Hello From Peru - For The Third Time

People who know Jay and I know that we've embarked on a decades-long commitment to take our nieces & nephew on epic international trips. This story tells how it all started.

If Clark Kent can turn into Superman in a Gotham City phone booth, then I can turn into a super uncle at a Cusco, Peru pay phone.

In July 2005, I hiked the strenuous but beautifully rewarding four-day Inca trail. On the fourth day, we woke up before dawn, hiked to the Sun Gate and started our day-long visit to Machu Picchu witnessing a spectacular sunrise over the Andes Mountains. After touring the final remains of the Inca Empire, I took a bus down to Aguas Calientes and then the train up to Cusco. There, I stopped to catch my breath for a few days, which was difficult at Cusco’s 11,150 feet. I checked email in an Internet cafe and picked up a message from my younger brother Jason. Besides sharing news from home, he asked me to “call sometime soon,” assuring me it wasn’t urgent but was important.

I watched the late afternoon sun cast golden light on Cusco’s main square, where women displayed crafts on colorful blankets for the evening tourists walking past restaurants and bars. I walked a block behind the square and bought an empanada and a bottle of water from a street vendor for the price of a soda at one of the square’s restaurants. I ate dinner while sitting on the edge of a fountain watching kids kick a football around. On the way to my hostel, I stopped at a bar for a pisco sour. Then I spotted a pay phone, reminding me to call my brother. Peru is directly south of Wisconsin and in the Central time zone, so I didn’t have to worry about waking him up with an off-hours phone call.

I don’t recall the small talk, but eventually, Jason told me his big news—he and my sister-in-law Lisa were expecting their first child in late December. In July 2005, I was single, 35 years old, living out of a well-traveled backpack and owned little else than a few boxes in a friend’s basement in Madison. Years before, I had decided I didn’t want children of my own, and the notion that my brothers might have children simply hadn’t crossed my mind. Here was an opportunity to have children in my life, and told him I was as excited as he was.

“You were in New Zealand last summer when Lisa and I got married. We’re hoping you’ll be home when the kid is born,” Jason said.

My South American adventure was winding down, now in its 10th month.

“I promise I’d be home before the little one arrives,” I said.

That phone call ignited an idea to take an international adventure with this new person in my life, mirroring in some small way my four years living outside the U.S. I would have to wait for the child to grow up, and we would measure the journey in weeks rather than years. But even with a few weeks abroad, I wanted to instill the same passion for languages, international exploration, curiosity, and thirst for adventure that had captivated me since studying maps in middle school. I returned home in September and in December, mere hours after my first niece Lilah was born, I held her.

“You and me are going to go to amazing places,” I whispered into her tiny ear.

I began laying the foundation immediately. I wanted to have a grand adventure, so I had to start saving immediately. The first opportunity we’d have to travel together would be around the age 16. I estimated that we’d need $10,000 for two of us to take a three-week adventure, and calculated that with modest growth, I’d need to save $25 a paycheck for 16 years. I started an investment account and added to it every paycheck.

My other brother, Matthew made a pregnancy announcement the following year “Oh,” I realized to myself, “there’s going to be more than one!” When Catherine was born, I increased my savings to $50 per paycheck. I also started to think about how this project would unfold. I used this idea as the basis for a graduate school class on project management, and ran the idea by other parents, teachers and grad school classmates.

After twins Jonah and Hannah were born, and later when Madeline was born, I continued to recalculate my savings plan. Along the way, I met Jay, and even before we got married in 2010, we decided he would be part of the trips, increasing our savings goals again. For the next few years, there were no more first birthdays, and my brothers told me they were both done adding to the family tree. Around that time my church friends Jessica and Bill had their third child, Micah, and asked me to be his godfather. I immediately said “Yes,” and it didn’t take long for Jay and I to decide to add him to our stable of young people to travel with. Eventually, we were saving $430 per paycheck to fund six three-person, three-week trips while they were still in high school.

Even though I started the savings plans as each child was born, I didn’t tell the parents about this travel idea. First, we needed to build trust with them to let us take their children on an international adventure. We also needed to build relationships with the children, so eventually, they’d feel safe enough to travel with us.

Since big ideas need time to mature, like acorns into a sapling and then a regal tree, I frequently told the kids stories from my past international adventures and the benefits of those experiences. I’d idly drop the notion that it would be fun to travel with each of the kids “some day.” But they weren’t idle to me, they were part of a long-term plan to not only get the parents comfortable with the idea, but to develop them into allies and advocates when it came time to talk with the children about going abroad with Jay and I.

As time went by and the children grew, so did my ideas. The Peru and phone call inspired idea underwent many iterations of how to choose where to go, when to tell the children, and how to explain why we wanted to travel with them. For more than a decade, I had been feeling out the parents’ comfort with the idea. In winter 2019, Jay and I had dinner with my brothers and their wives, during which we spelled out our intentions.

We offered to take each child, after they turn 14, on a three-week trip to a country of their choice in Africa, Asia or South America. We committed to being outrageously transparent about every trip-related detail and what we talked with the children about. We also told the parents that they had veto rights if a child picked a country outside their comfort zone. The four parents approved our proposal.

In summer 2019, we arranged for all five kids and parents to come to Madison on a Saturday morning. Jay, our housemate Miryam and I had worked all winter to invent an extravagant “Amazing Race” puzzle and scavenger hunt that involved geographic puzzles to unlock clues and explore our neighborhood, stores and an ethnic restaurant.

Game instructions had them ask people for directions, purchase international food at a grocery story, document the day with photos and a journal, use a map and sample dishes at an Ethiopian restaurant. My brothers and sisters-in-laws monitored the game sites and occasionally coached the children’s activities.

The grand prize for all the puzzling and chasing clues was Jay and I offering the children a travel adventure. We explained how we valued international travel, and how important the children were to us. So it made sense that we took an international trip together. The children were excited, even though the first trip for the oldest would be many years off.

Each child left the race day with a paper checklist, intended to be tacked up as a reminder of the promised trip. Their task was to check off items and, when complete, they could go on a trip. These were more than travel plans, the formed a framework for teaching the children about the things that matter most in life, teamwork, collaboration and long-term planning. But more than those practical areas, this was an exercise in curiosity, cultural understanding, self-sufficiency, and the joy of discovery.

In late 2019, our oldest niece, Lilah, told us she was ready to go. After several video calls about all her ideas, she selected Thailand. We were ecstatic. We spent a weekend in Madison shopping at several Asian food markets and then prepared a Thai food feast to make a big deal of telling her family and siblings about where she wanted to go. After dinner, Lilah presented her slide show, and we watched a travel video about Thailand.

In January 2020, during a Saturday afternoon planning our itinerary, we purchased three plane tickets from Chicago to Bangkok. The news had a few articles about a respiratory disease in Asia, but none of us were worried about it. Two months later when international borders closed up, including getting into Thailand or returning to the U.S., we quickly canceled our flights, and like everyone else, waited to see what would happen. Lilah gained two more years of age and we did lots of thorough planning before we went in August 2022. While the delay was out of our control, it helped us learn one lesson Jay and I hoped to teach from an international trip—that unexpected things would happen and we’d figure out our next steps together.

So far we visited Thailand in 2022 with Lilah, Costa Rica in 2023 with Catherine, Southern Africa with Hannah and we just got home from Peru with nephew Jonah, where we also hiked the Inca Trail. We looked for that Cusco phone booth, took many selfies in and around it, and I may share stories from this third time to Peru.

Below is the “Quest List” each kid has to complete to be able to go on a trip.