When I was little, I used to travel with my dad a lot. He was the editor of the travel pages in a big newspaper, and took me with him on his trips now and again. I’ve been all over, helping him find a good story: sailing past white coral beaches on Zanzibar, crawling through wartime tunnels in Vietnam, riding roller costers in Disneyland in Paris and standing in a never-ending line to get up into the Empire State Building in New York. However, sice the London trip that in the end never turned into anything due to the terrorist attacks in the underground just a couple of weeks before the piece was to be published, I’ve not been anywhere with dad. He quit the travel pages, and later even quit the newspaper, and now he freelances, writing stories about renewable energy mostly.
So that might explain why this trip to Scotland felt both familiar and quite strange. I’m older now, and have traveled a great deal by myself, which means that my dad isn’t the all-knowing travel editor anymore. I’ve got my own set of experiences that make me into a competent traveler. And, most importantly in this case, I have a driver’s license. My dad does not. So obviously, that was the main argument for why I should tag along on this trip. I was the driver. But these things combined also made it so plain for me that I’m an adult now. There are things that I know and can do, that my dad can’t. It felt kind of nice.
I’ve also never seen my dad doing interviews. One rearely does proper interviews when researching for a travel piece. And I don’t really know how interviews are supposed to be made, but seeing my dad with his piles of research, preparing questions, knowing all these technical engineering terms (generally, my dad is very much not a science person – he is rather a humanities kind of guy), it made me realize how competent he is. Not that I didn’t know that before, I just hadn’t seen it in action.
It’s kind of the same experience as the one I had in April, traveling around Liberia with mom. Seeing the way she could talk with anybody, asking them just the right questions to make them relax, even though she was this white stranger arriving in a huge embassy car.
Both my parents are very much what they do, and these last couple of months I’ve seen them in action, doing their thing. They’re not just my mom and dad, they’re professionals too. And I must say that it’s impressive.
Dad on the job, on his way down into the submarine-like Scotrenewable’s machine.
Katja Malmborg 