When Oprah calls, answer the phone even if you’re in Africa
Have you ever had the urge to take a year off your life to travel, visit exotic places and experience first hand what different cultures from around the world have to offer? That has always been a dream of mine and since my wife also has the travel bug, I’m sure that’s something we’d both love to do at some point. Of course, the next questions that come up are: Where would you go? How would you plan it? How would you pay for it?
Now think of this: What if you had four children ranging in age from 4 to 13? Could you still imagine doing it? Well, that’s the situation that Anne Andrus and her husband Tom were in and they’re currently in month 8 of their round the world trip with their family. They’ve been to Australia and New Zealand, visited floating villages in Vietnam, donated their time to help children in an orphanage in India, hiked the Great Wall in China, rode elephants in Thailand, visited the Angkor temples in Cambodia, camped out all over Southern Africa and saw wild game in its natural habitat, and they’ve gotten to do it all together as a family. Oh, and they were just on Oprah, as well…
Tom and Anne have been detailing their travels on a blog over at www.sixintheworld.com and apparently one of Oprah’s staff came across it and brought it to her attention. It’s well worth checking out, as they have a number of absolutely beautiful pictures, as well as plenty of interesting observations about the countries they’ve been to and people they’ve met in their travels. One of Oprah’s producers contacted Tom and Anne through their site in January and then arranged to shoot the piece via satellite on top of Table Top mountain in Cape Town, South Africa on Wednesday, March 28th. The segment aired just 5 days later on April 2nd. You can check out a clip of the Andrus’ appearance on the show here.
Of course, with Anne being a writer we had already talked about what kind of book may come out of their trip before they left back in August and it’s something we’ve touched base about a few times along the way. But when Oprah calls it’s time to kick your thinking into a whole new gear and once we found out they were confirmed to be on the show, I spent a couple of frantic days calling editors to get them to watch the show. The feedback has been excellent so far and I can’t wait to see how the proposal shapes up when the Andrus family is back home and Anne has had a chance to catch her breath and start working on the proposal.
Just goes to show that sometimes when you follow your dreams, all sorts of things become possible.
