from the WNIN Public Media center in downtown Evans I'm David James and this is two Main Street.

Okay.

Where did you go on your last vacation.

Maybe the Great Smokies Cancun, Disneyworld or a dream cruise to Alaska.

And how long did you take off work?

A week, maybe two.

Well, imagine this trip leaving home for 28 months to visit 28 countries.

Camping with Bedouin tribesmen in the Wadi Rum desert.

Crawling through tunnels in the Great Pyramids.

Close encounters with gorillas in Uganda and braving piranha infested waters in the Amazon.

For Evansville native Joe Ellsworth.

Was this a midlife crisis vacation on steroids?

Joe and his longtime companions, Stacy Hammer Brand, went all in, selling their possessions homes, cars, clothing and furniture, and waving goodbye to family and friends to begin an adventure of a lifetime.

World traveler Joe Ellsworth is my guest on two Main Street.

Welcome, Joe.

Thank you very much, David.

Thank you.

Gosh, I wish I had your voice.

I'm going to say you've got this beautiful, booming bass voice, and I'm going to sound like a like a kid going through puberty.

But I'll try to give you some good information regardless.

And we were reminiscing, we used to work together, channel 1414 back in a long time ago.

Back in the back about 1979 80 starts to sound like a long time ago, doesn't it?

Now, you were you in the camera crew and, I was I was the promotion director.

Oh, you did the promotions?

Boy, I'm going way back here.

I think my one promotions that we have back then.

Well, was a Levi 14 member shouting Levi 14 at the having groups of people.

So Levi, 14 was something that was kind of a trademark.

And it was.

Yeah.

When we drove down the street, even in cars and mark cars, people on the side of the roads would yell, Levi, 14.

Yeah, about us.

That was probably the best promotion we ever had.

A channel four tell that was starting to be a long time ago.

That's one deep in the archives and it lasted for several years too.

Usually these things are, you know, kind of hot for a while, but I think that it had some legs.

Definitely had some legs.

Okay.

We're going to talk about your big adventure now, Joe.

And I think what makes this story even more compelling is that you and Stacy managed to pull off this trip during a worldwide pandemic, Covid 19.

It certainly changed the trajectory of the trip.

We had planned that.

The idea was that I would plan about 75% of the trip, but leave about 25% to be open to things.

We discovered along the way, we thought we'd meet other travelers who would say, oh, you've got to go to Albania, you've got to see so-and-so.

And so we wanted to leave some flexibility in the plan, but Covid certainly forced us into more flexibility than we'd ever planned on it.

I had a generally sort of a more or less straight line from, from the U.S. around the world to be able to follow Covid made it zig zag.

The straight line turned into a bit of a zigzag.

Okay, now take us back to the planning stages for this epic journey.

So when did you guys decide to start selling your stuff and start packing?

Well, I met Stacy about 20 years ago.

And I told her at the time that I had a lifelong dream that I was going to accomplish this.

So a lot of people did say, was this a midlife crisis?

You know, was it something you recently planned?

But I'd always wanted to do this.

I've always lived in southwestern Indiana my whole life.

And I told myself, promised myself that at some point I wanted to live somewhere for a while where the trees were different, the topography was different, the animals were different, and I didn't know where that was going to be.

But for at least some period, I'm home oriented.

But for at least some period, I wanted to live where things were really different.

And living as an expat was one of the things that I, that I hoped to be able to do for a couple of years.

So I started researching over a number of years, when it came down to picking one place, I couldn't pick just one.

I had a dozen that I thought, oh my gosh, wouldn't it be wonderful to spend some time there, or this place or that place?

And so, at some point I said, rather than pick one place and spend a couple of years there, why not go to all the places on the list?

And so I talked with Stacy about that.

She did not have or share that dream, but she wanted to be together and thought it sounded like fun.

She had a few things tying her here to Evansville.

She had elderly parents that she was primarily, in charge of taking care of.

But I said, here's a timeline for me.

I said, when my kids are out of the house, I said, that's when I'm going to go.

There's probably a short window between the time that my kids are able to be independent and on their own, and the time that maybe I'm too old to be able to do this in the way I want to do it, because some of the adventures we wanted to have, we're getting a call for being in a reasonable, reasonably good condition, in good shape.

And so there was a brief window there.

I said, this is going to be the time.

I want you to go with me if you can.

And she went back and forth a little bit.

There were some times, I don't think, she thought she was probably going to join me on the day that I left, but I had a targeted date.

And sure enough, the day that we sent off, she was packed in there with me.

So what is what's the time period here?

This was we were doing the planning.

I sold my house, and we got rid of all our things kind of in the last quarter of 2020, right in the in the depths of Covid.

And so that the day we were going to take off was January 1st, 2021.

Did you hit that date?

And we hit that.

We took off that morning.

Well, yeah, today, New Year's Day, New Year's Day and your first, destination in Mexico?

Yes, San Miguel de Allende.

And as I started researching different places to be, I thought, let's ease into something.

I'd been to Mexico before.

Some of the places that visitors go a lot, you know, Cancun, Playa del Carmen, Puerto Vallarta, some things like that.

