Vacations that can transform lives
[Music]
each of us is here on the planet for a
very limited amount of time
and i know that sounds like a big bummer
but it’s actually not it’s actually kind
of cool
because it unites us all in a shared
experience
we know that our lives are limited and
precious and so we understand that other
people’s lives
are limited and precious as well and
it’s within that limited time frame
that we get to write our story the story
of our lives
so it’s worth stopping from time to time
to consider
exactly what story it is that we’re
writing
in the end what will the theme have been
and importantly what will be the really
really cool
scenes now this is something i’ve been
thinking a lot about lately because
recently
the story of my life took a dramatic
plot turn
in the past when people have asked me
what i do for a living i like to say
that i’m an author of books and a travel
writer
and i like to say that i own a vacation
rental business and a travel company and
that’s all true
but it’s a little misleading because my
real job my grown-up job for the last 22
years has been in finance
which means i’ve sat in front of a
computer 10 hours a day every day
staring at numbers
so you can see why i prefer to talk
about writing books
and about traveling but also because
those are my passions
i love stories especially true stories
and i love
traveling i love vacations in fact i
think that vacations
are some of the most awesome things that
people do
so it might surprise you to learn that
the most amazing vacations in my life
vacations that have literally changed my
life
are vacations that i didn’t even go on
and that’s because
several years ago i started an
organization called the vacation angel
network now the network is a group of
vacation rental homeowners and we open
up our homes to families who are going
through some kind of a hardship
like an injury or an illness we started
with families who had children being
treated for pediatric cancer and these
treatments can last 12 months sometimes
18 months most of that time spent in the
hospital and
aside from being emotionally devastating
they’re often
financially devastating as well so our
idea was
after these kids were done with
treatment and got to finally leave the
hospital
we would just give them a chance to go
on a free vacation
take a break be together as a family and
just enjoy life it was our hope that in
the story of their lives
this would be a chance for them to turn
the page and start a new chapter
and this whole idea really happened by
chance i i
encountered a family that was in the
situation and i said i don’t know if
we’ll help
but if you guys want you’re welcome to
go stay in one of our houses
and they said sure and they did
and it wasn’t a grand gesture on my part
it wasn’t a huge sacrifice
i think it’s possible the house might
have sat empty anyways
but it was quickly apparent that for
this family
it was a big moment in the story of
their lives
and what i didn’t know at the time was
that this event was also going
to be a big uh a big moment in the story
of my life
too because it was really feel good
and i quickly realized it was something
that i wanted to do more of
and so i did i went out and i recruited
some more vacation rental homeowners
and we started doing more vacations and
we started to donate
our houses to auctions for charities and
foundations
that were kind of in keeping with our
mission and suddenly
and quickly uh we had this sort of
thing that felt like it was making the
world a little bit better
place and it was cool so
that happened now um you guys have all
heard
the saying that no good deed goes
unpunished so a few years after that
um we were hosting a foster family with
a foster mom and she had five foster
kids at one of our houses
and this was over in lake chalan in the
cascade mountains of washington state’s
one of my favorite places
on the planet and my parents have a
place there so i happen to be there
along with all my brothers and sisters
and
all of my nieces and nephews i come from
a big crazy irish catholic family
super fun and uh it’s in the afternoon
and somebody raises the cocktail
flag and i get my first delicious icy
cold beer
about to crack it open and suddenly the
phone rings and it’s the foster mom
and she says john i’m so sorry to bother
you but
none of the toilets in the house are
working which
if you uh live the glamorous life of a
vacation rental homeowner this is not an
uncommon
call to get so i’m like fine i hand out
i hand my beer reluctantly back to my
brother i jump in the car
i go a few blocks up to the house and i
already know what the problem’s gonna be
i know it’s going to be the septic pump
in the cistern out in the yard
and i also know it’s not going to be fun
so
i get there and i put on my gloves
like a cowboy getting ready
to ride a bronco because this is not my
first septic system rodeo
and i open up the cistern and it’s
flooded now it’s
it’s clear water but it it’s sewer water
and it stinks so
i take a deep breath and i reach down in
and i
waters all the way up to the edge of my
gloves and i knock loose the float pump
and i come back up
deep wrap and all the water blows out
and i’m like okay great problem solved
now the swimming pool
is right in the yard there and the mom
and the kids are there so i yell down or
i say hey you should be all set now
uh everything should be fine and she
goes oh great thanks but john
come down and meet the kids now i just
want to go take a shower
but i say of course yeah so so i walked
down
and there’s a little 10 year old girl
and she’s in the um
shallow end and uh the mom says to her
uh mary tell john what you did
and i look over her and she is smiling
she is just
beaming and she you can tell she is so
proud of herself
and she says i learned how to swim
and i say oh that’s great and i look
back at the mom and the mom says um she
says
she’s never been in a swimming pool
before she’s
never actually been in a swimsuit before
and uh
i get a big lump in my throat i’m
getting one right now and my eyes are
watered up but
i can’t do anything about it because i
got the sewer water gloves on
and i went back to the mom and she says
thank you and tears just started
streaming down my face
and uh you never know
where you’re gonna be at a pivotal
moment in your life you never know what
you’re going to be doing
you never know what you’re going to be
wearing but this was a pivotal moment in
my life because it was the moment when i
realized that
this is what i wanted this should be a
big part of my life
this is really what i want to do and so
i did i wrapped it up
i started recruiting more vacation
rental homeowners
and we started doing more vacations and
importantly we started teaming up with
foundations
that would nominate families for us to
take on vacation and causes for us to
support
and because these stories really
resonated
with people especially stories of
illness
these were stories about families uh
showing great courage
they were stories of sadness and they
were stories of families
in the fight of their life against an
