Very young, three or younger, I believe. My parents would take trips to visit their families whenever they could afford it—every three or four years or so—and we were taken right along, regardless of our ages. They saved every disposable cent for these trips and for the occasional long-distance telephone call.
I live hundreds of miles from any border, and never have had the need to go to one and cross it.
19 to Canada. We had a family vacation to the U.S. Virgin Islands when I was about 12, but that’s not technically ,saving the country.
First trip to Europe at age 29 or 30.
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In 1959, when I was 12 years old, my parents decided to go visit their parents. Not having much money, they decided to drive the Alcan Highway. A rough rip in those days (the road was still gravel), and the old 1954 Ford barely survived it. Lost our muffler, the radiator welds broke, and the windshield was spider-webbed. Drove from Anchorage to Montana, then across to Portland (via Yellowstone Park) where they bought a used '57 Ford, and drove back up to Alaska. A grand adventure.
I guess it could have been as a babby, considering I lived so close to the Canadian border like many others here, but the first I remember was to Toronto when I was around 4. I don’t think I’d gone before, because we couldn’t afford a lot of cross-border vacations at the time, even living so close, because one of the things I remember about the trip is that we were parked across the street from a restaurant where I could see people walking up stairs with cups of french fries in their hands but my dad said we couldn’t afford to buy any.
We also visited the Toronto Zoo but I have no memory of that, just pictures. My most vivid memory is of an indoor playplace-like playground before Playplaces existed, which lead me as an adult to try to (successfully) recreate the feeling of wonder in the City Museum of St Louis.
In late 1976, my family went to live in the Soviet Union for a year. My father was doing research while he was on sabbatical. We lived in Moscow, but we saw the rest of the country. We went to Leningrad, Sochi, some small towns outside Moscow, and about half of the non-Slavic SSRs. After leaving the Soviet Union, we went to Czechoslovakia, where my mother still had some family, and Poland, Denmark, and the UK. Czechoslovakia, I understand-- we were there for several weeks, first in Prague, then in Bratislava, then in some small towns in Slovakia, visiting relatives my mother had reconnected with, and Poland I kinda get, because it was a Slavic country neither of my parents had seen, and Warsaw is a beautiful city, and the UK was actually something I wanted to see after watching Masterpiece Theatre, and reading dozens of children’s books from the UK (I must have read* Ballet Shoes* 15 times); I’m not sure exactly why Denmark, except that we spent the day at Tivoli. I guess of all the “children’s attractions” in Europe, Tivoli heads the list, particularly since there was no Euro-Disney at the time.
We had a house in Queens that my parents had rented out, and when we came back to the US in July of 1977, we didn’t go straight home. We visited my great-aunt and uncle on Long Island for a week or so, then stayed with my grandmother in Westchester for, like a month. My mother said at the time it was because we had come back early, and our renters were still in the house.
Years and years later, I found out that my parents didn’t want to return to Queens while the Son of Sam was active. School started on Sept. 1, or 2, whatever was the first weekday that wasn’t a holiday. Anyway, they had resigned to returning in time for my brother and me to start school, whatever the status of the investigation, but David Berkowitz was arrested on Aug. 10, so the next day, they rented a van, packed up out stuff, and we drove back.
I was four when we crossed the border from El Paso to Juarez for sightseeing and shopping.
We took camping trips to upstate New York at least as early as when I was five. Disney World at six.
I would have been 19 when I and my college roommate went to Montreal to visit a friend of ours from our dorm.
Darn. I chose 16-20 thinking of the trip my family took to Niagara Falls when I was 16 or 17, but after I voted I remembered that the first time we went to Canada was several years earlier.
In my single digits, our family would frequently borrow a lakeside summer cottage in Ipperwash Beach, Ontario, NW of the city of London. We took other summer trips to various outdoorsy Ontario locations, a fairly easy drive from the Cleveland area.
First visited Mexico (Tijuana, anyway) at 8 years in 1969, as part of attended drive/trip to California.
First overseas trip: to Spain (Madrid and Seville) in 1973. Franco wasn’t dead yet.
Went to Windsor, ON, from Michigan with my mom when I was 8 or 9 on a day trip. My best memory from the day? Finding GRAPE JELLO in a Canadian store. Took it home and ate like a king that night.
I was just adding up all my time in other countries as an adult after that trip down the Alcan (oh, and one other trip with parents to Dawson City in the Yukon), and came up with a total of 14 years spent overseas. I think that first trip through Canada is what sparked my wanderlust.
First time flying out of Britain was when I was 6 or 7, I think, to Malta, with a boat trip to Ireland somewhere around the same time. By 18 I’d visited three continents, by 22 I’d been to 5.
My Grandpa loved travelling (he worked in Saudi, with a contract including one trip home every 6 months, but discovered they’d pay the same airmiles regardless of the direction, so went to a new place every time as he’d rented the house out). Mum caught the travel bug off him, and I was brought up on the stories.
Wow! How hard was it to get into the USSR in the cold war days?
My answer is a lot less exciting–32, Nuevo Progresso on the Texas-Mexico border to see family. Before then, I never had the money to take a serious trip. Oddly enough, although I’ve always lived less than 200 miles from the Canada-US border, it took me until age 40 to cross it.
Technically, the summer I turned 15 (I might have still been 14, I don’t remember the precise dates of the trip) family took a driving trip to California and Grand Canyon from Oregon. In San Diego, my father decided it would be fun to pop over into Tijuana. I’m not sure how we managed it since we didn’t have passports with us, perhaps in those days (1964) they didn’t require them. We spent a couple of hours, maybe; I don’t remember if we even got out of the car (I was a little scared, I had this image of a sort of outlaw town in my head, probably nothing like reality).
FF 15 years and my first real trip abroad, I flew to Japan two days before my 30th birthday.
16 - short family trip to the Dominican Republic, must have been late 77 or early 78. Stayed a few days at San Pedro de Macorís and a couple of nights in Jarabacoa; back then you could travel there with just your birth certificate.
Actually, now that I think about it, I was born in Niagara Falls, NY. I’m sure we ventured to the Canadian side once or twice before we moved to Maine, but I wouldn’t remember it.
I was 2 when my family moved from Australia to England, so I have no memory of that trip, even though we would have spent about a month on the ship. (Flying was far too expensive back then.)
I do remember the second time that I travelled internationally. At the age of 9, we moved back from England to Australia. So the first foreign country that I remember going to was Egypt, since we visited it as we passed through the Suez Canal. (Of course, I never felt that England was a foreign country.)