A Florida family of five leaves home to travel the world.
The Florida Times-Union
Sunday, Nov. 4, 2007

By ANDREW MARRA
Special to the Times-Union

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Robert Peters could have been just crazy.

That would have been easier for his wife and three children to get. Easier, certainly, than the proposal he kept making.

The travel books had been arriving in boxes for weeks. And Peters, a Fernandina Beach real estate attorney, had been sounding more serious every day.

Surely, they told themselves, he was just crazy. Because how could an ordinary North Florida family of five be expected to just get up and spend a year traveling the world?

But that was before the giant cylinder arrived, before the day that Jody DeSalvo Peters and her three children came home to find the cardboard container leaning against the garage door.

They gathered around like science-fiction primates, deliberating whether to open it. Jody, in the end, told them to hold off. They’d wait until their father came home, she said. He’d ordered it, after all.

And when at last the cylinder was opened, they found inside it a 6-foot-high map of the world. The world, Robert explained, they’d be traveling together for a year.

Jody wanted to stash it in the garage, but Robert said no. It was to be displayed prominently on a wall in the hallway. And so it was. And somehow, on that day, the trip became a little more real.

Somehow, it seemed, the Peters family was really going to travel the world.

Some seven months later, on a breezy September afternoon, the Peters family found itself navigating a crumbling sidewalk amid the congested, European-styled streets of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Buses were coughing fumes, and street-side merchants were selling wares in Spanish.

The Peters family - Robert, Jody, 12-year-old Tori, 9-year-old Robert Jr. and 7-year-old Caroline - was big, blond and blue-eyed. And as its five members strolled into an antique plaza in the city’s San Telmo district, they quickly became the center of attention.

“Why do they always stare at us?” Robert wondered in his amiable north Florida drawl.

Jody and Tori were looking at homemade jewelry spread over a blanket. A man with barrettes in his long black hair looked up. He knew a few words of English and navigated them through prices.

A bracelet caught Jody’s eye and she stooped to pick it up.

“How do you say that in Spanish?” Robert asked the man, looking over Jody’s shoulder.

“Pulsera,” he was told. It sounded like pewl-serr-ah in thickly accented Argentine Spanish.

Robert winced, defeated. This word he would not be able to pronounce.

“Some things don’t go too good with Southern,” he quipped.

A trip with true purpose

But then, for Robert, that was the whole idea. It was the very reason he had brought his family here to South America for the first leg of a nearly year-long world tour. They were planning to see four continents in all, visit more than 10 countries and hear any number of foreign tongues.

It was going to be anything but Southern.

“The rest of the world doesn’t think like we do,” he said. “In the U.S., we’re always trying to get a bigger house and a bigger car. Things are different in other places, and I wanted them to see that.”

Two months into it, the trip had not been going as planned. By the time they finished with the South American leg in late September, they had been through their share of trials - some of them run-of-the-mill tourist frustrations, but some of them deeper, more existential doubts about the very purpose of their odyssey.

So much so that they felt close to calling it all off.

What saved them, in the end, was a trip to a raggedy village in the mountains, poorer than anything they had ever seen before.

Overcoming fear, delays

Jody said getting talked into leaving her home was one thing. Doing it was a different matter.

Before leaving Fernandina Beach, Robert had to sell his law firm. He had built it from the ground up, and now he had to boil it down into a title company, sell it off and cut his ties to the working world.

The family had never traveled abroad before. As a young man Robert had been stationed with the Air Force in Greece, but he said he had not appreciated the opportunity at the time.

The kids had to be ripped from school - St. Michael Academy in Fernandina Beach, the only one they’d ever known. Tori, a surprisingly self-possessed pre-teen, was the most resistant.

When the trip looked imminent, she penned a two-page later to her parents pleading for a reprieve. “This is where I want to stay forever,” she implored.

It wasn’t so easy to break the ties. The house had to be rented out. Parents had to be informed.

And then one day in March, Jody found a lump in her breast.

She went to the doctor and learned it was cancer. The real thing.

Just like that, all bets were off. The tickets bought for a May departure were cancelled.

The family gritted its teeth while Jody went in for surgery. They watched as she underwent chemotherapy and her hair fell out.

In the end, the cancer was removed without a glitch. It had been a mortal scare and nothing more. But what was to be of the trip? Calling off their plans would have been the easiest thing.

But Robert said no. The odyssey was delayed but the dream wasn’t deferred. The trip was on.

Exotic adventures

They landed in Ecuador in late July, the beginning of the longest tour of their lives.