But I'd been reading about San Miguel de Allende and most people that I think friends that I have when they go to Mexico want to go for the beach.

And San Miguel is not a beach city, it's in it's in the Central Highlands.

But I'd read articles about what a wonderful city it is.

Different travel magazines and called it one of the most beautiful small towns in the world.

And I thought, that sounds pretty interesting.

And, we left Evansville on the morning of January 1st, and that evening spent our first night in San Miguel.

We planned to stay a couple of months there, and start to get used to this, living outside our regular culture.

But we got stranded there a little bit by Covid two because our second stop was supposed to be Croatia, and our third stop was going to be the Greek islands.

Both of which closed their borders due to Covid at that time.

So we ended up, almost becoming, you know, regular residents of San Miguel.

We could go to the grocery store and people knew us by name and who would wave to us, knew what we liked in the grocery store.

And so San Miguel was a wonderful, wonderful experience.

So San Miguel is, is a popular spot for expats, and a lot, a lot of foreigners live there and they go there in the winter time.

Yes.

And, so tell me about the city, gorgeous colonial Spanish colonial architecture.

All the streets, are big cobblestone.

You see that?

A lot of times on a street here or there in some cities, European cities.

But all the streets there were cobblestone.

The architecture was magnificent.

It was.

It was like turning the clock back.

And even though there were a lot of expats there and there were fairly modern amenities, it was not unusual at all to see people walking down the streets with a donkey, with bags of produce and things like that, you know, being carried on their donkeys, and that's what you wanted to see.

And those are the kind of things we wanted to see.

So how was your Spanish?

Rudimentary.

I had a couple of years in high school.

I think I had a couple of semesters in college, and it was rusty, to say the least.

But when you were there and had been there for a couple months, all of a sudden things that you'd forgotten a long time ago started to come back to you.

And I found myself, engaging with people locally, getting into cabs.

And I told them what I thought I was telling them in Spanish, and I end up getting where I needed to be, so.

So I guess it was understandable.

But that's a wonderful experience.

It really is.

Okay, now, when you took off, take off on this trip, what was the reaction from your family members?

They were excited for me.

They knew I'd wanted to do this for a long time.

My kids, were thrilled for me.

They knew I had been talking about that since they'd been little kids.

They knew I was going to do this sometime and were happy to see me basically realize a dream.

That was a lot of people talk about doing what I've done, a lot of friends and family locally said, gosh, please send us pictures, let us know what's going on.

So I ended up keeping a fairly active Facebook presence, and sharing pictures and impressions along the way.

People started following it.

And kind of the most common comment that people made was, I've always wanted to do this, something like what you're doing, but I probably never will.

We're doing it vicariously through you.

And, that was gratifying.

Okay.

San Miguel, Phil from San Miguel and your next stop is where it was supposed to have been.

Croatia.

Right.

The borders were closed.

And I knew.

But you could follow along with State Department updates about when different places were supposed to open.

We knew that our third stop was going to be in Greece, and so I could kind of see a window there.

I thought, well, we can't get into Croatia.

What's generally in that vicinity, what's something in the neighborhood of Croatia?

So I go online and look at maps of the area, and this is just a couple of weeks before we're going.

So we've got no reservation, no plan.

And I said, Stacy, what do you know about Montenegro?

And she goes, absolutely nothing and said, she goes, what language they speak there.

So I googled it.

Montenegro.

Yeah.

How is your Montenegro?

If you thought I was rusty on Spanish by Montenegro.

Yeah.

But, but we ended up, going out, getting an Airbnb, rented a small fisherman's house in Montenegro.

Absolutely loved it.

It's a gorgeous country.

It physically.

Isn't that different from Croatia.

But it was a fantastic experience.

Wonderful food, wonderful scenery.

Just we we ended up falling in love with the country.

We'd never.

I mean, I've heard of Montenegro, but didn't know a thing about it a couple of weeks earlier.

And now there we are.

And so we were there for, for almost a month.

Well, well, now, before we go on and with your adventures, some random questions for you for, I guess travelers out there might want to ask the same questions.

Traveling together for two and a half years.

Probably some stressful moments, along with the joyful moments.

How did you guys get along?

Gwen Stacy?

I have been asked that a lot of times since we were.

We're within 20ft of each other for two and a half years, solidly, practically, and many places didn't.

Obviously, most places didn't know any other human being there.

It makes you really have together time.

People said, I'm going to guess that you either are so annoyed with one another by the end of this trip that you need some time apart, or it brought you closer together.

And the latter is what happened.

It was a bonding experience, like something I almost can't imagine.

There are even now places that I think can I really did I really do that?

It my memory tells me it was I really there?

Did I experienced that?

And I can say, Stacy, do you remember the day we did so and so she was there too and had the same experience.

So it really bonded us together.

We talked about this just a couple of nights ago.

I don't think we had a there were stressful times.

There were a couple of things, travel, things that that were stressful for us, but I don't think we uttered a cross word to each other in the entire 28 months.

It was it was a wonderful experience.

It brought us even closer together.

Well, that's good to hear that.

