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calimacIn Luann, which is currently the most interestingly-plotted comic strip that my newspaper carries, the college-age Luann is preparing for a trip to New York with a couple similarly-aged friends, and her parents are fretting about this first non-parentally-supervised trip and reminiscing about their own.
I suppose mine depends on precise definitions.
When I was as young as 8, I was taking full-day trips by bicycle to explore the rugged hills near our home. My parents let me do this because they knew I wouldn't get lost (I was an assured map-reader even then) and could be relied on to be home by dinner. My mother would pack me a bag lunch.
How about a little farther away?
I was all of 15 when my parents packed me on a plane by myself and sent me off to visit my grandparents. We were actually on a cross-country vacation at the time, and I missed the last leg, which was fine: by that point in the trip, spending another week cooped up in the motor home with three little brothers had lost its appeal. This was the trip when my grandfather took me on a private tour of the brewery for which he was the leading distributor, with the president of the brewery as our guide; fortunately I was too young to partake of the product and have to pretend I liked beer.
Overnight without parental supervision?
That depends if college dorms count. I moved into one at 18.
How about without any in loco parentis at all?
That would be when I was 19 and started attending science-fiction conventions. For my first, I took a bus the 40 miles to the City where a friend who lived there picked me up and drove the remaining 80 miles or so to Sacramento where Mythcon was. Another friend drove me back. Several other group expeditions followed, some involving me driving, but the longest was a large group expedition to a Westercon in Vancouver by train.
My first big totally solo trip that I can recall was to Britain at the age of 22. I attended the Worldcon in Brighton but I did many other things, and drove as far as North Wales and Yorkshire. Surely this wasn't the first time I rented a car, but I can't think offhand of when before I might have done so.
The year after that I moved to Seattle for grad school, and the following year acquired my first car entirely of my own, as opposed to an extra parental car for which I had privileges, and since then all my traveling has been of my own making.
I suppose mine depends on precise definitions.
When I was as young as 8, I was taking full-day trips by bicycle to explore the rugged hills near our home. My parents let me do this because they knew I wouldn't get lost (I was an assured map-reader even then) and could be relied on to be home by dinner. My mother would pack me a bag lunch.
How about a little farther away?
I was all of 15 when my parents packed me on a plane by myself and sent me off to visit my grandparents. We were actually on a cross-country vacation at the time, and I missed the last leg, which was fine: by that point in the trip, spending another week cooped up in the motor home with three little brothers had lost its appeal. This was the trip when my grandfather took me on a private tour of the brewery for which he was the leading distributor, with the president of the brewery as our guide; fortunately I was too young to partake of the product and have to pretend I liked beer.
Overnight without parental supervision?
That depends if college dorms count. I moved into one at 18.
How about without any in loco parentis at all?
That would be when I was 19 and started attending science-fiction conventions. For my first, I took a bus the 40 miles to the City where a friend who lived there picked me up and drove the remaining 80 miles or so to Sacramento where Mythcon was. Another friend drove me back. Several other group expeditions followed, some involving me driving, but the longest was a large group expedition to a Westercon in Vancouver by train.
My first big totally solo trip that I can recall was to Britain at the age of 22. I attended the Worldcon in Brighton but I did many other things, and drove as far as North Wales and Yorkshire. Surely this wasn't the first time I rented a car, but I can't think offhand of when before I might have done so.
The year after that I moved to Seattle for grad school, and the following year acquired my first car entirely of my own, as opposed to an extra parental car for which I had privileges, and since then all my traveling has been of my own making.
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no subject
Date: 2016-04-08 07:00 pm (UTC)I used to take the bus alone into Inglewood (next to Watts) to the orthodontist when I was eight. When the bus dropped me off, I had half a mile walk to school. Nobody ever stopped me, and the school checked me in alone.
I used to ride all over the place on my bike, and as a teen crossed town (with a long stop on Skid Row to change buses) to attend Mythopoeic Society meetings in the San Gabriel Valley.
I say all this, but I didn't let my kids wander like that. And I worried when my daughter took off after high school graduation, at seventeen, to go to New York with some friends. She had eighty-five bucks in her pocket.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-08 07:11 pm (UTC)Male and female experiences of being in danger are not of course comparable, though physically I am far removed from the kind of male nobody would mess with. The closest I've ever felt myself to danger was late one evening about 25 years ago. I was waiting for a bus outside a suburban London Tube station, having just come from a delectable concert at the Barbican, when a man of Mid-Eastern descent rushed up and accosted me, sure that I was the man who'd just been in his shop racially insulting him. He was quickly followed by his business partner, who kept trying to assure him that I was not the man. I had just kept saying I'd just arrived on the Tube and knew nothing about this, also pointing out my heavy American accent, which might also differentiate me.