Lessons Learned

I was a wonderfully lucky boy growing up. I know this because sometimes I recall memories of Africa that were planted in my brain from as young as 6 years old.

I know what the leather tanning and dyeing process smells like in Fez, Morocco. I know how loud Cairo is. I have watched wild dogs turn their dinner inside out while it was still conscious. I have walked to see gorillas and rhinos up close on foot; tasted giraffe and zebra. I have seen the skeleton coast from the air and hiked in the Drakensberg mountains. I learned how to open a bottle with another bottle over 7000 miles from home, picked ticks off of a cheetah, and been have been carried off by my parents in the dead of night under strange new southern constellations to escape an advancing wave of millions of unstoppable army ants.

It's important I recognize none of this would have been possible growing up if I wasn't born into a family who wanted to do this, and could do it the way we did, at every school break from south Florida. My sister and I had visited all 7 continents by the time I was 9 and she was 12. The memories from when I were a lad are, at times, just as vivid as the ones made in my 30s across the North American continent. I am grateful to my family for making those possible.

Here's to stories of adventure. Mine and yours; the well known, and the ones yet to be told.