Honeymoon with my Brother

I just finished re-reading a book called Honeymoon with my Brother by Franz Wisner. I picked up the book probably two years ago at a used-bookstore, and I'm so glad I made that $1 purchase.

I recommend that everyone read this book. It's the story of Franz, a wealthy poster-child of Republicanism, deep from the conservative throes of Newport Beach, esteemed writer and government relations exec for real estate giant, The Irvine Company. He's days away from wedding a girl whom he met during his days on Capitol Hill when he gets dumped. Sucks. Newly single, feeling like crud, and in possession of an all-paid, extra honeymoon ticket to Costa Rica, he decides to take his brother, Kurt, instead. After some brotherly bonding and the all-too-expected high they got from their short traveling stint, Franz and Kurt decide to take two years off from their cookie-cutter lives and travel the world together. They sell most of their belongings and leave their microcosm of a world behind.

And they face the real world. Months spent in Europe, South America, Africa, North America, and Southeast Asia. The book is an account of their hilarious, touching, and actualizing adventures with each other, with strangers, and within themselves as they chuck four-star hotels for hostels; rides in limos for tuk tuks and scooters; swooning with socialites to cavorting with hitchikers. The book is refreshing, funny, and damnit, you become jealous of their lifestyles.

I love this book because Franz hails from Orange County, a community that is all-too-similar to my own hometown and one that prizes characteristics akin to materialism and consumerism that are evident in many students from my alma mater. Franz was immersed in that world, but his travels and encounters with others forced him to re-evaluate. Throughout his travels, we start to see his priorities change. Being in a world that is, as he describes it, plainly poor, he emotes and realizes that money is not everything. That, while people at home in California/USA obsess and complain about the most minuscule and petty things, the majority of those around the world -- those with close to nothing, without shoes, clothes, parents -- are still able to smile bigger, open their doors more quickly, give what limited food they own, and emit more happiness than any American he'd ever encountered.

There's so much more that this book shares and does to the reader. It made me re-assess my career opporunities and think about the potential for which I can use my God-given skills for a greater good. It made me become just a little more disgusted with American consumer/capitalism culture; pitiful for the people who are so focused on making money that they don't stop to smell the roses; hopeful that I can have similar Wisner-adventures in my own life. I know that I have to make money in order to afford the opportunity to travel, and I hope that I will with that goal in mind.

From this book, I've learned that I must, MUST go to Brazil one day. Rio de Janeiro. Carnival. (But I'll go with a guy...or two or three. To be safe.) That Africa is a must-see, especially the safaris, which more clearly demonstrate the order-of-life better than any movie or book we've ever grown up watching or reading. That life is unexepected and the outline I've created for my own may change in an instant, as Franz's did, and that everything, absolutely everything, will turn out alright.

Throughout the book, Franz highlights his conversations and visits with his grandmother, LaRue. She turns 100 at the end of their trip. She lives in a retirement home and when the brothers announce their world trip to her, she and the fellow residents of the Eskaton Retirement Center follow them, read their letters, pinpoint on a map their visits, and hang their pictures in the multipurpose room. They are so excited for the brothers and all say they had wished they had done something similar, gone to that place, how it's a shame it's too late. Their response is a nice change from Wisners' parents, who anxiously question what they will do for money to fund their travles, with their jobs, what they'll do when they get back, when they're going to get married (and have kids), etc. etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Blah.

I can relate. Most people can relate. He writes, "Our parents' generation asks when we're going back to work. Eskaton asks where we're going next." True. Story. I understand why Franz includes his conversations with LaRue and her friends. It's called perspective. Because at the end of the road, what matters are not the numbers of breaths we take, but the moments that take our breath away. I'm glad I recognize that now.

Read the book. His newest is called How the World Makes Love...and What it Taught a Jilted Groom. Going to read it as soon as I get home.

http://www.honeymoonwithmybrother.com/