Only in a leap from the lion’s head shall he prove his worth.
– Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Leaping without looking is the single greatest act of faith I know.
Like when I was three and declared for all eternity that my favorite color would be purple. Or the day I packed a suitcase and moved to Mexico for a new job after a single, brief interview the previous day. When Robie and I left Florida on a boat without first knowing how to sail. Or the time I got down on one knee and proposed to Robie after just six weeks of dating.
When we met, Robie’s travels had largely been contained within the United States. Internationally, he’d been across the border in Tijuana and on a three-day cruise to the Bahamas, so to test the new boyfriend, I invited him on a work trip to Mexico hoping I might find something I could mold into the ideal travel companion. As I spent the days stuck inside a stale, windowless convention hall, Robie lounged poolside at the Acapulco Princess, befriended the mixologists at the swim up bar and learned to drink tequila like a local. By the time he ordered cabrito al pastor for dinner, I knew this was something special.
Over the plate of savory goat, I listened to Robie’s stories of family road trips to visit relatives in New York that abruptly ended following his parents’ divorce. I heard about his childhood in the Sunshine State and how it led to a fascination with snow and later, ski trips to Jackson Hole and Sun Valley. I took in the details of the summer he spent driving the length of I-10 from Florida to California with his dad. Because even though we came from different parts of the country and had dissimilar upbringings, Robie and I shared a passion for travel.
My own explorations began in the backseat of Old Yeller, my family’s faithful, yellow station wagon where my siblings and I viewed much of the country as it passed, victims of our dad’s career with IBM as we moved to different towns, strange homes, new schools and another state every few years. But no matter where we lived, we made an annual trek in Old Yeller to visit relatives in Oklahoma, stopping along the way to dine under the orange-tiled roof of Howard Johnon’s and spend the night anywhere a flashing, green, neon arrow pointed us toward a Holiday Inn. Until I was ten, I thought those were the only places we could stop while traveling, but when it snowed four inches in April and my mom broke down crying from the seemingly endless winter, Dad flew us to the tropics. And after that, no amount of cajoling could get us back inside Old Yeller.
But while the family vacations had certainly improved, nothing could prepare me for the summer my sister graduated college and decided to spend a few months backpacking around Europe. Because when Cheryl couldn’t find anyone to go with her, she realized I had the only two prerequisites necessary: access to Mom and Dad’s money and nothing better to do until high school started again in the fall.
After two months of traipsing around the Continent, I was hopelessly hooked. In college I spent a semester at the University of Salamanca, occasionally attending classes between weekend trips around Spain, North Africa and Europe. By the time I graduated, I had to find a job in travel not for the ridiculously low pay but for the chance to see the world on someone else’s dime. Then came the call about the job in Mexico, and I spent two seasons babysitting drunk Americans at a relatively unknown but emerging destination in a corner of the Yucatán Peninsula.
But while I like not knowing what can happen next, Robie takes a more careful approach to change. Despite his rash acceptance of my proposal, he moves slowly, studies the situation, reads books and magazines, talks to people, checks online forums and reviews, and worries so I know I don’t have to. Yet if you ask me, he really should have seen this coming.
Six months after our first date, Robie and I were paraded around town at sunset and married on the rooftop of Melissa’s Piano Bar in Santorini. Then my husband joined me frequently to attend awards ceremonies in Jamaica, conventions in Cancun, sales trips to Caracas. Following a conference in London, we met in Rome and when I took a cruise for work, we spent a week in the Caribbean.
In between business trips, we looked for deals in Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel magazine cruising the Nile for cheap in the aftermath of 9/11, grabbing special rates onboard American Airlines’ new route to Beijing and seeing the Great Barrier Reef without the price tag of a posh resort. When Robie and I started running out of paid time off, we got creative and ditched the Black Friday crowds to spend Thanksgiving eating steak frites in Paris, fresh sushi at the Tokyo fish market and potato perogies in Krakow. And once we had enough frequent flyer miles, we cashed them in on a safari to Botswana.
When Robie and I needed a life change, we rented an apartment sight-unseen then packed up and moved to Florida without first securing jobs. When we wanted a way to explore our new surroundings, we bought a boat before we knew how to sail. And when our landlady stopped paying the mortgage and the bank began to foreclose, we set sail for the Caribbean.
When we left Florida aboard The Last Resort, we didn’t know much about sailing, lacked the equipment to venture far from the U.S. coast, had no destination in mind, and with hurricane season approaching, we needed a plan. Fast. Then we discovered that maintaining a thirty-year old vessel in one of the most corrosive environments on the planet was a fulltime job. As I fretted about the weather, planned our route to the next port and wondered what kind of meal I could make in a tiny galley kitchen using canned vegetables, tinned meats and dehydrated potato flakes, Robie had the whole boat to worry about. He resewed the jib sail, installed a new bilge pump, wired the solar panels, fixed the head, plugged the hole in the line and changed the raw water filter. With every nautical mile we sailed, his list of to do’s never got any shorter. And we knew that this time around we needed to find something we could both enjoy.
Yet after years of watching my travel addiction from business class seats, what did Robie expect would happen?
In the months following his declaration of pending retirement, Robie started to get more comfortable with thinking about what came next, and I felt the various ideas worm their way through my consciousness as more and more of our discussions centered around the things that needed to be done to the house we’d lived in for more than a decade. Curiously, I found myself staring at bookshelves filled with trinkets and tomes, cupboards crammed with Cuisinart and crockery, boxes filled with old photos and older dreams and wondered what I should do with it all. Because I already sensed that soon we’d be faced with the same crisis as Indiana Jones, caught standing at the ledge of the lion’s head looking out over the precipice.
Then, much like Indy’s awkward first step, I know we’ll inhale deeply, close our eyes, put our hands over our hearts and take a giant leap of faith.