3 adventurous moms, 7 kids and 2 months in Greece set the tone for my life and made me want to travel

Thanks to my mom, I have an adventurous spirit and I KNOW without a doubt that I can do whatever I want in life. She gave me the gift of an open mind and an adventurous spirit. The first very clear memory is from when she was seven years old, but my mother has always done adventurous things like this…

When I was seven years old, my mom and two of her friends decided to go to Greece for a week. They signed up for Greek classes and began to study. But they soon realized that a week would be too short considering all the effort they were putting into the trip. So they increased it to two weeks… but what about the 7 kids????

The response, of course, was “We’re going to take them too, but we’re going for two MONTHS.” So we left in the summer of 1976, took the last month off from school, and planted some pumpkin seeds in the garden before we left. The three parents couldn’t be away from work that long, so the poor guys stayed home and did some boating on the Great Lakes.

I remember that trip so clearly and what amazes me now is how I thought it was just normal. Children are very adaptable and what you teach through your actions becomes a part of them. Thus, the travel bug was rooted in me, both as a will and as an adventurous spirit.

We spent a few days in Athens in a hotel, then took an overnight ferry to Crete, where we spent the entire two months. We lived in a pension with a single mother and her two children, Nicos and Nifoula, who rented us three rooms for $2.50 a night per room. We had many adventures during our stay, we made friends with the locals and played with the local children. I learned some Greek and crawled through the sewers of Knosses.

But one adventure really stands out… Donkey Island (or so WE call it even though there was no donkey there). I’m not sure how it all happened, but the 3 moms somehow arranged for some fishermen to take us out to sea, drop us off on a deserted island, and come back for us in the morning on their return trip.

I remember they left me and I thought “what if they don’t come back?” We had a bagged lunch for dinner and our sleeping bags and that was it. There was not a single person, building or road on that island. We explored, picnicked, and slept side by side in our suitcases on the beach, looking for shooting stars until we fell asleep.

In the morning the fishermen came back and made us some eel soup for breakfast. I wasn’t sure about eating eel at first, but it was the most delicious tasting soup I’ve had to this day. It was a light chowder-like soup with an intense lemon flavor…cooked fresh from the sea and eaten barefoot in paradise.

When we returned to Canada in early August, our backyard was covered in pumpkins and I had a new outlook on life, although I didn’t realize it at the time. That experience opened more doors for me in the years to come and looking back, I have my mom to thank for my adventurous spirit and the fact that thinking outside the box is normal for me.