Finding Love & Rediscovering Oneself After 50: Inspired by Niamh McAnally's Voyage Around the World

Don't wait, head to Wayfair to become and get your home holiday ready today.

SPEAKER_03: Have you ever had a day where it felt like your entire life was falling apart?

If so, well then you can relate to Nef McInley.

Because in the span of one day, she became jobless, homeless.

And the only form of transportation she had were the shoes on her feet.

At this point in her life, she was divorced in her mid-50s.

And to be honest, she didn't know what she would do.

But thankfully, Nev has a spirit like nobody have ever met.

And she realized that there was something more.

And so she would embark on an adventure, traveling the world for a year, working just for food and lodging.

Now, where her story really gets exciting was the last trip, the last go-around, before settling down, getting back to that quote normal life.

She was gonna help a solo sailor crew his sailboat from Florida to the Bahamas.

Now, what happens next, that is only a story that Nia can share herself.

All I can do is to urge you to not go anywhere.

And matter of fact, I want you to be sure that you listen all the way through today's episode.

Even if you have to take a break, you come back a few times.

Be sure you finish it.

Because there's a story at the very end of our conversation that ties it all together.

It's a part of her story that you never knew you are missing.

But once you hear it, you realize you can't live without it.

My friend, this is a story that I hope is gonna set your soul on fire.

It's gonna have you wanting more out of life.

Because that, after all, is the whole point of sharing it with you.

With that said, I welcome you to what is episode 346 of Grit Grace and Inspiration.

SPEAKER_02: Yo, are you ready to flip the script on life?

Because those bad days, they're just doors to better days.

And that's exactly what we do here at Grit Grace and Inspiration.

Your host, Kevin Lowe, is just flipping the script on his online.

And in over 20 minutes of being completely blind, it's a great inspiration, motivation, and encouragement just for you.

Stop, click back, relax, and let me introduce you to your host, Kevin Lowe.

SPEAKER_03: I am in the studio today with a woman who I have been looking forward to meeting again.

Because the first time I talked to her, she stole my heart.

I love her.

And I'm excited to get to introduce her to you right now.

Ninia, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Kevin.

Lovely to be here with you.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, well, I am excited to dive into your story all the way back from Ireland, all the way to Florida.

We're going around the world today.

And I guess I figure, you know, we might as well start back at the beginning.

And specifically, I would love for you to kind of dive into a story sharing with me a bit about life growing up in Ireland and specifically growing up in a family that were all actors.

SPEAKER_01: Right.

So both my parents were actors.

So I kind of grew up in that theatrical background.

And it's kind of hardly surprising that I ended up in the business myself originally in theater and eventually became a television director.

The best part about it that has been useful for me in my life has been the fact that they were both freelance actors.

So they would get cast in a show for three or four weeks at a time, and they would never know necessarily where the next job was coming from.

Now, they were both very good.

They knew they had the talent and they knew they had, you know, the demand, but they would never know for sure.

So as a result of that, like variety was very much part of our norm growing up, and you didn't know what was going to happen in two months' time or three months' time.

People would ask them, you know, for commitments for six months out, and they'd be like, well, we don't know because we don't know if we're going to be working then or not.

And that really helped shape my outlook on life in terms of reinventing myself all the time.

I've had like five careers across five different industries, but it it just seems normal.

You just start again.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that is fascinating.

Now, you had siblings as well who were into acting, also, correct?

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, both my brothers were in the business as well.

They were in front of the TV cameras and also behind them, and then into radio production and music television production.

So, yes, there was it was quite a family event.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's fascinating.

Now, growing up, did you pretty much just know, like after school and stuff, that you would want to get into that line of work?

SPEAKER_01: I wasn't sure, to be perfectly honest, because A, I didn't, my parents were both so talented, I wasn't sure if I would have enough talent and I didn't want to disgrace them.

So, Ireland at the time, it was very much a homogeneous society, and it wasn't a foregone conclusion that everybody would go to college.

And to me at the time, it seemed like it was mostly, you know, people who wanted to be teachers and professors.

And also, I had read an essay for our leaving certificate, the equivalent of like high school graduation, by by Cardinal John Henry Newman, which was the idea of a university.

And in it he said something that has resonated with me my entire life was it's a school of knowledge of every kind, consisting of teachers and learners from every quarter.

And so I thought to myself, well, I'm not going to see that diversity in Ireland.

Now, certainly it's a much more diverse country now, but at the time I also was I would loved English and I loved French.

So I took off as a teenager to Paris, France, and went to study French language and literature at an international class in the Sorbonne University.

And that opened my eyes to the world, if you like, because everybody was from a different country, and also I was living in the family with a French family minding one of the children.

So I thought, hmm, there's so much to do and see in the world, and I wanted to go.

But I came back to Ireland at the end of, I think it was 18 months, not quite 18 months.

And it was time to, well, maybe I should try and uh support myself now and get a job.

And it was coming up to the Dublin Theatre Fest.

I remember it was uh autumn time.

And uh I got a job working as the assistant stage manager on one of the shows that was uh a couple of weeks in rehearsal and then two weeks playing in the Olympia theater, I remember.

And then that was like, hmm, I really like this, you know.

It was it really kind of helped me with my artistic talents and creativity, so I kept going.

And I was working in theater for a number of years, and then ended up with the Abbey Theatre, which is the National Theatre of Ireland, and I trained as a trainee director, had another bit of experience over in London with one of Sir Peter Hall, who was a director who took on trainee directors, and then finally I moved into the area of television and became a TV director.

SPEAKER_03: Wow.

Wow.

So you were the woman behind the scenes, making everything work.

SPEAKER_01: Right, exactly.

From the beginning, I was kind of like I was testing the waters in front of the scenes, if you like.

But then after that, it was like, no, behind the scenes was where I really felt that that was my spot.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.

I love it.

Well, you mentioned about reinvention, reinventing yourself.

