Like mother, like daughters

Terry Elizondo, seated, has seen the world with her two daughters. Mary Frazier, her youngest, sports a handwoven bag bought on their trip to Nairobi, Kenya. Christina Rainey, not pictured, lives in Oregon. (Photo: hartphoto.com)

Traveling together can take all forms for mothers and their daughters, but for the women of the Elizondo family – Mom Terry and her two now-grown daughters, Mary Elizondo Frazier and Christina Elizondo Rainey – the tendency can be summed up in one word: intrepid.

The stories they share are colorful, and many: climbing Kilimanjaro with Mary; taking a $5 sleeper bus with Christina from Pune, India, to Goa; getting stung by jellyfish in Indonesia; spending the night (unwittingly) in a red-light district in Thailand. And the list goes on.

Nothing characterizes the family philosophy like a trip Terry took to Puerto Vallarta in 2002 with her husband, Candelario. Terry got the urge to go shopping in Guadalajara, five hours inland, and decided to take a bus, as she’d often done in the past, and leave Cande to lounge on the beach. She had a lovely jaunt to Tlaquepaque, a colonial village on the outskirts of the city known for its artisans and galleries. On the way back to Vallarta, however, the bus was robbed. No one was hurt, and only the men were robbed, so Terry lost nothing in the process – not even her sense of adventure.

“What I did, because I was so sad about what had happened, was that four weeks later, I told my daughters, ‘We’re going to go to Monterrey on the bus. We’re not going to let anyone take our freedom from us.’ And we did – and we had a great time.”

The girls, who were 18 and 20 at the time, remember feeling a bit nervous. “Every time someone got on the bus, I thought they were going to rob us,” said Mary, with a little laugh. “I remember I was a little concerned, but thought no way this would happen twice.”

Terry and her youngest daughter, Mary Frazier, enjoyed a little shopping in Moshi, a town at the base of Kilimanjaro – which the two women climbed after a four-hour bus ride from Nairobi.

The Elizondos raised their children in West University, and Mary stayed close to home, living now in River Oaks. Christina lives in Portland. Terry, Norwegian by heritage and a Spanish-speaking attorney by profession, frequently serves as an advocate for Latin American citizens. She was born to a family that owned halibut boats on the West Coast, and would make their living for the whole year with four or five months of hard work, leaving them the rest of the year to travel – so she got in the habit at a young age.

Candelario likes to travel, too, but his work as an attorney, a judge and the owner of two ranches keeps him busy. “She’ll travel at the drop of a hat – anywhere,” he says of his wife. “I like going on vacation, but not every six weeks. I have things I’ve got to do over here.”

Candelario’s idea of a great vacation is a long weekend in Puerto Vallarta, with beach volleyball, good food and good drinks.  The family travels together to Mexico at least once a year in a tradition beginning when the girls were still small. Terry has a much more ambitious itinerary, however; she has always been set on seeing the whole world, and she wanted to share it with her daughters. They’d already been to Mexico and to Europe; when her eldest, Christina, turned 12, it was time for somewhere more interesting. Since childhood, Terry has had a passion for travel in developing countries, not as much for the tourist destinations as for the opportunity to connect with the local people.

“I guess it just comes from who I am,” Terry reflects. “I’ve just always been interested in colorful, struggling people and countries.”

The first big trip was during Spring Break of 1992. A cousin had invited them to join him in Indonesia, and Mary had a lineup of school activities and couldn’t get away, so it was just Christina and Terry. They never caught up with the cousin, but they had a fabulous time. Memories of that trip include Christina doing homework in a $5 hotel in Ubud, Bali, a town surrounded by rice paddies; the Hindu-temple complex in the dense jungles of Monkey Forest; a harrowing ride in a broken-down ferry to the island of Lombok; and then onto the tiny Gili Islands, where they stayed and ate with local families in their houses on stilts.

That was to be the first in a lifelong series of mother-daughter adventures – often just with one daughter or the other, always filled with colorful encounters with the locals. Their list of travels reads like an index of a world atlas: Indonesia, Thailand, Guatemala, Paraguay, Argentina, Kenya, Tanzania, China, Goa, Jaipur, Brazil.