enemy that they didn’t even provoke
and that really resonated with people so
we started getting on the news and we
started getting on local television
programs
and if we posted on social media these
stories would really go
and that brought more people would start
to call me and say how can i help and
how can i get involved
and suddenly in an organic way this
thing really started to grow
there was a moment when i found myself
on the phone
with um there’s a really great
television program called treehouse
masters
and very popular it’s got millions of
viewers and i found myself on the phone
talking to the host
pete nelson and he said john i love what
you’re doing we have to get some of
these kids out to my treehouse resort
and i said sure so suddenly we
find ourselves out there we have a
family with a young cancer survivor
and pete nelson is this great gregarious
guy and he’s there and he
is dancing with them and they’re
laughing and they’re having the best
time
and i’m standing there in this beautiful
forest surrounded by treehouses watching
this
and i just thought this is extraordinary
and maybe that’s not cool
for a lot of people but for me a finance
nerd who has spent probably way too much
of his life in front of a computer
uh i thought it really was cool i
thought it was extraordinary
and so because of that suddenly we had
more people coming in and
we created a virtuous cycle and i
realized
we really have something here i would
like to see what this because what could
become
so after 22 years i quit my job in
finance and decided to pursue the
vacation angel network full-time
and see what would become of it now i
think that was a great decision
but if i’m being honest uh at first i
wasn’t so
sure because when we started doing this
we would have families that were done
with treatment and they were leaving the
hospital
and hopefully they were leaving the
hospital forever
and when they came out we would have
they would have a good time and then
they would continue on with their lives
and that would be the end of it but
now that we were teamed up with
foundations and we were doing more
vacations
i guess it was inevitable that we would
start to encounter families
that were going through an illness from
which
they were not going to recover
and we would encounter parents who were
going to lose a child
we would meet moms that were ill and
maybe they weren’t going to get better
and it hurts your heart a lot because
these moms in particular they weren’t
concerned about
being sick or even about dying all they
were concerned about was that their
young children
were going to grow up without a mom
and i had some
a hard time with these stories obviously
and
i’m not proud of this but there was a
time when i thought to myself
uh maybe i’ve made a huge mistake
but but that was the moment in time and
fortunately
um i’m not in that space anymore i’m in
a space now where i get
excited every day to get up and do what
i do
and it wasn’t one particular thing that
got me through it was really three
things
the first thing was getting a chance to
see these families
come together and really just have fun
and celebrate life uh sort of reignited
my passion
for vacations and for stories i think
all of you guys will agree that
vacations don’t always go well
some sometimes they go spectacularly
wrong even
comically wrong but your worst vacations
can end up being your best memories and
it’s because of the stories
they become the stories of your family
and when an unexpected illness or injury
befalls the family
they don’t always have the opportunity
to write those stories
and the story of every family is
important so for me
i get excited about the opportunity to
just in a small way
help these families to write their story
the second thing is i have been
overwhelmed
by the amount of generosity and the
outpouring from people
to help support our mission we live in a
time
now where you can sometimes start to
feel like the world is a cynical place
but after founding this organization and
seeing how many people have called up
and offered to support
um to offer their homes off their time
offer their talent and i want to
emphasize these aren’t
rich people offering their homes for a
weekend in the hamptons
while they head off to europe for two
days most of the members of our network
are small business owners in a very
competitive industry
some of them are struggling to make a go
of it and still they call
and say john what can we do how can we
help so
there have been times when we have had
more homes and vacations to offer
than we have had families to give them
to and i would have never expected
that so um i hope that makes you guys
feel like we don’t live in a cynical
world that we live in a wonderful world
i know it does for me
so the third thing is and maybe the most
poignant thing
happened when i was talking to a woman
who’s become a friend of mine
and she is the founder of an
organization called the ladybug house
and their mission is to uh to create
better palliative care
for children who have terminal illnesses
they’re hoping to create a better
experience for kids as they come to the
final months
weeks and days of their lives and i was
talking to her one day
and she told me her motto and it really
struck me and their motto is this
she said we can’t always add days to
their lives
but we can add life to their days
each of us has a terminal diagnosis
we’re all dying
we’re just doing it on a limited on a
different time frame
and it’s within that limited time frame
that we get to write our stories
for me it has been an honor and a
privilege to be a small part of helping
families to write their stories no
matter how long or
short those stories may be
it’s been humbling for me to witness
families show
grace and courage in the face of
overwhelming adversity
earlier when i said i think vacations
are some of the most awesome things that
people do
i think maybe you’ll see now i was being
a little intentionally misleading
the awesome things that i have witnessed
are not people going on vacation the
awesome things that i have witnessed
are people i don’t even know offering
their homes to people they don’t even
know
on our network and not just offering
their homes some of these people have
gone out of their way to make these
vacations
truly exceptional the founding of the
vacation angel network has become
one of the great joys of my life i’ve
learned
that the value of things that you give
often far surpass
the sacrifice that you make in giving
them in the end
it’s really no sacrifice at all because
if you can find a way to leverage your
time
and your talents and your assets to help
somebody improve the story of their life
you’re going to find that it
dramatically improves the story of your
life
as well and if you can find a way to
help somebody add life
to their days no matter how many days
they may have left
i think you will find as i have that you
will add an incredible amount of life
to your days as well and that is
something that i would wish
for all of you so thank you for letting
me share
my story
[Music]
you