And I'm going to assume from the little bit I know that those reinventions are probably going to guide our conversation a lot today.

And just as kind of like a sneak preview, would you mind sharing as an overview what those reinventions were that you've you've done?

SPEAKER_01: Sure.

So earlier in 87, I had been introduced to scuba diving.

And I met somebody that was also on the instructor program when I became a scuba instructor.

And we we were together and it was like, oh, let's go travel the world and teach scuba diving.

We can go to all these wonderful places.

And at that stage, I was a television director, and I thought, oh yeah, that'd be sounds great.

We just take off and travel.

And so that's when I got into the professional end of scuba diving instruction.

And that's what brought me originally to Belize, where I was working on a volunteer project, and then ultimately from there to Key Largo, Florida, and stayed there a number of years.

Now the relationship didn't work out, so I kind of figured, like, well, well, what's next, you know?

And down in Keil Largo at the time, the biggest kind of employer I could see at the time outside of Scuba was one of the hotels.

It was a Sheraton hotel at the time.

And you know, a little bit brazen, I went down there thinking, well, I'm Irish and we're supposed to be renowned for hospitality.

So how hard could it be to work at a hotel?

It's like, it's like I had this idea like somebody comes in and you say, Oh, good evening, here's your key, off you go, you know.

I mean, with absolutely no respect for all the people who have like gone to college and gone to hospitality degrees and everything else like that, you know.

But anyway, I started working in the hotel.

They very graciously gave me a job with zero experience.

And pretty soon, though, they realized that I had, you know, managerial kind of style of uh working.

So they offered me a job as the uh, I think it was the front office, a front desk, front desk supervisor originally.

And anyway, from there I might I did more and more, and I kind of backdoored my way into it.

I then started doing my certificates and my diplomas and all that good stuff.

And I ultimately became a manager of a hotel and living over on the island of Sark in the United Kingdom, Channel Islands, just off the coast of France.

And I lived on this amazing island, which was three and a half miles long, a mile and a half wide, accessible only by ferry.

There's no cars on the island, no paved roads, and no airport.

So it was incredible.

And it rises 300 feet up out of the ocean, if you like.

Wow.

Yeah, it's it's quite a stunning, stunning location.

In fact, Enya, the singer Enya actually has an album out called Dark Sky Island, and it's about that island, Sark, because they became the first island in the world to get dark sky status, you know, where there's no light pollution and you can see these amazing stars.

So that's uh that's how that came about.

So that that brought me into hospitality.

At the end of 2014, I had been on Sark for five years at that point, and the owners decided they weren't going to open the hotels in the year of 2015.

So I thought, hmm, what's next?

So I was so involved and addicted to volunteer travel.

Every time I went on vacation, I would volunteer to try and, you know, live in the community.

And I thought, I know what I'm going to do.

I'm going to take a year out and I'm going to travel the world as a volunteer in one direction.

So start out in London and head west and keep going the whole way around the world and take 12 months to do it.

That was my plan.

And it worked out really well.

I had I did some amazing projects like in St.

Bart's, in down in New Zealand.

I was in all many of the islands in South Pacific, like Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga, uh, French Polynesia, back up through Palau, across Asia, and then eventually back to London, right?

Job done.

And then right, and then I saw one more project on this website that I used to go to to uh find these uh volunteer projects, and it was to help a solo sailor crew his boat from Florida to the Bahamas, and it was only going to take a month.

So I thought, perfect, I'm gonna apply for that, and in the meantime, I'll send out my resumes, and then I'll be back in time by the time I get interviews, etc.

Well, I get on the boat, and let me just say it was supposed to last a month, and I lived on that boat for six years.

And then and then it turned out one of the things is the captain, Captain Gary, was not looking for a relationship.

Neither was I, by the way.

But when you live 24-7 in a 40-foot space on the high seas, and you have to rely on your fellow mariner for your safety, and there's no Wi-Fi, no internet, no cell service per se, guess what you do after the day is done?

You sit and you talk.

And we got to know each other so profoundly, you know, through chit-chat, but then some really deep conversations.

Because Gary had a degree, a master's degree in spiritual psychology.

And I had spent a year after Fiji, after my first trip to Fiji, with the Tony Robbins program, which really taught me an awful lot about why we do things and you know, and and how you motivate yourself.

And so the two of us came at similar conversations with similar approaches, but they were still different enough for us to, you know, have meaningful conversations.

So after that, it was like, hmm.

And then uh about I think we were four years on the boat, and we were down in the Caribbean on a little island or anchored off a little island called Beckway, and it was Thanksgiving, and the sun was setting, and he proposed on the deck.

Amazing! Yeah, yeah, that was quite extraordinary.

And then we were planning that was 2019, and then we were planning on getting married in 2020, and we're going to have a big uh wedding over in Ireland.

His family's gonna come over and my family would be there, but of course, then COVID hit, so it took another year and a half, and we eventually we ended up doing a legal ceremony down in Antigua where we were, and then about 18 months later, we were able to have a wedding, and but it was still quarantine time, so we flew to Ireland and we had a wedding reception for my family, and then flew back to America and had one a week later.

Same outfits, everything, just hiked them up, put them on the plane, and off we went.

And we did another wedding ceremony in America for his family.

SPEAKER_03: Wow.

Wow, I love it.

Well, that is quite the overview of this journey.

SPEAKER_01: Just the overview.

Sorry about that.

SPEAKER_03: Oh my goodness.

No, that is that is insane.

So I'm so I'm so excited.

Let's go back a little bit.

And I'm curious about when you finally you you went off and and you became doing uh scuba diving, and then that kind of just opened the door to all these new adventures.

What did your family think of you leaving um this industry that they all were in?

Did they think you were crazy or were they in full support?

SPEAKER_01: I think everybody I know thinks I'm crazy most of the time.

I'll tell you when the when the crazy comments came for sure.