So I guess, did anyone, anyone, did either you or her, want to call it quits during this adventure?

The, I've never asked her that question that way.

We had a couple of tough things that did happen.

Her mother passed away while we were in San Miguel.

And that was really, really tough for her.

And so we did come back, left San Miguel for two weeks and came back, for her mother's services.

But those things just be with family itself during that time.

And I'm going to guess that during that time, she probably had those concerns, I think.

Am I in the right place?

Am I doing the right thing?

But we but we forged on.

All right.

So I was a little bit more interesting.

Probably was, I was pretty happy having reduced everything I owned in the world.

Down to a suitcase.

One suitcase in one backpack.

Stacy is more of a enjoys her clothes and her wardrobe.

A lot more than that matters to me to be able to get everything she had into one suitcase and one backpack was a little more stressful for her.

And I think by the end of the trip, after 28 months, where I think I could have kept going for another year and would have liked to have said were there were still parts of the world we didn't get to see.

I think she was ready to not be living out of a suitcase for after two and a half years.

I think having something like a closet and drawers, was an incredible thrill for her.

So when we did get back to Evansville, you could just see her eyes light up, just to be able to look at her closet and say, things are actually on hangers now for a while.

So did you, do a lot of, washing and drying?

Did you see?

What is that?

Bathtubs.

We did that.

But actually, there are a lot of the places that we were.

You could go to a laundry service.

And it was so inexpensive, you'd get things wonderfully laundered and folded for, you know, an entire everything in your suitcase for 2 or $3 or something like that.

It.

Yeah.

It was nice.

Yeah.

So how did you communicate with, family and friends?

Probably some places.

I didn't have internet or cell service.

We a lot of places didn't have.

But there was always in every city we were, you could find someplace.

It was a coffee shop, a hotel lobby, something like that.

And, we used the WhatsApp app.

And that is basically internet based phone calling and texting that you can do from everywhere.

So while our phone plans were really limited because that much international plans would have been really expensive, we saved that had just enough of a plan to cover emergencies.

If we needed to.

Okay.

But basically communicated via WhatsApp.

So it was an internet based application and, and we use that for almost all communication with family and the people back.

Yeah.

So how did you handle your finances?

My brother Brad, the, friend of this station, was, here it was.

I signed over a power of attorney thing to him.

He filed my taxes, he did my major banking.

And so all the things that had to happen, they did need a local presence I enabled my brother to do.

That's great.

Yeah, yeah.

Kudos to and just mail things that did come in the mail.

He would he would take my mail and say junk, junk, junk.

Here's something important.

Would send me a picture.

Is this important?

Do I need to act on this.

And so that so so Brad was my safety net back here at home okay.

to again 28 countries in 28 months.

And, first, let's talk about, you, Joe, you're in Evansville native, right?

Yes, yes.

Well, I grew up in hunting burg, Indiana, proudly raised there, but I've been here since I've been in high school, and I've lived in Evansville ever since.

And so did you go to South Ridge High School?

Before there was.

But but that was South Ridge.

There's the hunting burg.

Happy hunters.

And I was always proud to be a happy hunter.

Oh, you were a ham.

I'm that old.

Oh, my.

So when did that went to Honey Berg?

Hi.

Just a few years.

I was not the.

My class would have been.

Not the last graduating class running Berg High School, but I think 3 or 4 classes after mine, and it became a consolidated school and moved on.

So now you started a business here in Evansville?

I did, I did, I did, right after my time with you, channel 14, I started a company.

It was a, communications corporate communications company that was involved with media, corporate communications.

It was called Rainbow Communications.

I, oversaw that business for 22 years.

We merged with another company at that time called Firehouse Marketing, and we took the fire from firehouse in the rain from rainbow and became Fire and rain marketing communications and that and I was with that company until I sold my interest in it and retired after 30 years in that business.

Okay, let's go back to your travels.

Now, you have described your trip to Peru, a nonstop adrenaline rush.

Why was that an adrenaline rush?

Well, it starts with being in the Amazon rainforest.

We, knew we wanted to.

I wanted to experience that.

That was one of the must see things on a bucket list for me.

Not so much with Stacy, but she said, I'll go along, and I've got to hand it to her because I threw out a lot of fairly wild things to do.

And she never bought.

She never said, I'll stay back at the hotel.

She she was up for everything, for every adventure.

So in the Amazon rainforest, we got on a plane in Lima, flew in a small four seater plane over the jungle for a couple of hours, landed on a grass airstrip, got into an old rickety bus and went for about another 90 minutes down dirt roads.

It stopped.

At the edge of a river is where the road ran out.

We got into a wooden boat and went for an hour and a half upriver, and then got out with our backpacks and hiked into a lodge that was in the middle of the jungle.

We were greeted at the entry by somebody from the staff and they said, we serve dinner every evening at six in the evening.

You are one of only about six people here in the lodge because again, this was this was Covid time.

So people just weren't traveling.

And they said, here's the key to your room.

We walked down the pathway to the oh, they also gave us a warning.

They said, whatever you do, don't wander off the immediate premises by yourself.

First of all, you're going to get lost.

There are trails that snake through here and you're going to get lost.

This is not where you're going to be lost.

There are a lot of things that can hurt you in the Amazon rainforest.

Big things and jaguars and things like that.

Little things, you know, spiders and scorpions and snakes and and things.

So they were giving us quite a warning and certainly said and they said every time you take your shoes off, make sure you shake out your shoes, because crazy things will crawl into your shoes.

So after giving us this warning and saying, well, absolutely.

So that we walk down the pathway, we go into our room.

And at first I thought, what a big, beautiful, clear picture window we've got at the end of this room.

That's great because we'll be able to look at the jungle.

Oh, wait a minute, there's no glass in that window.

It was a three sided room that had sticks as uprights on three walls, but the other wall was open.

So the to the jungle.

So the Amazon rainforest that they just warned us about was about 12 or 15ft away from this open space that walked up onto us.

We had two twin beds.

Both had mosquito nets over them.

Stacey asked me, she said, Joe, those animals they were talking about can't get into this through this mosquito netting carry.

So so oh my.

I said no Stacey, you're completely.

You stay under the mosquito netting and you'll be completely safe.

I said, think of this.

I said, we're going to be able to fall asleep tonight with the whole sounds of the jungles, with the monkeys, Helen, and jaguars calling.

And think of those wonderful sounds of the jungle at night that will be able to hear.

Well, we came back after dinner.

I was asleep in about two minutes and never heard a jungle sound.

Stacey was awake all night.

She said she had her sheets pulled up over her nose with just her eyes, and didn't sleep all night.

You know this.

I was scared to death.

So you are.

You are an eternal optimist.

So she asked me.

She said, did you know this room was not going to have a wall?

And sure.

Well, I'm not sure I read all the fine print.

Wow.

So now, on the, this river here, of course, there's piranha in the river and all.

Who knows what else is in the river?

You went to Machu Picchu?

Yes, we did that.

That was the following week.

And that was.

That's the sacred Valley.

And Machu Picchu allows a lot of visitors.

And I know a number of people from Evansville that have gone there, but it is a wonderful.

That's another bucket list place to go.

It's a very spirited place.

The, it's a little tough because the hiking you have to hike in, it's a pretty rugged hike to get into Machu Picchu, and it's it's a certain amount of, altitude there.

So the breathing is a little more difficult and things, but it's certainly worth it.

And just, again, you've everybody's seen pictures of Machu Picchu standing overlooking Machu Picchu there, but it has to be there in time.

It's one of those things.

I've seen these pictures hundreds of times in my life, but to actually stand here is pretty wonderful.

Sometimes I hear there's so much fog there.

Did it clear?

Could you get a good, clear day?

Beautifully.

Clearly you were lucky.

And you're.

And you're sitting there on a hillside just overlooking all the ruins from the village there, and all of a sudden you hear somebody walking up behind you.

You turn around, it's a llama.

Llamas, you know, live all over the area and stuff like that, and you just come walking up on you do.

And those are just kind of special moments that you're sure this llama and I are sitting here taking in this view.

Okay.

So many places to talk about and so little time, but I want to hear about your trip to Jordan, camping with the Bedouin tribesmen in the Wadi Rum desert.

I love that.

And you met a goat farmer and boy, he kind of.

He was a kind of attracted to Stacey, wasn't he?

Indeed he was.

The, And Jordan is a fantastic country.

It was just breathtaking.

One of the real highlights, of the of the entire trip.

And the highlight within Jordan was our time to camp with the Bedouins in Wadi Rum.

That's a kind of a that sounds really exotic.

It's kind of a thing that tourists can do now.

They have several camps, Bedouin camps in the desert.

And you can pay a fee at night and go out with a guide and do that.

Well, again, during Covid, the entire desert seemed to be empty of tourists.

I think we were the only in a few days there.

We were the only Westerners that we saw in the entire desert.

We, had a guide that was with us, a guide and a driver, and he asked us at one point he said, do you mind if we stop by?

He said, my grandfather is a Bedouin chic.

Now that conjures up, you know, Arab oil sheikhs and things like that.

This is a whole different kind of chic.

He was a goat herder that lived in the middle of the desert in a tent.

He said, do you mind if we stop by and check on my grandfather or what?

We did that, he was greeted us very graciously.

Graciously?

Of course, we didn't speak a word, of of the same language, but but the guide, his grandson did as we sat there and had tea and broke bread with him, he said, my he said, my grandfather wants to know how long you and Stacy have been married.

And I.

So we're not married.

We're longtime companions.

But, but but we are not married.

And you pass that along.

You said since you're not married, my grandfather wants to know if you'd like to sell Stacy now, in the camp where his three existing wives, a dozen or so kids of various ages kind of running around.

But there were three wives.

I looked at them first because I thought, since he's being very complex entry of Stacy, are they going to get jealous or are they going to be resentful at all?

I looked at them.

I could tell they were really happy to have us there, and they thought, if we've got a chance to have somebody split the work around here with another person, I think we're happy to do it.

But, the, so I said, well, what would you offer first?

