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How Teenage Lust Turned Into Wanderlust
At 16 years old, my parents took me on a cruise of the Virgin Islands. We always traveled as a family, but we usually camped and stayed within our own state of Minnesota and the neighboring states, with an occasional foray across the border into Canada.
I was the youngest of three kids, and by the time I was the lone child at home as a teenager, my parents were more financially stable, as happens with time. As a result, our vacations started to change from tents and canoes to hotels with pools and cabins on ships. Taking a cruise through exotic islands on water bluer than I’d ever seen was my first glimpse into the world beyond the American Midwest, and it sparked a wanderlust that has never dulled.
Moment of truth: my first glimpse of the broader world also included my first experience with love and lust, which may have been a factor in the wanderlust rooting so deep. But as first experiences with love/lust go, this was off the charts, setting the bar high for my love of the exotic and for all future romantic expectations.
Being new to cruising, my parents chose a lesser known cruising company, and didn’t realize until we were on the ship that the target audience of this cruise was mostly fifty years of age and older. There were a handful of other teenagers on the ship, but I didn’t even see them until the cruise was nearly…
