Editor’s note
When I was on the shadow side of 30, I told my parents that my husband, David, and I were quitting our full-time newspaper jobs to drive to Belize. I could tell right away this wasn’t news they were expecting. As I explained that we would be camping and/or sleeping in our second-hand Ford Ranger for the next 10 months, a quiet tension settled over the room. I’d set off on another epic road adventure when I was in my early 20s—one that took me from London, England, to Kathmandu in a double-decker bus. One highlight was travelling through Iran during its war with Iraq. When I mentioned that portion of the itinerary to my mother, it was greeted with the same restrained alarm she was now showing for our Central American adventure. But we remained undeterred—the fact that we had already sold everything and quit our jobs gave us steely determination. (At this point, are you wondering why I wasn’t clever enough to pen my own Eat, Pray, Love or The LifeChanging Magic of Tidying Up?) Our 7,000kilometre road trip took us from Nanoose Bay, B.C., to Punta Gorda, Belize, where we would do volunteer work with the indigenous communities of the Kekchi and Mopan, who were setting up ecotourism ventures in their jungle villages. I mostly navigated, which means I spent hours staring out the window and singing along with “Come a Long Way” by Michelle Shocked. For two newly married—formerly independent-minded—individuals, it was a crash course on learning how to compromise and communicate in rather confined quarters. I knew that our marriage had legs after I asked David to unload a wagon full of 50-pound bags of rice and move them to a barn so that a Mennonite farmer would let me take his picture for a story I was writing. Clearly, David was in it for the long haul. These days, every moment is easily documented, but many of my favourite images live in my memory alone. The most vivid is of the starry blanket of fireflies that lit the dirt paths in the Kekchi village where we stayed. The image of me driving over a (dead) two-metre-long boa constrictor is also imprinted on my brain. I hadn’t thought about our journey in a long time until our executive editor, Christina Reynolds, asked us to share a summer-road-trip story for “Driven” (page 88). She also wanted us to share some road-trip tips. Here are mine: 1. It’s liberating to edit your life’s possessions down to what you can fit into a truck. (Marie Kondo would agree.) 2. A road trip is a powerful reminder to look ahead to new adventures instead of staring into the rearview mirror. Or, as Jack Kerouac wrote in On the Road: “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”