They stayed in small towns with names like Canoa and Puerto Lopez, where men sold chickens from the backs of trucks and children played soccer in alleys. They ate fruit from street-side stands and watched whales from a boat at sea.

They were able to speak very little Spanish and understood even less. Still, they got by thanks to merciful English speakers and Robert’s gift for mime.

They flew to the Galapagos Islands to see blue-footed boobies and watched marine iguanas writhe in the ocean. They swam with sea lions and rode horseback along the beach.

In Quito, Ecuador, they visited the equator and ate chicken on pita bread. They learned how ancient inhabitants shrunk rivals’ severed heads. From a town of 100 in southern Ecuador, they paused to take in breath-taking views of the Andes mountains.

They trekked through a sliver of Amazon rainforest where village women wash clothes in the river. They took basket-weaving and pottery classes. They let people paint their faces with berry juice. They laughed as a toucan landed on Jody’s hat. They took a nighttime jungle walk and screamed at hand-sized cockroaches and spiders.

But moving about was more than a travel-brochure snapshot. It was hard work. By the time they got to Buenos Aires in late August, the traveling was becoming more of a chore, both mentally and physically.

Before they left Ecuador, Jody wrote in an online journal entry: “Homesickness is getting to me a little bit more than I had thought it would.”

Homesickness and other challenges

Buenos Aires was where things got tough. The family enjoyed being back in a major city, with its first-world amenities and Old World charm. But landing in a metropolitan area of 12 million people came with its own challenges, and the strain of Spanish there was, if anything, more difficult to understand.

The family rented an apartment and rode around in subways and taxis. Robert Jr. discovered hot dogs and became enamored with Argentine ice cream. Tori fell in love with the country’s famous steaks.

As the weeks went by the routine wore on them. The children were not in school and lacked structure. Robert and Jody never had time alone. Unable to communicate in Spanish, the family was always joined at the hip and always together, alone.

“We kind of didn’t have a purpose,” Jody said. “We were just running around aimlessly every day. I felt a bit like my freedom had been taken away from me.”

If she had been asked, she said, she would have told the family she wanted to go home.

Life lessons and volunteering

Everything changed with a journey to Paraguay, a poor nation between Argentina and Brazil.

They had signed up for a service trip through their church back home, Memorial United Methodist in Fernandina Beach, and they had a date to meet up with a group of missionaries.

They took an 18-hour bus ride from Buenos Aires to Asuncion, Paraguay’s capital. After a few days of sight-seeing they were off to Yabuca, a green-jungle, dirt-road mountain village of shanty homes without plumbing or electricity.

They were there to build wells in the village so residents could have more access to fresh water. There was work to be done, and they worked hard.

They sweated together alongside full-time missionaries. They sanded and they painted. They mixed mortar and cement.

Caroline, the youngest, played with piglets and befriended the local pastor’s little daughter, even though they couldn’t communicate with words.

The family was invited to a birthday party in the village and ate first while everyone else watched. Girls squealed when Tori painted their nails, running to wash away the nail polish and have them painted again.

They were struck hard by the poverty, by the kids walking shoeless to school, by the homes without walls, by people’s amazement at seeing faces on a digital camera screen.

When they pulled away on a bus a week later, they did so with a certain prideful glow. And amid the gift of giving, Tori said she learned a tough lesson.

“Life isn’t fair,” she said. “I feel guilty because I have a nice home and they don’t.”

Crossing the globe

The Peters family left South America early. They bumped up their flight and decided to zip through Africa, bee-lining for the English-speaking promised lands of Australia and New Zealand.

Spanish turned out to be harder to pick up than they expected. And they were tired of the aimless tourist wandering. Robert and Jody needed structure, and the kids did too.

In Australia the children would be enrolled in public schools for a few months. They would make friends while Robert and Jody had a few hours to themselves each day.

The trip to Paraguay changed their perspective. They began searching for more service opportunities, more ways to get involved with missionaries on other continents.

“You can’t just be a tourist forever,” Robert said. “You have to have some purpose.”

They’d had their fair share of family squabbles, of homesickness, embarrassment, frustration and fatigue.

But on the trip they’d grown closer. Tori surprised Jody one day by observing, unprompted: “Dad is really funny,” as though noticing for the first time.

The Peters family plans to return to Fernandina Beach sometime in mid-2008. But they don’t have a return-ticket yet. It’s wide open.

One thing is certain: When they do return, the world map on their wall will be more than a jumble of colored lines.