It was when when I uh when I said I was going to go to sea with a man I'd never met before.

That was like definitely on the top of the crazy list for them.

They said to me, like, you know, how do you know he's not an axe murderer?

And and what I didn't know at the time, what we've since laughed about, is that his friends were saying to him, You're taking on somebody you never met.

How do you know this woman isn't a modern-day pirate and going to take your boat away from you when we're 12 miles offshore?

And do you know?

I'll tell you what, Kevin, the thing that all of those comments really resonated with me and something a decision I've made in my life.

People out of the best interest, maybe they think they have your best interest at heart and say, Oh, be careful of that, or you shouldn't do this, or you know, that might you might get hurt there or that kind of thing.

If you allow somebody else's fears infect you, you'll get stuck.

You won't go, you'll get stunted, you won't be going and doing the things that your your heart sings that it wants you to do.

Do you know what I mean?

So I've I I took a while to learn that in life because you know, early on we kind of do things we should do, we we ought to do for maybe for approval, maybe for people say this is the best idea for you, you know.

And until such time as you step into your own persona and listen to your intuition, listen to who you really are and uncover all of that, you can allow that to stop you.

And that's one of the beautiful things that I've learned from traveling is that now I just listen to my own gut and it really hasn't steered me wrong.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.

Well, I I want to ask questions, and we're gonna dive into this just crazy thing of going sailing with a stranger, and then it's turned into just this a beautiful love story on the sea.

But I feel as though it's important for us to back up a little bit in your story because you were involved in another relationship you were actually married before.

Right.

Will you talk to me a little bit about that chapter in your story?

SPEAKER_01: Sure.

I was married, and one of the things, the reason I ended up getting married was because I was in my 30s and I had that baby clock ticking away in my brain.

You know, I wanted to be a mother, I wanted to have children, I wanted to have a family, and I hadn't quite met the right person for me.

And then I got into this relationship, and you know, it was all very fine, but I kind of had a feeling it wasn't the right relationship for me, and yet I the wedding invitations had been sent out, and I went ahead with it.

But here's the interesting thing: I grew up in a country, and at the time there was no divorce in Ireland.

In fact, it didn't come in on a limited version of it, it came in in 1994.

So I grew up where you know you got married and that was it.

You and there was always an expression, you was like, Oh, you've made your bed now, you lie on it.

And that was drilled into me subconsciously, consciously, and all through this relationship, I couldn't give myself permission to leave, even though I was married in America, I was living in America at the time.

It would have been easy enough to go get a divorce if you needed to.

So it took an awful lot for me to say, this is not right for me.

I was sublimating who I was as a human being in order to make it work.

We were just not the right two people being together.

And I went to various different counseling sessions, and one woman, a lady called Dana Vince, I know she won't mind me sharing her name of Healing Hearts Counseling, she was in Florida at the time, she's actually up in Tennessee now, and she's a wonderful counselor.

But she listened to me for about two or three sessions, and uh one day she said, Neve, I'm not telling you which is the right direction for you to go in here.

But if this is your decision, and if you do decide this is not the right marriage for you, why wait one more day to be happy?

And somehow that just one question really penetrated all my sort of self-imposed jail, if you like.

And I really heard her and I thought, yes, I know this isn't right.

In fact, I knew like very early on in the marriage it wasn't the right marriage for me, and but I stayed with that kind of cultural traditions, you know, and and internal chatter going on.

And once I got to that place, I went, yes, it's good, it's okay.

And you know, why wait one more day to be happy?

This is not good for you, and ultimately it's not going to be good for the other person if you're not being the best version of yourself.

So, and that's the that's made the decision for me that I I had to uh leave that marriage.

SPEAKER_03: How long were you in that relationship?

SPEAKER_01: I was married for what, eight and a half years.

SPEAKER_03: Wow.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm a slow learner.

SPEAKER_03: You know what?

I think the the truth is is that when we're stuck in a situation like that and you don't know what else to do, you just do it.

You're just there.

And and before you know it, it's not until you get so far down the road that you look back and you think, my gosh, what am I doing?

I just wasted all this time.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

And do you know people have asked me that, like, you know, if you go back in your life, what would you do differently?

But you know what?

That experience for me is part of my DNA now, it's part of who I have become, the lessons I learned during that experience.

So I wouldn't change it for the world.

Do you know what I mean?

It's like that was presented to me in such a way that it's part of who I am.

And it also knowing what I knew then, once that moment came when I was there so long, if you like this, I started out in my 30s in it.

And when I was in that relationship so long, by the end of it, at that stage, it was too late for babies anyway.

And when I got to that place and I realized I'm not going to be a mother and I don't have a partner either, and I'm certainly not going to.

To start trying to do this by myself.

Once I got to that, I was, you know, I was upset naturally enough.

It was something I wanted in my life, but now I didn't have the opportunity.

I said, I can either stay here boo-hooing about this for a while, or I can try and look at it from a different aspect.

And what I did was I said, okay, if I can't have children, what is it I can do that mothers and family, you know, parents that have children and they're raising them and all those responsibilities, what is it I can do that they cannot do?

And that's when the answer of long-term travel came to me.

Because I'd always wanted to travel.

So I I mean, I could take off.

I was independent.

I was just me.

You know, I didn't have the responsibility of raising family at that point.

So I thought that's what I had to do.

And from then on, every time I came across a situation that on the surface didn't look good, I would say, okay, well, what's the gift in this?

And if I couldn't find a gift, I would say, okay, well, what's the lesson?

SPEAKER_03: That is amazing.

SPEAKER_01: Things go wrong in our lives, and we're all tested in various different ways.

And some can be minor, some can be major.

And the only way I I have found to get through those times is to try and flip it on its head and look for something, look for some kind of good in it.

What is the gift?

There's a gift here for me somewhere.

And I mean, it could be as simple as missing your airplane, you know.

