Another factor contributing to my untimeliness was that after leading my family onward into another adventure into the past —this one, climbing the Chilkoot Pass of Klondike gold rush fame, and kayaking the 2,000 length of the Yukon River past Dawson City to reach the Bering Sea—Bernice decided she wanted a job that offered a retirement plan, a yellow house where she could plant roses, and a husband with a 'normal' career.

I was so crushed by the disintegration of what I had portrayed in my LIFE Magazine article (September 3rd, 1971) of the journey you are about to begin, as "the ultimate family," that I threw the first draft of this manuscript into a file drawer, along with boxes and boxes of 35 mm slides, where it sat untouched for many years.

The words and photos (and my role in all this) came out briefly in 1990 when an adventure diving for gold in the jungle of Dariean Provence, Panama, led to paydirt. I received a phone call asking if I would be willing to present a program on my experiences living with the Choco Indians as a guest lecturer aboard a cruise ship transiting the Panama Canal from New York, to San Diego. No pay was offered, but if I could put together six separate slide programs for the three week cruise, they would cover passage for two—a value of $6,000.

My jungle gold and Alaskan experiences covered two programs. I also had programs from previous trips to the Caribbean, and West Coast of Mexico. The Yukon paddle adventure fit in nicely on a hot day off the Honduras coast. That left the finale to be the story of a journey that had started very near San Diego, oh so very long ago.

It was so traumatic pulling up pictures that had in ways become a personal scrapbook of what no longer was, and talk about these memories before an audience, that the ships doctor introduced me to Tagament!

As so another 10 years passed. But much has happened since then that has changed my thinking about the pain. My daughter Bernadette became hooked on genological research. She called up one day, laughing, to tell me that she finally knew the reason why (explained in the Epilogue) I was driven to take this journey.

I also have a mate now, sometimes called Dianne, or Roberta, or Bobby, who is an adventurer in her own right. In her 20's she took her children on a 2-year odossey of the United States in a converted 1949 delivery van. Being we are a matched pair we have been making plans to take all of our grandchildren backpacking the 2,000 mile legnth of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine.