Back in early September 2010, just a couple of weeks before leaving her home to join me in Mexico, for our two-years journey across Central America and Europe, Alia wrote me: "[Alia running away with me] will tear my mother's heart apart as she attempts to fill the whole left by her grown child", but Alia did not yet know how bad it was going to get for her. Indeed, Robyn had been able to create an incredibly strong bond between mother and child, and she had also been able to keep Alia bound to her childhood. Alia was in love with me, but she absolutely loved her mother: as those emails of mid-September 2010 show, it really tore Alia's heart apart to break free, but she still did it, because she knew she had to do it. Because she wanted to have her own life, she was eager to start a life on her own and start fighting for herself. Fact of the matter is we both knew it was the time of our lives: it was now or never. We both knew we were to each other the person we have been waiting for all our lives. We knew we would find obstacles, struggles and difficulties. We both knew we would have bad times, but we were both ready to work together and overcome our differences
For the next two years we traveled across the Norwegian Fjords, the Swiss Alps, the Greek Islands, the Caribbean, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Costa Rica, Romania, Sicily, Halkidiki, the Massif Central, Lake Atitlan, Tuscany, the Peloponnes... We went to Vienna, Venice, Istanbul, Cancun, Salzburg, Prague, Antigua, Matera, Guanajuato, Budapest, Amsterdam, Florence, Dibrovnik, Seville... We saw the Eiffel Tower, Yedi Goeller, Chichen Itza, Tikal, Palenque, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Sistine Chapel, the Berlin Wall, the Parthenon, the Louvre, the Rome Colisseum, the Alhambra Palace, Cappadocia, Pompey, Notre Dame, the Uffizi Museum, the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba, etc. etc. etc.
We certainly had difficult times. Travels are stressful and Robyn's terrible parenting had not been in vain and so Alia's wild spirit of adolescence was still very much alive; but we were both ready to work and determined to succeed in our marriage, and we made it, we succeded!
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