Look, what what are we talking?

So he starts talking about numbers of goats he's going to offer me in exchange for Stacy.

I asked him about the return policy.

I said, if you decide in two weeks you don't like Stacy, do I get to keep the goats or are you going to return?

Do I need to return them?

He said, if I don't like Stacy, you can keep the goats.

So what is Stacy?

Think about all these negotiations?

Laughing nervously.

Oh, and and I was, I thought, the guy.

We're just having fun together.

I didn't realize how little sense of humor probably translated into Arabic.

And while I was still joking and going along, I think the negotiations started to get serious.

The, and, Stacy realized that first and kind of start kind of get the elbow, you know?

Hey, Joe, you need to back off this.

I started realizing to now, how am I going to gracefully get out of this situation?

I'm willing to not take the goats home.

And I think I want to keep Stacy.

So, as things got a little started, to get a little tense, all of a sudden the chic was wearing, a tunic that was kind of an ankle length tunic.

All of a sudden he jumped up in the sand, started kind of dancing around.

A scorpion, had walked up his foot and up his leg and up his tunic, and so he starts jumping around trying to get the scorpion out from underneath the tunic.

And it kind of broke the tension of the moment.

I said, okay, well, time for us to go.

Well, this has been great to meet you.

We went back and jumped in the Jeep and oh yeah, that was your and it made it made a maybe less than graceful exit, but an exit nonetheless.

And Stacy, got to live another day back in heaven.

Scorpion saved the day there.

Okay, now we get some other exotic locales.

Uganda.

Silverback gorillas.

And you also went to a native village.

We did, the, and being with the silverback gorillas, there are only 900 of them left in the world.

They all live in a fairly small, concentrated area.

It was one of the things we knew we wanted to do.

A safari in Africa.

And what made us choose Uganda rather than Kenya.

Tanzania was because that was the location of the of the silverback mountain gorillas.

Well, they come very, imposing creatures, incredibly imposing.

I've seen them in zoos and they're frightening.

Well, and in zoos, all you see is lowland gorillas, which I don't know how much difference there is between the two, but mountain gorillas cannot and do not live in captivity, only lowland gorillas.

We were with the mountain gorillas.

It's a different kind that you've never seen in a zoo.

They were imposing.

And when we first.

What?

We had to do a pretty difficult hike.

For about an hour into the jungle.

It's called the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

So obviously it's an impenetrable.

Well, that sounds like every kid's dream.

But we walked up, and when I first when we emerged into a clearing and first started to see him, my thought was, I thought they were going to be bigger than this.

They don't look that big.

I didn't realize I was looking at the kids, in the tribe.

Suddenly it was almost like in the movie King Kong, you can see the brushes shake and the alpha male, the head of the family, came in.

He was gigantic.

His his chest was as big around as four men's chest.

His his upper arms were.

And I'm holding up my hands for how big he was huge and intimidating.

And he was in charge of the situation.

He looked everybody, all of us in the eye.

And it's like, you know, as long as you don't mess around with us, I'm not going to mess around with you.

And we sat with them for about an hour and a half, watching the kids play.

People eat.

But this this big alpha male was large and in charge, and he let you know it and you knew it.

You know, we're not going to do anything to to make him unhappy with us.

Now, the native village, what was that like at one point?

I thought that day with the gorillas was the best day of the trip.

I thought this may be the most interesting day I've ever had in my life.

The very next day surpassed that.

We went into and we were told we were going to go into a native village.

I guess I've grown up hearing the term pygmies.

Maybe in this day and age, I didn't even know if the term pygmy was a politically correct term to be able to use it.

No, but but there are pygmies.

They exist.

They call themselves pygmies.

And we went into a village that was a pygmy village.

It was the most moving day of the entire trip.

These people have absolutely nothing, even by poverty standards in the United States.

This is a level of of deprivation that that we can't even you almost can't fathom.

And yet we were treated so graciously and so generously by everyone there it was.

It was.

The end of the day, they told me, at the beginning, they said, by the way, as you smile at these people, don't feel insulted or don't feel they're not being friendly if they don't smile back because regular smiling is not a part of their culture, he said.

If they want to show acceptance of you, they'll do it in other ways.

But but don't expect to smile.

If you smile at them, they'll smile back as we've been there for the better part of a day.

At one point, our guide that was with us said, can you come to the center?

To the little center of the village?

Some people want I want to communicate with you.

We went back there and they said they'd like to sing a couple of songs for you.

So it's Stacy, myself, the guide who speaks English, and.

And this group, this village of 90 pygmies, the the men, the tallest men came up about my sternum.

That's how big they were.

And, And the women, much tinier than that.

But they started to sing to us and they started.

And the entire village sang and did a dance with us.

And at one point, you know, one of the gentlemen from the village came out, took Stacy by the hand, pulled her into the circle with us, and they tried to pull my hand.

I said, I'd like to get this on video.

So I took my I took my cell phone, my camera, phone and shot video.

As Stacy was dancing in this circle with all these villagers, of these pygmy villagers.

And it was just an incredible moving experience.

