Frank McMains
I think I’m safe in saying that adventure is good for you. My wife and I were mid-adventure when we met—in Ireland, a country that neither of us could call “home.” Like any self-respecting Southern girl my future wife played hard-to-get. Having won my heart she fled the country. I gave chase and eventually ran her to ground on a small Greek island where, after an awkward scene involving her, me, a half-Greek male model, and the worst sunburn anyone’s ever seen, she collapsed into my (sunburned) arms and we embarked on nearly three years of penniless wandering before finally returning to her hometown and settling down … sort of. That’s the short version but the point is that Ireland turned out to be the first chapter in an ongoing series of travel adventures that continued until we tired of living out of backpacks and began to yearn for a place to call home. We roamed around Europe, the U.S., and Australia—from coast to coast, alpine resort to Mediterranean shore, sea to shining sea, following the seasonal work that sustains the migratory diaspora of backpackers perpetually wandering the globe, always trying to scrape together enough cash to finance the next adventure. The jobs weren’t glamorous. If you weren’t picky you could easily find work washing dishes, sweeping kitchen floors, or waiting tables in the mountain and coastal resorts of Western Europe, where the high season had jobs for thousands of pairs of hands willing to work with no strings attached. In 1993, as a backpacker in search of a few months’ winter work, one of your best bets was the Austrian and Swiss ski resorts, where I’m ashamed to say the rather xenophobic locals preferred to give their seasonal jobs to transient backpacker types—mostly Australian, English, or South African ski bums—who could be counted upon to disappear at the end of the season—rather than the Yugoslavians and Serbians escaping conflict in their home countries, who certainly needed the work more than we did.
Most of us washed dishes or waited tables. A few cleaned hotel rooms. Occasionally there’d be some dashing, multilingual Dutchman who would get work as a line cook or a ski instructor. Others improvised. Ron, a genial surfer-cum-snowboarder from Durban, South Africa, supported himself by volunteering for German medical experiments. Every couple of months Ron would disappear up to Munich for a few days, sign some documents, then let scientists inject him with various substances. He would return well-rested, with plenty of cash but strangely orange skin, which made him easy to spot on the slopes. Since the color of Ron’s face would gradually return to normal I remember thinking he was onto a pretty good thing at the time. But now we’re all approaching fifty I wonder what he looks like.
In any case, when Ashley and I finally settled down in Louisiana it seemed only natural to continue to explore. Even better, now we had a job that, rather than just financing the next adventure, required us to go in search of it. Not only did we make a living publishing a magazine for which the tagline was “Adventures Close to Home;” there was also the fact that every couple of months one or more of the itinerant friends we’d made during three years of backpacking would turn up in South Louisiana expecting to be entertained. Keen to show off our adopted part of the world, we spent a lot of weekends criss-crossing the region in search of whimsical, out-of-the-ordinary experiences to share with our visiting wanderers. Hardly surprising that some of that spirit would find its way into Country Roads. This is why we keep writing about places where you can go Cajun dance at 8 in the morning, paddle through a flooded cypress swamp, visit a rookery teeming with nesting spoonbills, eat crawfish the size of little lobsters, wander alleyways bristling with public art, or sit in with a Saturday morning music jam. Our part of the world has a well-deserved reputation for being an unforgettable place to visit. Why we locals shouldn’t want to make the most of it as well is beyond me. Once-bitten, as they say.
Anyway, I hope this spring “Adventure” issue of ours gives you fodder for your next excursion off the beaten path. Keep on exploring; there’s lots to love out there.