When we live long enough, the friends that pass through our lives take many forms. Some begin in grade school or high school, the folks you don’t see for years, but the next meeting is like you had simply continued the last conversation. As adults, friends can ebb & flow, and sometimes, if we make ourselves available, very special relationships are born.
Kristin and I have traveled extensively. We always enjoy meeting people in new places. Many become Facebook pals or email buddies. On rare occasions, the energy and rhythms strike a symbiotic cord. A song of trust and mutual benefit becomes a rhapsody.
Liz was a client on our Intrepid Travel Tour in Moroco in 2013. Intrepid attracts international clients that speak English. She hailed from Australia, we were attracted to her: attitude, humor, and pluck straightaway. We admired her fearless negotiation skills in the confusing, mysterious and very male alleyways of the Moroccan Madina. In Fez and Marrakech they are walled, 1,000-acre covered shopping areas more difficult to navigate and exit than a Las Vegas casino.
As our amazing adventure came to a close, we invited each other into our respective homes if the opportunity presented itself. These offerings were not a casual, uncommitted, ‘let’s do lunch’. They were seeds sown with expectation.
In several years time, our travel lust took us on a tour of New Zealand and Australia. That trip ended in Sidney. Liz, her husband Mike, and their dog Harry picked us up at our hotel and drove us two hours away to their home in the Blue Mountains. The seeds would germinate.
Our time with them included a Land Cruiser expedition into the out back. A days drive on dirt roads parallel to railroad tracks with Roos shadowing our progress. Our destination was an abandoned Sheep Station. The pens and sheering tables were there to explore, no sheep, but the flys remained. At night, our walkabouts were a canopy of dazzling stars unmolested by ambient light with curious Kangaroos at every turn. These were wonder-filled experiences with our new friends that helped render our relationship.
Our friends from OZ are robust explorers and campers. It wasn’t long after our return from down under that they rang us up and told us they wanted to travel around the US. The plan was to purchase a camper and explore the lower 48 states.
The cosmic forces would do their work. In a national search, Mike found the style of camper he was looking for in the town of West Bend, Wisconsin thirty minutes from my home.
This fellow had just put the camper up for sale and the first inquiry came from Australia? Mike called me and asked if I could go over, take a look at the camper, and validate his interest from far away. I would find out this gentlemen knew my cousin who lived on the same lake, instant credibility.
The next trip Stateside was the search for a suitable truck. Mike’s greatest obstacle was rust. No vehicle in Australia has rust. If it did it, couldn’t be sold. Mike would create a new paradigm that included vehicles that have lived in the salt on winter roads. They would call their camper/truck rig, Beast.
The purchase and title were made easier because we let them use our Wisconsin address.
Eight trips, Covid, 40,000 miles, and thirty-eight States later, our friends have sold their rig to a gentleman from Ohio. It’s time to focus on a new grandchild.
Mike and Liz are simply good people who are easy to be around. They enjoyed an Abell Family Thanksgiving, our summer cabin, and fell in love with Wisconsin’s Supper Clubs.
Yes, we’re just a Zoom call away, but the eleven-year cooperation and the laughs around the fire at the cabin have come to a reluctant, inevitable close.
I’m not too old to cry.
The Adventures of Spaghetti Eddie 