Viva la View-Master!
On summer days when it was too hot and humid to be outside, my granddad would crank up the a/c and we’d spend hours looking at the View-Master.
The forests of giant sequoias in California. “The Seven Wonders of the World”. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Kathmandu. Samarkand. Barcelona.
Everything was so big and magical and different. I was only 3 or 4 but I was hooked on travel.
Nowadays, you can get customized viewers and reels to suit just about every fancy – a talking Dora the Explorer, Disney classics, Nascar racing and countless others.
But, none of that stuff was around when I was first introduced to the View-Master.
That’s a good thing. Because my life might’ve turned out a lot differently if my grandfather had been into Huckleberry Hound.
What about you? What got you interested in travel and other cultures?
Viva la View-Master!
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Hi Karen. Yes, I think View-master are still very popular, especially the old glass ones. In fact, my mom gave me some glass slides and a vintage stereoscope as a Christmas present this year. So cool!
What a delightful memory! I too could spend hours looking at a View-master. It seems so simple now but that was our technology back then, wasn’t it? Kids today would be shocked. Although those vintage stereoscopes have held up well in resale so everyone must continue to have a fascination with looking through the glass to a far-off land.
Hi Jen! Yes, family history, literature and romance are definitely a big part of the travel equation. I love your bucket list and hope you get to all those places one day and that you will share your experiences there with us here on the blog.
Hi Justine,
Great post! I, too, had a View Master as a child and enjoyed the nostalgia of reading about your experience. For me, I got the travel but in college when I joined a study abroad group in Scotland. It was part family history adventure (I’d recently discovered my grandpa was of Scottish decent) and part my love of Scottish and British poetry–and a certain boy I was traveling with. Now, I think my interest in travel is political and cultural–the world is too small not to know about the other people who share the planet. Some bucket list places: India, China, New Zealand, Mongolia, and Africa.
Best,
Jen