Are you going to meet somebody else sitting in the waiting room or in the lounge area that you wouldn't have met otherwise?

You know, those kind of things.

And if I can't find a gift, I've got to find a lesson.

You know, there's got to be some reason this is happening for me and not to me.

SPEAKER_03: I hope anyone and everyone listening to this just took note of that.

Because I mean, that right there is, I think, reason enough for a lot of people who click play on this episode is they need to hear what you just said.

That's powerful.

SPEAKER_01: Great.

Well, that's good.

I mean, and that's the other reason I wrote a memoir was to try and use my story, not to write a book about oh, me, me, me, but to use my story and if any of the stuff that I've been through on that journey resonates and is helpful for somebody else.

And I mean, that's why I went quite deep and quite personal and you know, quite vulnerable, if you like, was to try and share that story if it was helpful for somebody else.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.

So if I understand correctly, it would be then that you embark on the year of traveling.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was a little time later.

I kind of rattled around for about two years in America trying to find out where my niche was.

And I just couldn't settle, you know what I mean?

I I tried living in various places.

I had been in California, I'd been back in Florida, I'd been in Texas, I was running around the country trying to find my feet, if you like.

And I ended up down in Fiji on a volunteer program.

I was down there for about four months, maybe.

And I got called back to Los Angeles to help somebody and help them drive.

They'd been in an accident and was trying to help drive them to and from work.

And I was on the road in LA where driving is uh a challenge, and you know, the traffic was crazy.

And I I one day I was in the car and I said, Oh, get me on an island without cars.

And I I I went back home, and you know what I did?

The the absolutely normal only thing you could think of doing was I I Googled islands without cars.

And believe it or not, oh, Google said, I'll help you out there.

Here's three islands that don't have cars or don't have any roads per se.

And there were three of them.

There was one in Greece called Hydra or Hydra is probably called, and there was two in the English Channel Islands, and that's how I ended up finding Sark.

So that's when I thought, okay, time to pack up in America and head back across the Atlantic.

And I my mother was still alive at the time, and I wanted to be a little bit closer.

So I moved to Sark.

Now, the irony of that is that on Sark, you have to get a ferry to Guernsey.

From Guernsey, you have to fly to Southampton or London.

Then you got another plane to get to Dublin.

I, when I was in Florida, could have jumped on a plane in Orlando and been in Dublin in eight hours much faster, you know?

But uh, but that's why I was living there.

I was living there for about five years, and it was then I ended up doing this world travel after those hotels closed.

SPEAKER_03: Okay.

Wow.

I love how all these pieces, so I mean, it's rough.

It's rough when you look at it from the big picture, but when you look at it kind of from today, it all kind of keeps piecing itself together.

One step leading to another, you know?

SPEAKER_01: Exactly, exactly.

And and and all like all those different professions that I did, they all end all along.

I have been a writer, but I haven't started being a professional writer until 2016, until I got on that sailboat with Gary.

Because I showed him one of my short stories from back in the day, and he looked at me and says, Oh, Neaf, you've got to do this full time.

So I went, Yeah, really.

And on the boat, yes, I had a little bit of time, but most of the time it was like galley slave, deck duties, you know, hoist this, hang on to that, get under the boat, start scraping the barnacles off.

So it was a it's a busy, busy time.

But anyway, I started writing full time then on the boat, and I started writing my memoir following sunshine.

And the interesting thing, all these careers, all this experience, and everybody has it in the same way, all your life experience, all sum up into who you are today.

And and also having worked in five different industries, I've got a lot of things to draw for.

So if I start writing novels now instead of true stories, you know, I'll have a ton of stuff.

I have a in fact, a friend of mine gave me a mug that says, be careful or you'll end up in my book.

SPEAKER_03: That is great.

Wow.

Well, I'm curious to know before we continue.

I want to hear the full story about how you came to meet Gary on this boat.

Tell me the story of how this whole thing came about.

SPEAKER_01: Well, it was at the end of the year volunteer traveling.

He was looking for a volunteer because he was a solo saver.

He had come out of a long-term marriage and a long-term land-based career.

He was an entrepreneur.

And he actually, believe it or not, in terms of counseling, he had gone to talk to a counselor as well.

And at the time, apparently they said to him, Oh, you know, 80 is not the end of the world, and it's not necessarily the end of your life.

But, you know, you'd be at whatever age he was at that time was in his 60s.

He said, Um, you know, how would you want to spend the next 10 to 20 years of your life?

And he said, I there's things I want to go and do, et cetera.

So he bought a boat, learned how to sail, although in fairness, he learned how to sail first and then bought the boat.

But but again, somebody who was embracing something later in life and saying, you know, I can learn, it's not over.

Just because I'm in my 60s, it's not all over.

And he uh spent about six months um fixing the boat up and getting it ready, and he was in Florida and he needs some crew and he advertised and I saw it and I went, Oh, I've always all along I always wanted to work at sea.

And funnily enough, here's a funny story for you.

Once upon a time, I applied for a job on a cruise line that did the rivers in America.

And I got to second interview, and yes, all my experience in hotels, all my experience on boats, you know, working in scuba diving and working on the boats.

Everything was going great.

And then they said to me, Right, the last thing we need from you is your transcripts from your bachelor's degree.

And I'm like, okay.

And I want to say, but I went to the University of Life.

You know what I mean?

I don't have that one piece of paper.

I have tons of certificates and diplomas in all sorts of industries, including um one I forgot to tell you about, which is for 10 years I was a retirement financial advisor and an insurance agent for life health and all that good stuff, long-term care.

And I had all, I mean, that was state exams.

I had all these pieces of paper that were exams, but they weren't all tied up in a bow in a bachelor's degree.

And they said, Well, I'm sorry, we can't hire you.

And I went, Okay.

And they they would they'd sooner hire a 21 or 22-year-old with zero life experience, but had that piece of paper.

