Deep thoughts... What is travel?

Saturday morning I got up altogether too early (especially for a Saturday, but really it was too early for damn near any day of the week) to go with Hubby to a bicycle race. He was racing, and as it happened to be located near my mother's house I decided to tag along, read a book while he rode, and then have lunch at Mom's afterwards.

I was doing just that, happily reading my book and getting sleepy enough to nap, when I heard voices - outside my head, thankyouverymuch - coming from a camper parked nearby. It was an older woman, full head of white hair, and a little girl - about 5, I'd guess. In that split second of a moment in which we all do this, I decided that the woman was the little girl's grandmother, and the person who was the generation between these two was in the bike race. This part wasn't so much brain surgery. It was when they started talking that I got really distracted.

It was clear from the get-go that the grandmother wasn't speaking English. Even in my sleep-deprived state, I could tell that much. The little girl, however, was speaking only in English. The conversation they carried on, therefore, was an odd-sounding one - the grandmother speaking one language, the granddaughter entirely another. And yet they seemed to understand one another perfectly. I instantly thought how lucky the girl was, growing up in a bilingual world.

Then I realized I was understanding bits and pieces of what the grandmother was saying. It sounded like Italian, but spoken with a heavy - almost Eastern European - accent. I could not figure it out, nor can I still. Hubby posited later that she might have been from a region of Italy that's close to Slovenia or something, or at the very least speaking a dialect of Italian I'm not familiar with. In any case, it was really fun to listen in on the snippets of conversation I heard, since I was understanding them. The most repeated snippet involved the grandmother trying to put a pink hooded jacket on the girl, who kept shouting, "No jacket!" (I chuckled when I saw them an hour later, the girl wearing the jacket with no audible fussing.)

So, all of this got me to thinking. Sure, we'd only driven less than two hours from our home, and yet why was it that this little trip wasn't what most people would call "travel?" What defines travel? Is it a certain distance one has to go? Is sleeping on a rented pillow one of the necessary factors involved? I really wonder - I mean, I started thinking that the definition of "travel" is far too narrow, and that what many of us do on a weekly (if not daily) basis could be considered travel - if we think about it the right way. (Hubby disagreed, but wasn't willing to come up with his own working definition. So until he does, mine stands.)