That was sort of the end of the day.

Hugs were exchanged, you know, goodbye was goodbyes were made.

We walked off, we both got, and we both broke down in tears.

It was just.

It was so moving.

It's it's a day like I've never had any other day in my life.

It's kind of hard to top that one, wasn't it?

Definitely.

But you had some other ones.

Other great trips here.

You were camping along the Nile along with a herd of hippos?

Yes.

The, And we were in a tent.

Now, I it's not like a pup tent that you put up on a Boy Scout trip.

It's, you know, it was built on a little, maybe four foot wooden platform.

It was a big tent.

But it did overlook the Nile.

That was in Uganda.

Also, there was a central lodge, and that's where they served meals.

But after dinner at night, an armed guard with a flashlight and a rifle would have to walk you back from the lodge back to where your tent was, because there are animals there that can that can hurt you.

So we we zip ourselves in and they told us, by the way, they said, don't just use your zipper.

You've got a padlock, the zipper at the back, because baboons have learned how to use zippers.

And if you don't padlock your zipper, baboons will come in and will take everything you've got.

They will take even take.

You think, of course, they're looking for food.

They'll take your clothes, they'll take your sunglasses, they'll take, you know, anything you've got.

So we made sure that we did that, that we locked ourselves into the chance at night.

But then shortly after, after bedtime was we were laying there in the bed under mosquito that again, you could start to hear huffing and grunting and, and all the hippos that were down in the Nile during the daytime.

At night they come out and graze on the grass up on the hillside where our tent was.

So they were just outside.

And again Stacey said, Joe, those hippos can't get here in the tent, can they?

No, Stacey, they can't possibly get anywhere.

So like, okay, let's I want to talk about the food.

Now, did the the eat anything of the pygmy village?

No, we did not eat there.

We ate.

We basically ate there back in the lodge.

We did have, we toured the slum areas of Kampala, the one of the biggest cities in to, and again, if the rural poverty that you saw with when the pygmy village was was startling, it was a different kind of poverty that was perhaps even more startling in the in the slums of Kampala.

Ankle deep trash in the streets, piles of junk that kids played on, like they'd play on, on a hillside here.

But as we walked through, the only thing organic that I saw at all, was they were sometimes yards or different in for the little houses.

And the houses didn't.

They had doorways, but not doors.

Everything was dirt floored.

The houses were made of whatever material was right.

It might be.

One wall is a tarp, another tall is some stacked up bricks or an old metal sign.

But, when I saw these seeds that were laying there, I said.

I said the guy, I said, what are those seeds?

He said, well, that's sorghum.

He said, they grow sorghum in the countryside and sometimes bring it back to, you know, sorghum.

So yeah, we we're not far from Kentucky.

You can see fields of sorghum in Kentucky.

And they said, well, we make what do they do with that?

I said, I think they make like a maple sirup, like a pancake about of it.

They said, well, here we make beer with that.

They said, have you ever had sorghum beer?

And I said, no, I have not.

They said, would you like to try some?

And I thought we were going to stop into the local bar and get a bottle of beer.

He walks up to one of the houses that's got the seeds there, says.

He says they've invited us inside.

Come in.

We sat down in this mud hut, an array of about a dozen other family members, and they kept stepped into a back room and came out with what looked like a coffee can full of beer.

We've been told by the guy he is, they're going to drink with us.

He goes, make sure you finish your beer.

And he said it would be considered a little bit rude of a reader offensive if you don't finish everything.

So I thought, okay, I'm going to be drinking a coffee can of beer.

But they handed it to the guide, who took a big sip and passed it to me.

So that was the most horrible taste it had.

The texture of porridge.

Oh thank you.

And I looked at Stacy, who's trying to keep a smile on her face, but you can see the worry in her eyes, but she gulps down.

She passes on to the next person.

It goes in round the room, 12 people drinking out of the same ten in the height of Covid.

It comes back and there's still half the can left.

So we have to do it again.

Oh my God, that is it finally was gone and I told her as we left the house and Stacy, if tomorrow morning comes and we're still alive, we're bulletproof.

Nothing's ever going to kill us again.

That's right.

Well, yeah.

I was wondering if you had any intention problems on this date night.

Not.

And we ate some crazy things.

And you were talking.

We talked about Peru a few moments ago.

Ate the guinea pig.

That's a local delicacy.

A roast guinea pig on a stick.

The entire thing.

We we ate that.

We ate alpaca in Peru.

We ate fermented shark in Iceland.

We had the beer in, in Uganda and and never had a sick day the entire time.

Wow.

That is that is amazing.

That was amazing.

And, I was wondering, border crossings.

Was that, an adventure going to these different countries?

It was.

And that caused us to reroute the trip at one point to, we had been in Thailand for 60 days.

We were on a 60 day visitor visa.

It was day 59, so it was time for us to move on.

And the next stop was supposed to be Vietnam.

I had my plane, tickets purchased.

We had a hotel waiting for us in Ho Chi Minh City.

The and, there was at the airport, and my flight is getting ready to board.

Our bags are on the conveyor belt, and they're looking through the information, the visa information that the Vietnamese government had sent us.

