Often our old friends date back to childhood neighborhoods, or school, or sometimes work. The great thing about long-term travel is that you meet people (often folks from your own culture) who are uncommonly attuned to life, since meaningful journeys have a way of bringing that out in a person.
Last month Kiki and I got to spent time in Paris with my old buddy Dan Neely, who I first met in Cairo’s Sultan Hotel in 2000. (I wrote about that experience for Salon.com; Dan didn’t make it into that story, but he did appear in the endnotes when it became a chapter in Marco Polo Didn’t Go There.)
Later that year, Dan and I and another Sultan Hotel travel-buddy road-tripped across the USA from Arizona to NYC (see left image below) just weeks before Dan left for a Peace Corps assignment in Honduras. We later met up in Sweden, roomed together for a month in New Orleans, and took a one-week fly-fishing-and-mountaineering road-trip in New Zealand (see right image below).
Dan actually appeared as one of the “Vagabonding Voices” in my first book, where he will be forever listed as a “26-year-old raft guide from Arizona”. Now pushing 50, he works in emergency management and lives with his wife and two daughters in New Zealand’s capital. While visiting Europe with his family on his wife’s work trip, Dan and I were able to reconnect in Paris (with our families in tow) for the first time in a decade.
Here’s to the blessing of old travel friends!
[Curiously I have no photos of Dan and me together in the Sultan Hotel the week we first met 26+ years ago. A testament. I think, to how taking photos was less important to the experience of travel (or any aspect of life) back then.]
