All my life I have disagreed with Henry David Henry: Unlike him, I think it is “worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.” That’s why inveterate travelers find the return to post-pandemic travel an exhilarating experience.

This spring my husband and I were excited to resurrect an aborted trip abroad that was planned almost four years ago. We were so excited you might have thought it was something we’d never done before. The truth is travel is in our DNA so having to stay close to home for so long was hard.

The joy of travel began when I was a child,nd the high point of summer was a family trip to Toronto to visit my father’s relatives. On the eve of the journey my sister and I laid out new shorts, T-shirts, and sandals to be ready when the alarm rang at 6:00 a.m. Teeth brushed and hair combed, we skipped to the back of the black Buick and didn’t argue with our brother for the window seat. We were too busy savoring breakfast at Howard Johnson’s, part of the annual ritual that always began our trip to another country.

Every year we took a different route to enjoy the scenery. Pre-interstate and Holiday Inns, we drove through Pennsylvania Dutch country or New England or New York State, where we visited Ithaca’s gorges, the 1,000 islands, and of course, Niagara Falls. Every night, we looked for AAA-approved cabins in which to sleep, with their worn linoleum floors, chenille bedspreads, and inevitable spiders. We thought it was pure heaven (except for the spiders.)

Crossing the border was like going to a forbidden country. We had to answer questions about where we were going, why, and for how long, and reassure customs officials that we had nothing illegal with us. Once cleared to proceed we headed to the Falls to ride in the Maid of the Mist boat that went behind the Falls spraying us with water.

In Toronto we checked into the Royal York Hotel where a little man in a maroon uniform roamed the lobby every day calling out, “Call for Mr. Smith!” “Call for Mr. Jones!” The next morning, before heading to my grandfather’s cottage, we ate breakfast in The Honeydew Restaurant. Only then were we ready for the obligatory visits that lay ahead.

Later, in my early twenties, I took my first solo trip to Europe. I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven as I experienced Amsterdam, London, Paris, Rome, and the Swiss landscape, relying on travel books that promised you could do this kind of thing economically. Relishing every moment and every conversation with fellow travelers from different cultures, I thought I’d go mad with the pleasure of it all. I marveled at the sight of Michelangelo’s David, wept in San Marco Square, thrilled at the pageantry of the Changing of the Guard, sat in cafes on the Champs Elysee and smiled back at Mona Lisa. I even fell in love twice. More importantly I knew that my life had changed and that I would never stop traveling.

Luckily, I married a Brit who loves traveling as much as I do and with whom I was able to travel internationally because of his work, then mine. We even lived for a year in Thailand when I got a teaching gig there. We traveled like cockroaches then, scurrying around Southeast Asia, discovering new foods, new art and music, new friends, beautiful rituals, and other ways of living.

Travel also offers a diverse and sometimes dramatic education. History, art, literature, religious beliefs all come alive as we are exposed to other cultures, rituals, and norms. We become more curious, learn new ways of thinking or expressing ourselves, and grow in ways we never imagined.

Traveling also offers challenges. Before there was a single currency in Europe, I had to learn how to convert currencies, to communicate without a common language and to know the difference between the Alps and the Pyrenees. It was instructive and fun. I also had to develop bargaining skills and to know how to deal with dangerous situations. Luckily, in my experience, there is always someone to help.

Travel, if it’s possible, can be simply a pleasurable experience or a profound life-altering event. For me it was both, and I view it as a great blessing.

That’s why I continue to agree with Mark Twain who claimed that travel is enticing, not least because it is “fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” Like Twain, whose account of one trip gave us Innocents Abroad, I think “it would be well if such an excursion could be got up every year and the system regularly inaugurated.”

Traveling may have seemed a thing of the past during the pandemic. Now we may find ourselves changing venues because of the climate crisis or different opportunities. We may prefer more café crawls and fewer cathedral and museum visits along with more chatting with the locals. But I am among those travelers who are not ready to let a passport expire because I never know when I might have a fierce urge to weep again in Venice, to learn something new, to make new friends, or to count cats in Zanzibar.

