ABOUT MEN

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

Some people think a guy should live with a potential partner before he decides to get married. I suggest you travel together instead.

Nothing tests the strength of a relationship like a couple of weeks on the road. You either get stronger or you get separated.

You really get to know someone when you are in a tent with a hungry brown bear rumbling through a garbage can 6 feet away. Or when you drive 18 hours from Chicago to New Orleans to spend 18 hours at Carnival and then drive 18 hours more to get back to be in time for your college class.

My wife and I have been traveling together like that for more than 25 years. Our honeymoon was a two-month road trip across the country in winter. By the time we went from Chicago to San Diego, via Arkansas, we knew each other well enough to move in together.

Since then, we've climbed volcanoes in Japan, toured the great museums of Europe, bicycled the Pacific Northwest, and island-hopped across Micronesia, all on a youth hosteler's budget.

Still, when we break out the memories, it's never the perfect trips that come to mind. When we start telling tales with old friends, it's always the horror stories that we bring up first — the ones that solidified the relationship:

Remember the time we took a walking tour of Hell's Kitchen with a friend who wanted to see how many drug deals we could count in one hour? What about the day we almost got arrested in Munich because I didn't know how to parallel park? Or that night on the town in Bangkok with a couple of drugged-out friends from Guam? Then, there were the three days we were stranded in the run-down Crete port city of Heraklion. Ever since, when things start to go bad, my wife just says: "It's Heraklion all over again."

We've slept in plenty of down-and-out places, too: British youth hostels overrun with Irish soccer hooligans, marijuana-scented hotels in Amsterdam, the Pagoda hotel on Rycroft Street. Don't even mention that Christmas Eve in the Chung King Mansions in Hong Kong.

Then there was the night we spent at a truck stop in Prague. This would have never happened if I hadn't insisted on following the Grateful Dead on tour in Europe with a not-so-minivan we rented in the Netherlands.

"Why can't we get a Eurail Pass like everyone else?" my wife asked.

Anyway, there we were late one gray October night driving the outskirts of Prague and hunting, without a map or directions, for the country's only real campground.

I knew we were in deep trouble when the road signs started to say "Moscow: 600 km." That was one road I didn't want to head down.

Instead we pulled into the truck stop and waited, either for the Czech secret police to arrest us or Ukrainian bandits to rob us.

All night long, the Moscow truckers came and went. The truck fumes were worse than anything you've ever seen in L.A. It seemed like the night would never end, but of course, it did. No one with a gun ever knocked on the door. We survived. And I knew right then and there that the marriage would last forever.

We're even thinking of going backpacking in Europe again next year. This time, though, we're getting a Eurail Pass.