to me and said the way the city felt reminded her of being a young student in Paris, of walking those streets for the first time. She had not thought about that in years. It was sitting inside her, waiting for a city to come along that would shake it loose.

On one of those evenings we ended up on the rooftop of the Thompson Hotel at sunset. I ordered us a bottle of sparkling rosé, and the bar manager brought it out himself, on ice. We tucked into a corner where we could just make out the edges of Pike Place Market and, behind it, the water, with the light going soft over everything. My mother turned to me at some point and said, this is amazing. Her whole body had let go. She was so deeply happy.

A week later, the world shut down.

It was March 2020. I stopped working in Seattle. Everybody stopped doing everything. And the weekend my mother had almost not taken became the weekend she had taken just in time. She still brings it up, six years later. Not the gifts I gave her that year, not the things I have given her since. That weekend. Ivar’s. Bellevue. The streets that reminded her of Paris. The rooftop. The rosé. The city she almost did not come see.

That is what I mean by a gift that stays. Six years on, it is still paying her in the same currency she received it in. It will keep paying her. And it pays me too, every time she tells the story.

This happens, in some version, on every meaningful trip. My sister and I took our first trip together to Bangkok, more than ten years ago now, and we both booked the same Thai massage at the hotel. We had completely different experiences. She had the most calming, soothing, restorative hour of her life. I have described mine, ever since, as being slowly beaten up by a very tiny woman. To this day, when I am trying to describe an uncomfortable situation that is also somehow funny, my Thai massage comes up. It is a fixed reference point in the family vocabulary. With one of my closest friends, in Cabo, it is a hotel sushi restaurant with the strangest menu either of us has ever encountered: sushi with blueberries in it, and other dishes so liberal with Chinese five spice that I can still identify it instantly, anywhere in the world. We bring it up regularly. The trip was the gift. The memory is the gift that keeps arriving.

What this work is for

Which brings me to the name.

Sonder is a word. It means the realization that each person you pass on the street is living a life as full and as complex as your own, with their own histories, ambitions, anxieties, joys. It is the moment when the rest of the world stops being a backdrop to you, and starts being a place full of people, every one of them at the center of their own story.

That feeling is what travel produces, when it is done well. Not the sights. Not the photographs. The dawning understanding that you are one person on an earth full of other people, and you are very lucky to be here at the same time as all of them, and the only way to really know that is to go.

That is what Miriam Beard was getting at. Travel is not the seeing of sights. It is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living. It is what helps us connect better to ourselves. It is what helps us connect better to each other. It is what helps us connect better to the earth we are sharing for the brief time we are on it.

It is also the slow work of connecting memories to memories. Reading a book and then walking the steps described in the book, because that is a real place. Seeing an image on a postcard and then standing in front of it, and passing that tradition along by sending a postcard yourself. Going to the corner you saw in the movie. Building family lore that your children will be telling at dinner tables for decades. Hanging a small object on a wall in your home, and feeling the echo back of where you were when you got it, every time you walk past.

It is intangible. And it is one of the most valuable things a person can carry.

Moments of Sonder Travel exists to help people find their own moments of sonder, and bring them home, and live differently because of them. That is what this work is for.

Priscilla Nzessi is the founder of Moments of Sonder Travel. She was born in Paris, raised between France and California, and carries Cameroon with her always.