For Mary, the highlight was Africa. She and her mother climbed Kilimanjaro with a team of six porters who carried their gear, set up for them and cooked for them – probably the most luxury Terry ever indulged in, though it was considered to be a budget trek. Some expeditions, Terry explained, have 14 porters for one person.

“I think they were relieved that we were just normal people,” Terry said. “By the time we finished the trip, they were our family.” One of them followed Mary around for three days, begging her to marry him and take him back to Texas.

Orienting her girls to the finer points of adventure travel was generally done in context, and is more a subject for their amusement than anything.

“I don’t think there’s any way to prepare you for this type of travel,” said Christina. “A lot of people were very curious of two young girls traveling alone with their mother. Young children would listen to us speak English, greet us and touch our hair.”

Terry and eldest daughter Christina Rainey set out on a rickshaw at 5:40 a.m. to catch the sunrise at the Taj Majal – a small tourist break from their generally grittier travels through India.

Upon hearing of their exploits, friends and family have occasionally expressed concern. Candelario, for his part, doesn’t lose sleep over his girls’ wanderings.

“My wife and my daughters are pretty astute. They can spot trouble a mile away,” he said. “I feel like they know how to handle themselves.”

It’s been a skill acquired, thanks to a great deal of faith – in each other, and in the innate goodness of others. Terry recalls putting the two girls on a Funjet to Mexico alone when they were in high school. “Everything was fine until we started talking about money. I gave them $25 a day, so they’d have to be thrifty and ride the bus.” They got lost in the hills above the city and had to talk their way back down with their basic Spanish skills.

Then there was the time Terry found cheap tickets to Pattaya, Thailand, and nabbed three of them. It wasn’t until later that she learned of its reputation as a hotspot for child prostitution for global sex tourists.

“We didn’t see any of that,” she says. “I thought the place was fabulous.”

It helps to have a sense of humor when you have a wife like Terry, which Candelario does.

“Nothing surprises me anymore – nothing at all,” he said. He likes to tell the stories – like the time they were at the ranch in South Texas, where he was hunting with a group of his guy friends. “She said, I’m going to Mexico,” he recalls. Terry found a great deal and booked some non-refundable rooms and a flight for her and the girls, out of Nuevo Laredo, to Puerto Vallarta. Unfortunately their flight was canceled due to fog – but that didn’t stop them. She found a 24-hour bus from the border that was just about to leave – and almost full – but there were three seats left in different parts of the bus and they grabbed them.

What Terry remembers about that trip is arriving at the bus station in Guadalajara at 3 a.m. with no pesos, visiting with a group of runaway boys from Tepic until it was time for their connection to Vallarta. 

Public-transit adventures are a recurring theme for Terry. There was the bus from Pune to Goa that she and Christina took – a $5 sleeper bus, which sounded great. Until they discovered that they would be “sleeping” on a sheet of plywood two feet from the ceiling – in the back of the bus where the rough roads had them bouncing up and hitting the ceiling.

Over the years, the girls developed their own travel styles. Christina, a mother of two with a supportive husband, thrives on the uncertainty and the novelty of bare-bones budget travel to exotic lands. Mary has had her share of adventure too, but these days, her law practice and two little kids keep her closer to home, and her preferred itinerary looks more like her Dad’s.

“Mom will have you staying in budget hotels, walking all over town and taking the bus,” she says. “I’m more of a lawn chair-on-the-beach type of traveler, and Mom’s not into that.”

Still, each of them treasures the memories and looks forward to more. They agree the travels have strengthened their relationship. They’ve also seen how it’s strengthened each of them.

“I think it builds your confidence,” said Christina. “If you could survive an all-night bus ride and sleep on a piece of plywood, you feel you could do just about anything.”

It has also given them a deeper sense of compassion, they say. “It gives you a worldly experience of different cultures and people everywhere,” said Christina. “We’d been in poor countries, but just to understand that people were spending their nights sleeping on the sidewalk in a tarp tent and their days washing clothes in a metal pot is an image that I don’t think will ever go away.”