And from that, I was like, Oh, I always wanted to work and see, this is not going to work out.

And so then when that volunteer job came up with Gary, I went, Oh, here's my chance.

You know, I could do this for a month and just live on the ocean and see what it's like.

So that's how that happened.

SPEAKER_03: Okay, interesting.

I am so glad that they turned you down on that river cruise.

SPEAKER_01: You know, it's really funny you should say that.

Only about a week ago, we were talking.

I don't know if you've heard of the the movie Sliding Doors, where they set up this premise where this person was actually going down a tube, uh, you know, underground to get on a tube or a metro or something like that.

And somebody bumps into them on the way down the stairs and they miss that train.

And the story unfolds in two versions.

One is their life as it would have happened had they got on the train, and the other was if the life that happened because they didn't get on the train.

Anyway, the movie's called Sliding Doors, and I was talking to Gary recently about sliding doors, and I said to him, you know, if I had had the bachelor's degree, I would have been working on that cruise line, and we would never have met.

And then we started talking, well, would we, or would we have met in a different way?

And the really funny thing, remember, I was telling you I was in Los Angeles and I was driving somebody around, and I was actually staying in Marina Del Rey, which is uh the harbor out there on in Los Angeles, at the same time that Gary was looking for a boat, but we never met.

And the isn't it?

And and the whole thing about that is we weren't meant to meet at that point.

And and people have said to me, because we have such an incredible relationship, and then you know, they joke and laugh, oh, you little newlyweds, you make us sick.

But the funny thing about it is, is neither of us were ready to meet the other person at that time in our lives.

We both had our own journeys and we had our own baggage to work out, and it wasn't until we were both ready.

And I think that's what's making this particular relationship work really, really well.

We've come into it as whole human beings, and there's three of us now.

There's a me, there's a you, and there's an us, rather than you hear that expression, oh, my better half or the other half of me, all that kind of stuff.

But uh you need to be your own individual person and you know, not bring too much suitcases with you into the relationship.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.

So I'm curious what happened after that month sailing trip with Gary.

SPEAKER_01: Well, I stayed on for about four months, and because the reason I didn't go back to work immediately was because I was uh heading to Ireland for a family reunion that summer.

And as time was going on, I was not, I didn't get a job for, you know, it was it was pretty difficult trying to do interviews while I was on the vote originally, and I wasn't getting hired or or nothing was coming through.

So I sort of said I'd stay on.

And interesting, back to the people, and it was wasn't family, but it was friends were saying to me, You need to come back to America, you need to settle down, you need to get a job, you need to do this.

And I started to think about it.

I said, Well, what would I do if I went back and earned a ton of money?

What would I do with my life eventually when it's time to retire?

I know I'd buy a sailboat and go to sea.

And then I thought, I'm already here.

Why would I give it up right now?

Right.

So we ended up staying on the boat together for four months, and then he we brought the boat back to me.

I went all the way down to the bottom of the Bahamas and came back up to America.

And he and I said goodbye to each other.

He was like, you know, I'm not interested in having a long-term relationship.

I've been in a long-term marriage.

I I just, you know, I need some space and time, and I'm I'm not ready to commit to relationship.

And I totally got that, even though I knew he was such a special human being.

But for the first time in my life, I was able to let somebody go out of my life with absolutely no qualms.

I was sad, but I wasn't clinging, if you know what I mean.

SPEAKER_04: Yes.

SPEAKER_01: And and I just said, you know what, Nif, there but for the grace of God, there goes one of the best people out of your life.

However, you're a better human being as a result of meeting him and being with him for four months.

And you know what?

Once I went through that process, it wasn't 10 minutes later and the phone rings, and it's Gary calling me from Los Angeles.

Now, the hilarious part is I was still living on his boat in the marina.

I was driving his car around, you know, because he said, Oh, well, if you're not getting a job between now and then, you know, the boat's going to be in the marina, you might as well stay on it.

That's fine.

And I said, Oh, I can still volunteer.

So I was working like five hours in the morning, you know, polishing the stainless steel, doing all that good stuff, and then writing in the afternoons.

And so he calls me up and he said, He first of all said, What year did your father die?

And I went, That's a funny kind of question.

And I said, 1989.

Why?

And he says, Oh, well, I'm sitting here with some friends and one of them is an actress and she thinks she worked with your dad.

And I'm thinking, hmm, here's a guy who is not into relationships, happens to be back with his friends in California talking about who?

And I, in my mind, I didn't say it to him, I in my mind I went, You are so busted, you know.

So anyway, long story short, he decided to come back to take his boat out.

And he says, I'm coming back early to take the boat.

And I said, Okay, no problem.

I thought I'll find another volunteer project for the length of time before I go to Ireland.

He said, Well, I'm actually taking it up the east coast of America.

Do you want to come sail with me?

And I went, Okay, sure.

What why not?

Right.

And he says, up to New Jersey.

And I said, What's in New Jersey?

And he said, Newark, and there's a non-stop flight to Dublin, Ireland.

And I went, Uh-huh.

Because I had previously invited him to come to Ireland.

But in conversation since, I've learned he was like, I'd love to go to Ireland, but I can't go to Ireland because all our family's going to be there and there's some of her friends are going to be there.

What would that say about me?

Oh my God, whoa, whoa.

I mean, like into sales fit.

So anyway, he did end up coming back.

But the funny thing is, when he came back and we started sailing, I thought initially that meant that he was like, okay, ready, that there was something between us and that it would continue.

And when he got off the airplane, I went to pick him up in his car, mind you.

When I went to pick him up, I looked in his eyes and I saw he wasn't ready.

And he he was back, and we've since talked about it.

And sure enough, his his feeling at the time was he wasn't ready to commit, but he wasn't ready to let me go either.

And so we basically took it a day at a time, and it, you know, that phrase where I like you pretty much, let's see how this goes.

And that's what we've done.

