If, as they say, the best training for an artist is travel, I was good and well trained by the age of 15.

My father is a professor of sociology and my youth was spent not only travelling between University towns in the U.S., but also (after the age of 7) travelling throughout Europe and living "behind the iron curtain" as we called it then, mostly living in Budapest, but travelling around Poland, Czechoslovakia and the surrounding regions.
My Great Aunt Shirley and Uncle Charles lived in Cairo in 1983, and were kind enough to buy me a ticket to come and stay with them for over a month in Egypt.

I developed a sense of the world early on and although it was very difficult as I was so young, I will be forever grateful to my father that he pushed on and insisted that we all come along with him to these foreign lands instead of leaving us at home.
(Which was, honestly, the only place I wanted to be as a child).