Prologue to Turkey: Pert & Kenny

It’s been about 3.5 years since I last posted in this blog. It was always intended to be a blog for my specific backpacking trip ion 2011, but I decided to bring the band back together and post one last time since I just came back from Turkey, and so many aspects of the trip reminded me of my time backpacking across and Asia and Europe a few years back.

Turkey had been on my short list of must-see destinations for a while now, ever since I went to Greece and everyone I met said I HAD to get to Turkey. Over the past few years, I kept hearing great things about it. I watched Bourdain talk about how great it was. I heard stories from Uncle Ed and Auntie Carol from their business trips, eating great food and lounging on the Mediterranean. But I had done very little to make the trip happen. I just started a new job at Gates, and still had visions of volunteering in Cambodia in sight, so it just wasn’t prioritized for me to plan. But luckily, it was prioritized for some of my friends.

My long-time friend Kenny and his then girlfriend (now fiancée) decided to take two years off from teaching here in Seattle and move to Korea to teach English – part change of scenery, part opportunity to just explore different locales in Asia. Before they left, we thought it would be really great if we could meet up somewhere out on one of their adventures. Being a single guy, I had a lot of flexibility, so I wanted to use that to visit them. Nothing happened the first year for the aforementioned reasons, but then they came back this past summer for a little engagement party, and it reminded how much I loved being around them. We spoke again of potential trips we could do, and I decided to block of my calendar for one of these potential trips, destination TBD, which was completely OK with me.

One thing I’ve been trying to be better at over the past few years is to follow-through and not just say things like “let’s grab coffee sometime” or “let’s travel together” without actually trying my best to make it happen. This goal actually started a few years back when I announced to everyone who would listen that I wanted to backpack for a few months. I got some cold feet while planning (since I hadn’t really gone out traveling on my own ever, especially for 3 months) and would’ve been completely happy staying home for the few months watching Netflix, but I wanted to follow-through. So when I told Kenny and Alison I wanted to meet up, I wanted to make my best effort to actually follow-through.

So when the fall rolled around and Kenny told me they would be going to Turkey for a couple of weeks, it was a no-brainer that I would definitely meet them out there.

Let me take a little (it’s actually going to be kind of long) trip down memory lane before I talk about how much fun we had in Turkey (next post after this!).

I’ve known Kenny since 6^th grade! We were 11!! It was 1995!!! And this year is the 20^th anniversary of our friendship!!!!! When I think about it, it really is crazy. Whenever my dad told me about friends he’s had for decades, it always blew my mind and made him sound old. Now I have some friends I’ve known for multiple decades and although it does make me sound a little old, it reminds me how blessed I am to have kept friendships over the years, and kept them strong.

So I’ve told this to Kenny before, but I want to reiterate here how much influence Kenny had on my life when we first met. I was a shy 6th grader coming from a different part of Seattle, so I didn’t really know anyone at Eckstein Middle School. Kenny was the BMOC at his elementary school and continued to be so when he went to Eckstein. We had homeroom together in Mr. Ewing’s class in the portables and immediately hit it off. I don’t know exactly how we started talking (maybe we sat near each other), but both of us being basketball fans, it was easy to extol the Sonics, MJ, Penny, Grant Hill, Jason Kidd, etc. We also played a million games of one-on-one in his backyard. I will forever be angry that Kenny beat me pretty much every game because he knew every single angle and could just fade away into the bushes and make every shot. Frustrating, but such a nice thing to have with a friend to get used to a new surrounding.

So young...

...so innocent.

Two handsome 7th graders (we're the baby-faced assassins front-left) on a loaded 8th grade team!

 Yup, that's Aaron Brooks in the front, or as Kenny and I would say, our backup PG.

Additionally, he introduced me to a lot of his friends, who then became my close knit group of friends throughout Middle School (his good friend at the time, Kyle, somehow weaseled himself (joking, but not really) to my birthday party in 7^th grade and now I’m his daughter’s godfather). I’ll always be grateful to Kenny for taking me under his wing, so to speak, which really helped me transition into middle school. One additional note is that we will forever share the story that we both started over Aaron Brooks (the NBA player) in middle school as point guards. We’ll sometimes selectively mention that he couldn’t play because of grades, but regardless of that fact, it’ll always be an “accomplishment” we share. We also were the two only 7^th graders to make the 8^th grade team, which was a big deal because our team was really good (shout out to Jah Lofton!).

We kept in touch sporadically through high school and college, and were mostly only reunited because Kyle always did a great job of bringing all of us together for his annual man parties where we would continue our basketball discussions and debate things such as who would be better, Terrance Ross or Terrance Jones?

Honestly, I don’t know how much we each thought we would be friends as adults because we lived in different states for a good amount of time, and even when Kenny moved back to Seattle we didn’t really get together a whole lot. But a nice thing about growing older and maturing is that you look at certain things in your life with new importance or appreciation and I think that’s what happened to Kenny and me as we got into our mid to late 20s. We still got together at Kyle’s, but we’d also try to get together at other times to grab dinner and just catch up.

Another great thing that we could connect on was our passion for our non-profit work; Kenny with Long Way Home in Guatemala and me with One Day’s Wages here in Seattle. It was great sharing our work with each other, and I so love that we could build a partnership between our two organizations and raise over $30K to build new schools in Guatemala. Such an amazing and tangible body of work that started with a friendship 20 years ago. I’ll always look back on that so fondly and with amazement that two friends could discuss that over coffee and actually make it happen.

OK, so that’s enough of babbling about the warm and fuzzies. Let’s get to the actual awesomeness that was our trip!

20 years in the making.