Erica Jong, author of Fear of Flying, wrote about more than her own fear of flying in her best-selling novel, but she did manage to capture my own feelings whenever I board a hunk of a silver vessel about to hurtle across the sky. “My fingers (and toes) turn to ice,” she wrote, “my stomach leaps upward into my rib cage, the temperature in the tip of my nose drops to the same temperature in my fingers, and my heart and the engine correspond as we attempt to prove again that the laws of aerodynamics [will save us}.”

I never give in to my fear of flying because I love to travel, and like most of us I think “it can’t happen to me.” But what’s been occurring in aviation recently has ratcheted up my anxiety. It doesn’t help that I am writing this commentary prior to a trip that involves several flights, two of them transatlantic, which means there’s nowhere to land in an emergency between London and Boston except Iceland. Nor am I assuaged after PTSD memories of a flight over the Andes in which the turbulence was so intense I wondered if I’d be forced to eat survivors as we waited for rescue. Then there was the “close as it gets” landing in Honduras some years ago when two aircraft rounded a mountain simultaneously while trying to land.

Now my anxiety is heightened by near misses taking place. Recently, a commercial aircraft and a private jet were within seconds of crashing into each other on a runway when the pilot of the smaller plane ignored air traffic control instructions to wait for a Jet Blue plane to land in front of it. This was only one of several incidents involving near misses. “Experts say near-misses on runways are more common than the traveling public may realize. There have been 613 runway incursion incidents so far this year, according to FAA data, compared with 1,732 in all of 2022,” according to an NBC.news report.

Then there’s the cluster of potential disasters taking place in aircraft cabins. The FAA’s year-end totals for 2022 are shocking. Nearly 2500 episodes of unruly passengers were reported, Over 800 investigations of incidents were initiated, and more than 500 enforcement actions were started. In March of this year, a man tried to stab a flight attendant on a flight from Los Angeles to Boston and cabin crews report having suffered various physical attacks as well as sexual harassment. According to the Flight Attendants union, flight crews have “called on the entire airline industry to step up to combat harassment and recognize the impact it has on safety. … Airlines must also ensure that staffing levels on flights are sufficient.”

It’s also clear that climate change and global warming have played a part in increased episodes of severe turbulence. The research is clear: “Earth’s warming, the result of the burning of fossil fuels, is increasing the risks of bumpy flights. It has to do with ways warming in the atmosphere influences winds at varying altitudes,” as the Washington Post reported in March. In December 36 passengers on a flight to Hawaii were injured and in March a Lufthansa flight from Houston to Frankfurt had to make an emergency landing at Dulles International Airport in Virginia.

Despite all these worries, I realize in my rational moments that air travel is statistically safer than getting into your car. I know that like cars, airplanes are, for most of us, a necessary part of modern life. Still, there is something about flying that kicks in when I board a plane and the aircraft door is sealed by a gatekeeper on a terra firma ramp. As the engines rev, and the safety instructions, which we all know are pretty useless, are demonstrated, I think of Erica Jong, who admitted that “constant vigilance” was her motto. “I keep concentrating very hard, helping the pilot fly that 250 passenger !#+@!” she said. Believe me, these days I relate to that more than ever.

Political commentator and comic, Dennis Miller, along with Erica Jong, have both captured my own aerophobia (a real word), which is nice. It gives me something to laugh at when the going gets rough. “"My fear of flying,” Miller shared, “starts as soon as I buckle myself in and then the guy up front mumbles a few unintelligible words then before I know it I'm thrust into the back of my seat by acceleration that seems way too fast and the rest of the trip is an endless nightmare of turbulence, of near misses. And then the cabbie drops me off at the airport."

So, here's to all the other fearful passengers out there as we buckle up. Long may we fly high until we reach our destinations, which is more than likely to happen. Right?