And somebody said, you're you're missing a page of this.

I said, well, that's all that we were sent.

And they said, well, you can't board the flight without this fourth page of the visa papers.

And I said, well, how do we go about getting that?

This will apply over again.

It'll take you about two weeks to get the the extra page.

I said, well, we can't stay here for two more weeks.

Our visas, it's $1,500 per person per day every day.

You overstay your visa in that country.

So we couldn't stay.

So we thought, how can we get on the plane?

They said, you're not getting on this plane.

You're not going to Vietnam today.

And so our next stop was supposed to be Cambodia border closed because of Covid stop.

After that, Indonesia border closed.

Stop.

After that, Australia border closed.

We had nowhere to go.

And and couldn't stay and couldn't move on to any of the places that were in that part of the world that we're trying to get to.

So that was yes, that made for a stressful day.

Well, what was the outcome of that?

The outcome is we had to fly back to the United States and get our get our papers, oh my God, in order.

So we so we flew back, we bought and and the other thing that happened was so I said we were going to have to fly.

We'll fly back to Los Angeles.

We'll spend a little time there.

My son lives there.

We'll speak and get our paperwork straightened out and then come on back.

Excuse me.

And then so I went to the counter and I said, I'd like to buy two tickets from here to let you have a flight to Los Angeles.

Yes, we have one leaving in three hours.

Can I buy one and one?

They said, well, you're going to have to go online and buy it during Covid.

We don't sell tickets at the airline desk.

We went online and because by now the flight had left and my, my credit card company knew that I was on a plane there.

They assumed this was fraudulent and they canceled my credit card.

So now we're there with no credit card and no way to buy our ticket back to the United States, either.

Stacy only had an American Express card.

They didn't take American Express.

My card didn't work.

They didn't take debit cards.

It was it the stress was added to at that point.

And let's go to Morocco.

Joe riding camels in the Sahara desert.

And, if one person is out there, what are some do's and don'ts when riding a camel?

No, I want to know.

Everybody talks about camels being mean.

That our camels were very nice.

They seem used to having people on them.

Yeah.

You can just pretty much sit there and let them go where they're going to go.

There's there's no problem with the camel.

The one thing that was perhaps a little bit unsettling was that we rode the camels on on our first day in the Sahara.

The next day, camel sandwiches were on the menu.

Now, it was not the same camels that we'd ridden.

So because you start to form a little bit of a bond after that, but they did grind camel meat and put it on a on like a hoagie bun.

And so camel sandwiches were on the menu and, and after writing them and eating them, it make your eyebrows a little bit to think about what did they taste like?

Not much different than a subway sandwich for some subway meatball sandwich.

Sure.

Okay.

All right.

Oh, boy.

Okay, I know, I know, you've you've went all through Europe, England, Scotland, Italy, Czech Republic, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Iceland.

And, you said you tried some fermented shark in Iceland.

That is, a local delicacy.

It's it's not something very I would recommend going to taste.

That's exactly that.

It tastes like you're leaving little cubes of spongy ammonia.

That's that's that's the perfect description for it.

I guess it was a thing that the Vikings used because you could make it.

You fermented it, and that way you didn't have to refrigerate it.

You can have a floating.

Yes, exactly.

But, I would not recommend it.

You know, as as tasty.

It's something you kind of have to do if you go to Iceland.

Just to say you tried it once and did it, but I would not say I would not need to order a second time.

A buddy of mine just got back from from Iceland shows incredible pictures of the of the hot springs and everything and the scenery there.

Just fantastic.

It was, it was visually, the two countries from the 28 we visited that I would say were most striking visually were Jordan and Iceland.

Yes.

All right.

And I, you spent some time in England at Harlequin.

I did, I did we went England.

We wanted to see the Cotswolds as part of the trip.

So that was part of our plan and while we were there, decided to stop by because of my university, Evansville connections, wanted to stop by and visit, UBS campus in England at Harlington.

We spent a few days there, as guests, and during that time, talked about having me come back at a later time.

I've been involved.

The University of Evansville has a program called Change Labs.

And I have coached those in the past, in the last few years.

I was asked to come back and coach a change lab.

And so we again altered the trajectory of the trip.

And I went back, decided to go back and spend time at Harleston, where I had, a class.

The students had classes for a couple of days a week.

So I was able to live in that fantastic Harlequin, the manor house, which is absolutely wonderful.

I know a lot of Evansville people have got connections there.

I've spent a couple of nights there.

It's fantastic.

Got to spend, an extended period of time there, but still have enough time that, I had basically a 4 or 5 day weekend every week.

So August, a couple of weekends we'd stay at the manor and just stay around Grantham, England, and Harleston for the weekend.

A lot of times we would go to another pick, another village somewhere in England and visit or go to London.

But even, you know, as many times as we did that we just pick another nearby country.

We don't think about that in the US.

You think traveling from one country to another is a big deal, but you can get to, you know, to Holland, to France to, you know, to Belgium and all those places so easily.

You can just get on the train and go and beat those places in a few hours.

