When my wife and daughter asked me what I wanted for my 55th birthday, I knew I would have to come up with an appropriate idea for this special, once in a lifetime occasion. They patiently waited for about two minutes for me to answer their question and then said, almost in unison, “You think about it and let us know, or we can just plan a quiet night at home and get you something you need. Now everybody knows a quiet night at home is not the way to celebrate a 55th birthday unless you’ve just been featured on “America’s Most Wanted” and are afraid of being seen in public. Determined to make my 55th birthday celebration an event to be remembered for generations to come, I methodically made a list of exciting weekend cruises and wrote “Rolex” (the watch) five times at the bottom of the list. Then I “accidentally” left the list on the kitchen table.

The next morning my list was gone. I was in my office wondering which cruise they would choose when my daughter popped in and asked me if I had ever been an “ecotourist”. I assumed this was a hint that we would be traveling econo-class on a weekend cruise from Los Angeles to Mexico and back. It wasn’t the cruise I really wanted, but it was a whole lot better than a moonlight ride on a pontoon boat at one of Arizona’s scenic lakes.

Two nights before the weekend that my birthday fell on, my wife and daughter presented me with a giant size card wrapped with birthday paper. I opened it slowly, complementing them on their ability to keep the Acapulco Cruise a secret, and carefully removed the colorful folders and brochures with pictures of a train on them and discovered three first class tickets for an ECOTOURIST EXCURSION departing from Clarksdale, Arizona on the Verde Valley Railroad.

The brochures describe how the train eases away from the Clarksdale depot, cut through mountains of slag tailings, passes the remains of an old copper smelter, near Sinagua Indian ruins tucked into sandstone bluffs, and pushes deeper into basalt cliffs towering crimson pinnacles before entering eagle country along a remote and relatively inaccessible portion of the Verde River. Passengers who take the train during March journey through an area that words and pictures cannot describe.

Over 30 American Bald Eagles make their nests here each winter. Many can be seen circling high above the canyon, their eyesight seven times more keen than a human, then swooping down to catch a fish from the Verde’s shallow waters. Resident raptors, which include great horned owls, red tail, black sharkskin and Cooper hawks, and American kestrels, are also very visible during the winter season, when the trees are barren of foliage.

I was overwhelmed with the wonder of it all as the vintage locomotive slowly pulled the train 18 miles up the canyon to Perkinsville, a water stop on the old rail line that was abandoned in 1950. Perkinsville was the destination for this train, but the journey wasn’t over yet as the locomotives was moved to the back of the train to return us to the depot in Clarksdale.

“What a fantastic way to celebrate my birthday.” I thought to myself. “My wife and daughter have given me a gift that I could never have planned for myself.” The gift was discovering that it’s the journey, not the destination that really counts.

I wonder how many of us spend far too much time worrying about planning our destination in our personal and professional lives without taking enough time to enjoy the journey we have already travel and experiencing the wonder and excitement of the journey that is about to begin.

  Adventures in Education