When you ask people for their favorite vacation story, likely the most common answers focus on the commonplace, such as a great meal, a great museum tour, or some other lovely vignette.
Ask that same question of Belmont residents Martin Kysel and Amy Fox, and they will offer a story about flying from Bolivia to New York, buying hard-to-find parts for their pickup truck and flying back to South America with the parts tucked in a suitcase.
“It was just much cheaper that way,” Kysel said.
They might decide to change it up a bit and tell the story of creating tiny wheels for their truck to knock off three or four inches in height so that the truck would fit in a shipping container for over-water transport to another South American nation.
Stories like that tumble out of the couple, with Fox often pausing to think aloud, “What stories to tell?”
A few years ago, the two decided to head out on an adventure. They bought a pickup, did some work, added a camper, and headed south. Their route would take them as far south as Argentina. When they returned to Belmont, the wanderlust hit again and they soon headed north through Canada to the Arctic Circle.
All told, they were on the road for 1,050 days, covering 63,000 miles and 21 countries.
“We decided, ‘Why not?’ It’s literally the only reason,” Kysel said.
The couple, who moved to Belmont last year after living in Watertown, started out with an itinerary created by Fox. The creation of a Google map, with pins and ideas for places to go, was their North Star at first. But over time, it changed.
“I mean, the map was still a guide, but we ended up just winging a lot of things after a while,” Fox said.
“Winging it” included a four-day, one-way drive from Bolivia to Rio de Janeiro. Why? They were sick of being cold, and Rio was warm. So, off they went.
Neither had ever attempted a trek of this nature before. They hit the road, Fox said, with few expectations because they simply didn’t know what to expect. Road trips in North America are somewhat simpler. For example, a Walmart in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, looks very like a Walmart in South Gate, California. You know going in what the store will stock, even a rough idea of cost. In Central and South America, that is not the case.
“This was, at least for us, going in blind. At the start, we didn’t speak Spanish. A lot of it was, I guess, an expectation of, ‘Yeah, we’ll learn Spanish,’ and we’ll figure out a lot on the way,” she said.
Figuring it out meant learning auto repair, including that trip to New York for parts. It meant learning carpentry to fix the camper, damaged in a crash in Colombia.
Kysel, a software engineer by trade, learned most of the repair work as needed.
For Fox and Kysel, the outcome of the trip more than justified their approach.
“When you go on this week-long vacation somewhere, you get a taste for it, but you don’t really know anything about it,” Kysel said. “And I think for me, a huge chunk of that was seeing all the unseen things and discovering all the things you can’t expect. And I feel like a lot of the really good experiences we found were just the unscripted stuff.”
They met a lot of interesting people, finding those living in places off the beaten path to be welcoming and kind. Their fellow travelers, Kysel said, were mostly retired Europeans, particularly in South America.
Living in a tiny camper for almost three full years might be a trial for some couples, but for Kysel and Fox, it was a positive experience.
“I think we’re also more adventurous,” Fox said. “We did all kinds of things that at the beginning of the trip I never would have imagined us doing.”
It wasn’t always about driving, either. At one point, they were interested in seeing the Pantanal, the largest tropical wetland in the world. The town was an arduous, roundabout drive. The direct route required putting the truck on a cattle boat and head upriver, modern Marlows seeking jaguars in the rainforest.
“We knew 10 words of Portuguese, and the Brazilians who we were working with didn’t speak any English. We spoke Spanish. Some of them spoke tiny Spanish,” Fox said.
Both Fox and Kysel are determined that their South American journey and trip to the Arctic Circle won’t be the only long-distance treks they take. He wants to make the next trip to Antarctica. Fox, meanwhile, hopes the next trip will be to Central Asia.
“Ultimately, yes, the answer is to do both,” Fox said. “But who gets their way first? We don’t know yet.”