And believe it or not, every day since that, or at least on a weekly basis, we check in with each other and say, Do you still want to be with me?

Yeah.

How's it going?

Do we need to connect?

No, really, we do.

Yeah.

And you know, it keeps it fresh, it keeps us ticking over.

And there's times, especially now that we're kind of half, well, we are land-based at the moment, even though we got in the water on a smaller boat.

It really helps us to notice when we're not fully connected.

You know, like you live in a 40-foot space, you are on top of each other 24-7, and there's time and room for meaningful conversations.

But when you get into busy life on land, you could go a couple of days and you'd be like, uh-huh-uh.

I'll see you.

I'll see you later, Baba.

And then you might not have actually really connected.

And so we we go through that exercise to keep us on target.

SPEAKER_03: So we're all like, can you just cut to the chase and where does the love story really begin?

Everybody's like, enough of this dancing around it.

SPEAKER_01: Like well, it took a year, I think.

Uh I think it was on the anniversary, which we call the boat aversary, of my stepping on the boat for the first time was January 15th of 2017, when he eventually got the love word out of his mouth.

Yeah.

Another slow learner.

SPEAKER_03: Yes, another slow learner.

I love it.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it it was it was quite amazing.

And there's a thing on boats when you're traveling up and down the different islands, you have like, you know, a business card where now they have boat cards, and it's a picture of, you know, your boat on one side, a picture, and usually a picture of the people, and then you know, all the details on the back.

And that's how boaters stay in touch.

And nearly all a lot of the people out there were couples who'd save up into retirement.

They're going to do this for a while.

Well, Gary had his boat card.

There's a picture of him on the front, and uh people started asking, well, who was Neve?

And then he would eventually write my name on, and then that day on our first boat adversary, he hands me a card, and it's a it's a picture of the two of us together on the front.

So that's when I knew.

And I jumped in the dinghy.

We were we were down actually in Marathon in the in the Florida Keys at the time.

I jumped in the dinghy and I drove around all our friends and all the different boats in the anchor.

I was like, I'm on the cart, I'm on the card.

And they they were saying, Oh, that's as good as a wedding at sea, you know?

That's some commitment right there.

SPEAKER_03: Oh my goodness, that is so so special.

Well, so at that point, because so so when you you guys did the you spent four months together at the first, yeah, you were separated for not very long.

No, but then you re you reconnect how long before you guys get married?

SPEAKER_01: So that was 2017 when I got my picture on the front of the boat card, and the proposal was Thanksgiving of 2019.

So what's that almost three years?

And then we were married, we were legally married in Antigua on our boat adversary, so it was like four years from the time I stepped on the boat.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

Okay, we're gonna go back to Antigua after I ask you this question.

Okay, you guys got married three times.

SPEAKER_01: That's correct.

SPEAKER_03: We want to hear about this because most people get married once.

SPEAKER_01: Right.

And you know, like three times for the same person.

But so we had uh what we called a toes in the sand wedding in Antigua, and there were two couples who were there as witnesses.

They were also on boats and they became our great friends on the ocean, and they happened to be in in uh Antigua at the time, or actually, one couple flew in specially for their boat was down in Trinidad at the time.

And so we had that wedding, which was very special, very intimate, and we were like signing the legal document out of the back of a van on the side of this deserted beach, you know, so very us.

And uh and there's a picture of us afterwards where we are like, Oh my god, what did we just do?

And the funniest thing about it is that we had been back in America about oh yeah, before that Thanksgiving moment, when he apparently had bought the engagement ring, and I didn't know anything about it.

And so when he gave me the engagement ring, I was like, wow.

And then, of course, we were still out there in the Caribbean on the ocean when it came time for this Antigua wedding.

And the Justice of the Peace lady from Antigua, who was on the beach with us, this is a deserted beach, right?

And uh, she she says, now Gary, blah, blah, blah, it's time to put on the ring.

So he goes and puts the ring on me and I do the wed and all that good stuff, right?

And she turns around to me and she goes, and now, Nev, your ring for Gary.

And I'm like, Huh?

I don't have a ring for him.

I didn't know what to do, right?

And so one of the lads who who was with us as witness had uh he says, Don't worry, Nev, I got you covered.

And he hands me his keys, right?

And so so we we take the keys off his key ring chain, and of course, you've got that little ring that's left over, right?

And so, and Gary's looking, knowing full well I don't have a wedding ring for him.

He knows I don't, right?

And so I'm going, not a problem.

And then I just out this, well, there's a photograph, and I tell you what, he's cracking up laughing.

He goes, I gave you this most beautiful diamond ring with sapphires, like you know, it looks like us two diamonds in a sapphire sea, and I get a key ring.

Oh my god, it was priceless, absolutely priceless.

But I will, in fairness, now I did get him a ring when we got back to land.

So he has a wedding ring now.

SPEAKER_03: That is adorable.

SPEAKER_01: I know.

SPEAKER_03: Yes.

So where were the other two weddings?

SPEAKER_01: So the other two weddings, one was in Ireland in County Wicklow.

We had this manor, and like I said, it was it was put off.

For 18 months because of COVID and everything shut down and we weren't able to travel.

So that was 18 months later, and we had that wedding.

And there was a lady down, beautiful, I wanna call her a tailor, a couture, called um Noreen.

And in Antigua, she makes these dresses and like she makes them in the cruise ship.

People come in, they get a gown, she like tailors it, and then she delivers to the ship, you know, so she's got some gorgeous stuff.

So anyway, she had made a dress that I was going to wear at my official wedding.

And it was because of COVID, it was hanging up in the closet on land, and it was looking at me every time I thought, are you going to eat that biscuit or are you going to wear this dress?

You know, so it was it was hanging there mocking me for about a year and a half, like, yeah, mm-hmm.

And then it was finally, uh, one of Gary's grandchildren said, When are we ever going to have this wedding?

