Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Hello! My name is Ron. All my life, I’ve enjoyed going on voyages and adventures around the world. I grew up in Westport, Connecticut, and went to university in Providence, Rhode Island. And then during my university years, I studied in England and France,  visited Northern Africa, and toured throughout the  Middle East. I was passionate about Frisbee Sports,  and so everywhere I went, I organized festivals,  tournaments, clinics, players associations, family,  play days. I became known as the “Frisbee Diplomat”  because of all the adventures and events that I organized that brought people together. In fact,  during that era, I took frisbee players with me and we went to the Soviet Union when there was one,  to India, to China, and to Japan. I ended up being inducted into the Ultimate Frisbee Hall of Fame as a Johnny Appleseed, and who was he? He was the guy who travelled all over America with a bag of apple seeds, putting them out in the ground so that freshness and sweetness and delicious flavour would grow. Well, my life continued like that for the next 30 years. In 1990, I moved to the tiny island nation of Singapore, on the Malaysian Peninsula.  And I had the privilege of being part of helping to make this nation what it is today, one of the iconic cities for outstanding service throughout the whole planet. Now, I didn’t spend all my time just here. I travelled. Oh boy, did I travel! More than a hundred flights every year to help leaders, teams, and organizations improve their service. My U.S passport looked like that. My Singapore passport looked like that. The number of pages,  the stamps, the flight that that represents, well,  over the years, I became known as the Global  Customer Service Guru. And throughout the entire time, this amazing woman, Jen, my wife, has been handling all the travel. She’s been managing all the details. To tell you the truth,  she’s been managing me. Now, several years back, I discovered this wonderful book called, “Magellan”. Ferdinand Magellan, Conqueror of the Seas by Stefan  Zweig. If you want to read a good book, pick that one up! And I got inspired, so I said to my wife,  “Hey, let’s go experience what Magellan experienced!  Let’s go sail the Magellan Straits. We’ll fly into Argentina, Buenos Aires. We’ll fly down to Ushuaia.  We’ll get on board a ship, and we’ll go through the  Straits of Magellan. We’ll discover what he did, and then, we’ll get off the boat near Santiago, Chile,  a city and a country that we both really love.  But no, we’re not going to rough it as Magellan did. We’ll be on a beautiful french cruiseliner.  We’re going to have a real vacation together! 

And so, in February 2020, off we went. We did!  We discovered glaciers. My wife has always wanted to see penguins, and in this picture, you’ll see one,  two, three penguins! And so while it was just another one of our many global adventures,  something else was travelling at the same time.  That’s right! The global pandemic was breaking out,  and sure enough, it came and it found us in the Southern tip of South America. Now fortunately,  it didn’t come on board our ship. We remained safe throughout the entire voyage. But as we came up the coast, Chile closed the border. So the ship had to turn around and sail back through the Magellan  Straits and up to Argentina. And then Argentina closed the border. We couldn’t get off the ship. So we had to keep going, and then, Uruguay closed the border. And then we went all the way to Rio de Janeiro, but Brazil had closed the border, but they would allow us to get off the boat, as long as we went immediately to the airport and flew out. And, so we did. We got off the ship and this beautiful cruise ship said goodbye after three weeks of a  floating quarantine and stepped into the car to go to the airport and it was a bit of an unsettling moment. My wife looked like this. I think I was more upset, or unsettled. I looked like that! And when we arrived in Singapore, it was mandatory to go into a 14-day hotel quarantine, and so we did. By luck of the draw, we were put into the smallest hotel room of any that had been allocated for that purpose, for all the people flying back into the country.  

And so, for the next 14 days, two weeks, we were inside a room big enough to take six steps. That’s all the room we had. You weren’t allowed to leave the room, and the window didn’t open. Inside that round circle is a tiny speck of orange, and that’s Jen in an orange shirt jumping up and down to say hello because a friend of ours had come out to the parking lot (that was our view),  and taken a picture of us. The window wouldn’t even open. And there we were for 14 days. Now, it wasn’t so bad because I was with the love of my life, and we had people who sent us care packages.  And, of course, being the incredible person that she is, we figured out a way to have two desks to go to work, including her laptop on top of one of our suitcases. Now, during that period of time, we realized that we were going through an actual transformation. Our whole way of living was melting down. It felt like being in a cocoon. And so, I researched, I went online to actually discover what happens to a caterpillar when it’s inside the cocoon. And here’s what I learned. When the caterpillar spins a cocoon around itself, it then releases an enzyme that melts the caterpillar down into a  protein-rich soup, and only certain tiny elements which scientists call “imaginal discs” continue to survive. And the little elements that become an antenna, that become an eye, that become a wing, that become the beginning of an entirely new future…a butterfly! And that’s what happened to us. And after the two weeks, we came out of quarantine, and we’d been transformed. And, ever since then we’ve been taking on a new way of being in the world with the same commitment, same desire, same passion,  to serve. But now, well, I’ve got the love of my life, and for the rest of my life, we’re going to be uplifting the world, and uplifting each other,  teaching people to serve better, to care more, to love life. And on that grand adventure together, well, we look forward to sharing the adventure with you! Welcome home.