And so we saw a lot of Europe, during the time we were at Harlequin, so I could come back and be a sort of a professor, you know, for a few days a week and then, and then be a, a vagabond European traveler, backpacker for the for the rest of the week, a Grantham, the hometown of Margaret Thatcher.

Absolutely.

And, Sir Isaac Newton.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Well, very good.

The statues to both of them in the town square now in Scotland.

Did you try the haggis?

Yes, we did, yes we did.

Exotic it is.

We thought if if something is part of the tradition, we really wanted to immerse ourselves in that culture.

And even though haggis, I think is less eaten as a regular meal, it's part of the tradition in that country.

So if a country had a traditional food, we would try it.

Sometimes we really liked it.

Sometimes once was enough.

Ireland, loved.

Well then wait a minute, I have that.

I take that back.

Ireland I had been to before.

So we did not go on this trip.

And I tried to, with one exception.

We only went on this trip to places that I hadn't been to for some other purpose in the past.

So I've been in Ireland before, but.

But we did not.

It was not part of the of the 28 month journey.

What was your last destination before you came back home?

Portugal.

Portugal?

Tell me about Portugal.

Really liked it.

We spent that semester at Harleston.

The English winters while there.

Not as bad as Evansville winters.

They are gray and they are cloudy, and they are misty, and there's a lot of rain.

And we wanted sunshine, and just be and seaside.

And so we thought, well, the very last trip we'll take, let's go down to the Algarve region of Portugal, which is the very southern tip, of the ocean, beautiful rock formation and things and sea caves along there.

And so we went back and spent our last two weeks, in the Algarve, basically there for the sunshine.

Were you in Spain before we went to Portugal then?

We had been in Spain earlier in the trip.

We went to Spain after Morocco.

We went to to a couple of cities in Spain after Morocco.

So that was so close to Morocco.

You can stand in Morocco and see Spain across the water.

Why did you go to Gibraltar?

We could see it off in the distance from where we were at one point, but didn't actually go there.

Okay.

Now I have been to Gibraltar and, it's like you take a ferry over to Tangier.

Yes.

You know, it only takes like about 45 minutes or an hour.

It's fascinating area.

And okay, now you guys are already planning another trip, is that right?

Well, we are, I had promised Stacie that one of the things that we did that her youngest son was graduating from you in May of last year, and she said, I'll go with you.

I'll go to the place that you want to go.

I'll stay as long as you want to go.

But I need to be back in Indiana because I want to see my son graduate from college.

So we came back last May, which, because we extended our time in Harlesden, there was a section of the world that we didn't get to see that had been on our travel list.

And it was that same area that we didn't get to because of the Vietnamese, visa mix up.

So there is still a section of the world that's going to take us 3 to 4 months, and we feel that is an area that we missed.

So, we are going to go back.

It won't be the same because this time we'll have a home to return to.

We'll have a real life back here, which we didn't have for a while, but we're again going to go back and make another attempt at Vietnam and Cambodia and then go on to Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand.

And we're planning on doing that in the first quarter of next year.

That'll be a year.

It'll have been, over a year in a year that we're there.

I mean, yeah, that whole that whole part of the trip will do the all that in about four months.

Okay.

Well, gosh, that'll be like a weekend or your other journey.

So, so finally, what did you take back from all of your travels?

I know you went out of your comfort zone.

Is this something you always wanted to do?

What are the rewards of this trip?

You were in there?

Were there?

And we've seen I've talked about this extensively after that, you learn that, people the world over can be very more gracious, more hospitable, more friendly than you could ever imagine.

Most places we were in very little to no English was spoken, and we spoke no words of of the local language.

If you seemed open to things and tried to be friendly and didn't demand that things are always like, you have them back, you know, at home in the US, that, that you were willing to try their foods and accept their customers and do it their way with a friendly spirit and people will take you in everywhere.

We had so many examples of hospitality and friendliness and graciousness.

It really, it changes you, I think inside, we also learned because we did live for those years without a home, without so many material possessions.

That's an incredibly liberating feeling when you're unburdened with all those things.

It's just it's really amazing.

It's amazing how feel, how free you can feel when you're not worried about taking care of your house, taking care of your car, having to drive somewhere, having that.

It was it was it was very unburdened.

Living that resulted a real feeling of liberation, I think.

And I both feel like after that experience, there are a lot of different ways to live.

And we could live in a very different way than we had ever had before and really be very happy and very content with that living.

We also learned that the people, as different as we are culturally, people want a lot of the same things around the world, no matter where you are.

They don't want to argue.

They don't want to fight.

They're concerned about raising their kids, having a good, safe place for their kids.

It's just, you know, as many differences we saw, we also saw a lot of the communal of mankind.

And, and, and that was as a rewarding that I think changes you a little bit inside to a lot of the things we get upset about here.

A lot of the things we argue about, there's probably not really not that need to do that.

Joe Elsworth, world traveler, thanks for being my guest on two Main Street, and I have a quote here.

I want to leave with here traveling.

It leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.

You are a great storyteller, Joe.

Thank you David.

It's been an honor to be here.

Thank you.

You're welcome.