Because I'd invited her to be a bridesmaid.

And we just couldn't make it happen to bring the two families together.

It would have been put off.

And I said, You know what?

I'm wearing this dress this year, or I'm not wearing it at all.

That's it.

I'm done, you know.

So that's why we ended up with the two extra weddings, one in Ireland and then one in America for him and his family.

SPEAKER_03: Oh my goodness, I love it.

And you know what?

I mean, it's something as special as the wedding, why do you have to just have what just one, you know?

SPEAKER_01: Right.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And and now, you know, there's an there's an expression in Ireland where we say, Oh, to be sure, to be sure.

Well, you know, it's like now I'm married, to be sure, to be sure, to be sure.

SPEAKER_03: Oh my goodness, I love it.

So I mentioned about wanting to go back to Antigua because you're gonna have to correct me if this is the start of your writing endeavor, or if this was just along the way, because I know that you met two men in Antigua at some point that ticked off writing for you.

SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah.

I had I had already started and actually finished uh my memoir, which is called Following Sunshine.

And while we were there, as you said, two men came ashore having rowed a 20-foot wooden boat 3,000 nautical miles across the Atlantic.

Wow.

Exactly.

I was like, what?

And to put it in perspective, Gary and I had done a 10-day open water passage from the Bahamas down to Puerto Rico in 2018.

And let me just say it was less than ideal.

I remember getting off the boat thinking, oh my god, that's I've done two open water passages and one, my first and my last.

And uh it was really, really rough.

And so I was fascinated by these guys.

And when they crossed the finish line in the mouth of the harbor, they have this kind of Olympic podium moment where they light their handheld flares and hold them up.

And it was such a moment, and we were out there in our dinghy, and I had my uh long lens camera with me, and I started, you know, pretending I was a sportsman photographer.

I was all click-click-click-click-click.

And at one moment, I just turned around to Gary.

I goosebumps, I'm actually getting them now talking to you about it.

I just said, Oh my god, Gary, I've got the shot.

Now I didn't know what it was going to be for, I didn't know it was going to be anything.

And I turned around, I was actually crying at that point just because it was so incredible.

And I said to him, I said, This moment is going to live with me for the rest of my life.

And we dinghy back to shore, they came ashore and they literally had to be helped off because they were what I call marine lagged.

You know, their legs weren't wobbly because they'd been on the ocean for so long.

And we found out that they had no family on island to greet them.

Now, there were locals and there was a couple of people from the race officials who were there to greet them.

And so we went over to them after the whole ceremony was over, and we invited them onto our sailboat for their first home-cooked meal the following night.

And we showed them the photograph I'd taken.

And one of the lads, Paul, he was 55 at the time, and his partner doing the rowing with him was 65.

And Paul had started out to do this challenge because he had survived a brain hemorrhage.

He was a firefighter, and he thought, Oh, I'm going to do something good with my life.

And so he decided he was going to do the toughest challenge he could find, and that was to roll across the Atlantic.

There was only one slight problem.

He didn't have a rowboat and he'd never learned to row before.

But anyway, why would that stop him?

So I showed him this photograph, and I and he said to me, Neaf, he said, that doesn't just sum up the 70 days at sea, but it also sums up the four-year struggle it took to get to the starting line.

And we started talking about it, and they found out I was a writer, and I was fascinated by their story.

And it was like, you couldn't make this up.

If you put this in a novel, people wouldn't believe you.

They'd say, Oh, it's contrived.

So I said to them, Yeah, I'd be interested in writing their true story on one condition.

It couldn't be about how to row an ocean.

But if they would dig deep spiritually, psychologically, and emotionally as to why they rode the ocean, how it affected their families, and after they had time to reflect, how had the experience changed them as human beings?

I said, that's the story I'd be very happy to write.

And that's what it is.

And and it turned out that that uh photograph became the front cover of Flares Up, a story bigger than the Atlantic.

SPEAKER_03: Wow.

Wow, that is so amazing.

Again, the puzzle pieces, they just fit together.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.

And I was working with that book for it took me about a year and a half to write because I couldn't write it out of my head.

It was all Zoom call interviews, and this is all during COVID as well.

Zoom call interviews, emails, phone calls, everything to try and get the story, but not just the story, but to get their feelings behind it.

You know, every time they'd send me a little note saying, Oh, this happened this day, yeah.

Well, how did you feel about that?

And what did you think about that?

How what happened when you called your family, or all those kind of things, you know?

And I interviewed all of his um their their wives, their people they worked with, children, so many people, and even the guy who built the boat originally to try and get it authentic.

And I wrote it to read like a novel.

And the beauty of it is, and and this is a God-given talent I got.

Yes, I learned my craft of writing, but I I have this innate ability to put people in the situation and the amount of people have come back to me and said, I felt I was in that boat with them the whole way over, you know.

And I mean, it's not all just in the boat.

Obviously, the the the whole run-up to it, but I think the first third of the book is actually them preparing and you know their family dynamic, and and so it's not all in the boat.

And then, of course, you see what happens to them afterwards.

So after I'd finished all that and we had it out, and it was published uh by a UK publisher, and then we were doing some marketing on that.

Then I went back to my memoir, Following Sunshine, and I brought it up to date in the epilogue to the moment that I took that photograph.

And so it just came out, and and the subtitle of Following Sunshine is A Voyage Around the Mind, Around the World, Around the Heart.

And it's my story, and that first part around the mind is like the what we've been talking about growing up in Ireland, how it was impactful, you know, growing up in the family I grew up in.

And then the second part is around the world, which is that year I spent volunteering in all these different places.

And the third one around the heart is from the moment I stepped on the sailboat and met Gary Krieger.

SPEAKER_03: Oh my goodness.

Yeah.

That sounds amazing.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a good, it's a good old read, let me tell you.

SPEAKER_03: And and for somebody dying to read it, where can people go to to purchase this book?

