The Scene: 5am, breakfast table at Anglers Inn Lake El Salto, hot coffee, eggs made to order. A seated woman looks up to a man bringing over his heaping plate of food.

“Brother Pete,” she says. “Do you have any more?”

There are plenty of places we vacation and it’s one-and-done. More and more, though, our travels have not just become about the places we go but the relationships we make. We’ve built a family around the globe.

We met our good friend Ray Kawabata in the Amazon in 2011, and since then we’ve been on multiple fishing trips with him to Mexico, as well as back to Brazil in 2019. Somehow, through much of that friendship, he neglected to tell us the most important things about him.