New Year’s Day 2014: I’m sitting here finding it hard to believe it is now exactly ten years ago when it all came together, our best laid plans came to fruition and our Pan-American Adventure was finally a go! New Years Day 2004, our last full day in Belfast before London, Paris and then Santiago in Chile to pick up the two little yellow BMW’s that had been at sea for the past two months.
Then the trip itself… 15 months on the road and 35,500 miles of what would definitely be the most exciting and fulfilling days of our lives! As this incredible journey unfolded in ways we’d never dreamed of, the trials and tribulations would slowly take each of us apart, piece by piece, replacing the weaker links with stronger more flexible bonds that enabled us to adapt to our changing environment and, I believe, to become better people as a result of our passage through such incredible events, people and places. Since reaching the end of this particular road we went on to produce the journey’s legacy, the two ‘Adventures in Yellow’ books titled from a Van Gogh exhibition, and the journey took a new unforeseen direction as we travelled the length and breadth of the UK telling our story to anyone who’d an ear to listen, our aim; to encourage and inspire.
Hardly a day has gone by over the past ten years when we haven’t thought of someone or some place from that road and we remain in contact with most of the incredible people we met along the way. We’ve had American and Mexican friends to visit providing an opportunity to return some of the hospitality showered upon us. There has also been occasional sad news; both Chris Halliday, the big lad from Carrickfergus who ran the hostel we stayed at in Quito, and Dennis Gardner who we schooled with in Guatemala and then enjoyed the run of his amazing open house in Baja have passed away. Both of our lives have been enriched by the encounter we had with each of these wonderful people and their loss has been sadly felt.
Our travels, where we spent every day negotiating in foreign tongue and strange land demanding patience and consideration in dealing with others, provided us with a fantastic skill set for every situation. Obviously when the travels were ended and books written we had to go back to working for a living. Astrium took me back and I spent a fantastic four years working on MIRI – the Mid-Infra-Red Instrument, one of four science instruments that will fly on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the successor to Hubble. I was invited to join the programme as Product Assurance Manager over a European consortium of some 26 organisations ranging from blue-chip companies to small university departments spread across 11 different countries, our mission: to build and deliver the instrument to NASA for integration onto JWST. We did it too – last of the four instruments to start, first to finish and all down to a great team of people. I’m still at Astrium and as we enter 2014, I am now Head of department for Product Assurance over all Earth Navigation and Science programmes at Stevenage site looking after missions that will travel throughout the Solar System.
Maggie too has seen her life revolutionised by the trip, pursuing her love of health and fitness to qualify first as a Gym instructor and then last year as a Pilates Instructor. In 2014 she will commence running her own classes in the small village of Pirton in Bedfordshire. Check out www.magspilates.com for details…
Since returning we have continued to travel both with work and on vacation with trips that have just about scratched the itch, for it never quite goes away. Our travels have taken us to amazing places like (in no particular order) Carcassonne, Budapest, Malta, Istanbul, Heidelberg, Lake Garda, the Outer Hebrides, Rhodes, Washington DC, Copenhagen, Oslo, Lubeck, Barcelona, Amalfi, Isle of Wight, Madrid, Pompeii and not forgetting the host of amazing locations across the beautiful islands that make up the United Kingdom. Many of these trips have been undertaken on the two BMWs and I’m happy to report that they’re just about run in, ready to go again and distant roads are once again calling…
So, as we look forward to the start of another year, our whole Pan-American experience has been one of empowerment and enrichment in both of our lives such that we stand now ready to face whatever comes in the next ten years and beyond ☺☺☺. If you’re sitting there, reading this, thinking you’d love to chase some dream or your life’s desire our advice to you is… make it happen in 2014. Dreams don’t have to remain mere wishes; they can be converted into hard currency easier than you think and spent to great benefit…
Wherever you are, whatever you are doing have a fabulous 2014 and hopefully we’ll meet again on a road somewhere…
Norman & Maggie