SPEAKER_01: So in America, yeah, obviously it's on Amazon and it's in local bookstores.

And the best place to follow me or to find me and to find all my different things that are coming out in new books, etc., is on my website, which coincidentally is called thewriteronthewater.com.

Original.

Yeah, very original.

Let's let's just put it this way it's a whole lot easier to spell when I'm doing a radio interview, and people are like, What?

Rather than my name, right?

Which, as you know, is a Gaelic name.

So there's a lot of letters and constants in there.

So so my whole brand is called the Writeronthewater.com.

SPEAKER_03: The Writer on the Water.

What a beautiful name for a beautiful story with a beautiful woman.

Honest to goodness, you yourself are are amazing.

Your story is just so joy-filled.

I think I think that's honestly the thing that that I love the most about you and your story is a perspective on life that I wish more of us had, of looking at life for the beauty, for the joy, and finding those little moments in amongst it all to just appreciate it.

And listening to you and telling the story that's turned into this just amazing love story, I think it gives all of us a little bit of hope, no matter where we are in life, that sometimes you just got to keep going.

Because you never know what the decisions you make today, how they're going to impact tomorrow.

SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.

And I mean, speaking of joy, there's no one better than you than looking at life through joyful eyes and you know, and and encouraging everybody else with your podcast.

And I think the one thing that I would share from my experience is number one, it's never too late.

And number two, never put off a dream.

SPEAKER_03: I agree.

I love it.

Before we end, is there anything else that you want to be sure that this person listening today knows about you, about your story, about what you do or what you have coming up?

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let me just very briefly tell you about my time in Borabor in French Polynesia.

Oh yes.

I kept putting that off.

And the reason I put it off was number one, it's a very expensive destination.

It swallows your firstborn, your wallet, your house, your mortgage, everything, right?

And number two, it is the honeymoon capital of the world.

So I was single at that time trying to find my place when I was going around before I met Gary, and I kept putting it off.

And then finally I found a way, and I ended up staying eight nights on board aboard the main island for the price of one night on one of the resorts.

And I found it a pension, and um, I ate from food trucks, and I got to experience the incredible, beautiful blue azure lagoon and the whole experience.

And that taught me the lesson never ever ever put off a dream, you know.

And and also, we don't know how we as one human being can impact another person.

And a story that came up during the it's actually in the writing of um, it's a little bit of a spoiler alert.

It's in the writing on Father with Sunshine.

Years and years ago, when I was in one of those despondent places, is after you know I was out out of a relationship and I didn't know what direction to go in.

I ended up sponsoring a kid from Bolivia.

You know, that back in the day you were able, oh, here's a charity, and you know, you write to the kid every week and and you sponsor them to help them either get more programs at school or something like that.

And I did that, and I did it for two reasons.

One, I made it my number one job, no matter how what I position I was in financially, I was going to do that every month.

And number two, I wasn't going to tell anybody.

And back to my whole psyche of freelance, variety, start again.

It was the longest commitment of my life that I had ever done at that point, which was 10 years to do this every month and write back and forth.

And at when the kid turned 18, the charity said, Okay, you're done and dusted.

Here's another kid you could start with.

And I went, No, I'd I'd like to keep writing to him.

Thank you very much.

And they said, No, we can't give you his details.

So years and years and years and years passed by, and I was never able to find him.

And then one day I'm on the boat with Gary, and this friend request comes up on Facebook, and I'm like, the name is kind of familiar, but I don't have no mutual friends.

Who's this?

And it turned out to be the boy Ivan, who's now a man.

And guess what he became?

He from Bolivia went on through that whole schooling and he became a doctor.

And he studied for nine years in Cuba and then went back to Bolivia to his local town and became the doctor in the local town.

And I was like, oh my God.

You know, we've no idea how we can impact another human being.

And now, talk about the butterfly effect.

Look how he's impacting other people by taking care of them, you know, in remote areas.

SPEAKER_03: It's incredible.

You know what it goes back to is love, is caring for one another, for taking the time to be there for one another.

And and you have to look at that and you have to know in your heart that you had to play a massive role in where that where that man is today.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and Gary said to me, he he said something like that to me.

And I said, No, I just wrote to him and you know, we exchanged letters and all that kind of good stuff.

Well, here's a massive spoiler alert.

I'm only telling you, I haven't told anybody else in any any conversations or interviews I did.

I said to him, someday I want to meet him.

And I can't go to Bolivia because where he lives is like way up in the mountains, and I suffer from altitude sickness.

Well, for my birthday this year, I have four rules.

One is I always celebrate on the day, um, not the Saturday before or after because somebody else wants to not have a hangover going after a party.

And number three, I celebrate Mother's Day on that mother's and father's day on that day, not the day that the card company tells me to do it because that's the day they became my parents.

And number four, I have to do something I have never done before in my whole life.

And this year it was like, I'm running out of things because I've done quite a little bit of things, right?

And I went, I want to go meet him.

And it turned out he's back doing his special uh his specialty in hematology in Cuba.

And we went down and we met him in person for the first time ever.

SPEAKER_03: Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01: I know I can't, I can't tell you how amazing that experience was.

SPEAKER_03: Yes.

Wow.

Niaf, you have made my day.

I can only imagine for whoever's listening, wherever in the world they are, that you've made their day.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for being here today to get to share just this little piece of your story with me, with my listeners.

It means the world.

SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you so much.

I love talking with you.

You are such an inspiration yourself.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, well, thank you so much.

And for you listening, wow, what an interview that was.

A conversation with a woman who is just a ray of sunlight, an amazing soul who, I feel like we're all just been blessed by her presence today.

So, my friend, if there's somebody you're thinking of that you know would love to hear this, be sure to share today's episode with them.

And if anything else, take something you heard today, put it into action in your life.

Always in the hope of making today a little bit better than yesterday, and tomorrow even better than today.