Meeting my best friend in Fiji

Bula! This means Hello in Fijian.

When I was making the decision to take the jump and leave my job to live my dreams, there were few people who consistently told me to do it, to take the jump, to live the life I had been saving for for the past 38 years. There were few people who told me ‘I would be just fine’ and that ‘I deserved this.’ So it was quite fitting that six months to the day my best friend Nicole met me in Fiji. She is the person who listened to me – endlessly – repeat myself over and over, expressing so many fears, and patiently letting me get to the right mental place to ‘jump right on in.’ Nicole and I also met 10 years ago this month, so there was more than one reason to spend a week in Fiji together. When your best friend tells you they want to meet you on the other side of the world while you are working on a world record, you say, ‘when and where?’ And that’s how we found ourselves in Fiji.

A taxi adventure and a frog mystery

We had a bit of a mix up with the AirBNB that we had booked so had to stay in a different place the first night. The place itself was quite fine – clean, comfortable, spacious. There were two large spiders about the size of a half dollar, but Nicole tackled them and we survived. This place, however, was a bit off the beaten path from the rest of Nadi (the major city in Fiji). We had gotten the phone number from the taxi driver at the airport, knowing we wouldn’t be able to just walk outside and get a taxi here. I tried, repetitively, to call this driver the next day and my international plan just wasn’t working. It took several days for us to figure out that we needed to add the + sign in front of the country code when dialing. You would think by now I would have these little things figured out. Lessons learned.