March 6, 2025 • 37 mins
When actress Diane Farr isn't filming on the set of "Fire Country," you can find her globetrotting with family and friends. In this episode, she talks about the healing powers of travel and the revelations it has brought in her life. Find out why her favorite trips have happened after losing a loved one, and how her relationship with her estranged father was salvaged through their shared love of travel. Plus, after visiting more than 100 countries, Diane shares the reasons for her 5-day travel rule!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is let's be clear with Shannon Dherty. Hello, let's
be clear. Family. My name's Diane Farr. I like Shannon
Dherty and an actress who's been around for a really
long time, almost the same exact amount of time. We
lost Shannon at fifty three. I'm fifty five. I was
in high school when sorry, I was in college when
(00:24):
she was on nine oh two and Zer and not
working yet, and not working for a long while. It's
took me a long time to get going. But her
impact on my family is maybe unique, or maybe it's
the most universal kind there is. My mom and my
next brother down on the family had a standing date
every week to watch nine oh two and Oh. Today,
(00:46):
I have a teenage kid who's about the age my
brother was then. It's really hard to find things to
do with your teenage son that he's willing to do
with his mother. Most of them don't have it in public.
You're not allowed to touch them, you're not allowed to
touch their hair. Especially the idea of my mother and
my brother sitting on the couch every week so excited
(01:09):
mostly to see what Shannon was going to do, is
one of the best memories I have of them. And
then when I was out of college and in La
hustling looking for work, Shannon had moved on to Charmed.
I got to say, she's clearly a woman ahead of
her time. She was speaking about things long before women
(01:31):
were allowed to speak about them. I've long felt that
America has trouble with ambitious women. They often feel like
we should be in a small box, that women who
use their voice and use their voice to save themselves
are frowned upon. This is like something that's still ongoing.
We're making headway, but I admire Shannon and I'm really
(01:55):
happy to be here today as a guest host. Lindsay
Price was going to join me the morning A nine
on two and o Alum, who's a friend of mine.
We did a show together called Splitting Up Together. We
were so excited to come on and talk about her
experience there, but she's sick. So if I'm ever invited back,
she can't wait to be here. Also, so people will
(02:15):
know me from one of three camps. Mostly it's Rescue
Me and maybe The Job, the first show that I
did with Dennis Leary, the first show that I did
playing a firefighter. I'm currently on a CBS show called
fire Country. Playing a firefighter again. My first time was
just after nine to eleven, playing a New York City firefighter,
(02:35):
and now I play a cal firefighter. I play the
chief now and it's just after the LA fires, So
I have a really strong connection to firefighting. And then
I've been playing it on and off for twenty five
years and it just really gives me an idea of service.
Other things people know me for are either numbers or Roswell.
(02:56):
And the beginning of my career, I was a talk
show host on LOVEE Line with Doctor Drew and Adam Carolla.
We did two hundred episodes on MTV that was me
with the very short hair and the big laugh, and
we were talking about sex, drugs and rock and roll
and the amount of visibility I had was so high
and the money I was making was so small. It
(03:19):
was a crazy time in my life. I imagine, probably
the closest I ever got to what the teenagers were
feeling at nine o two and zero. But I survived
it like everyone there did and went on. I really
thankful that I get to work as an actor. The
most consistent thing in my life that I think tracks
with Shannon, which is I think why I'm here today
(03:43):
is travel. I have been a traveler my whole life,
and I think there was a difference between a traveler
and a tourist. I think I've been to about one
hundred countries. There's an app on the phone called bin
b E E N and you can track all the
places you've been, and it says I've been to forty
four percent of the world. I've done most of this
(04:05):
traveling by myself. I did it mostly when I was impoverished.
I remember my first year out of drama school. I'm
twenty two. I am a full time waitress. That is
the only place I was making a living, and I
was spending almost all of that money on headshots and
mailings and these little workshops you could do to try
(04:27):
and meet an agent. And when I was doing my taxes,
I didn't get the math gene. Know one in my
family got the math gene. So I used to go
home to my parents' house and visit with our nextraor neighbors,
and they would help me with my taxes. I made
fourteen thousand dollars my first year out of school entirely
as a waitress, and I had been to seven countries
that year. So my traveling has nothing to do with money.
(04:50):
It has nothing to do with the hotels that I
stay in. When I go to places, it's mostly to learn.
It's not really like, oh, this would be fun for
me to go somewhere new. Is a little bit like
the pull towards the center of the earth. There is
a gravitational force. It's how I've learned everything in my
life of value. I didn't get a lot out of school.
(05:11):
I watched my teenage kids bored out of their mind
most of the time in school. But I can remember
the first time I was in Israel, traveling to the
Dead Sea and looking around, going, oh, that's what they
were talking about in geography, Or the first time I
was in New Zealand and I saw a fjord and
(05:32):
I was understanding how water could cut land and how
that affects us, And oh, that's what was happening in
the Grand Canyon, and that's what that iceberg in Iceland,
that's what they were talking about, were cut through and
why there's so many of them there. It's also been
really healing for me. Who I travel with, where I go,
(05:53):
how long we do it for, and why we're going.
I went to college in England, so I had traveled
a lot around a lot of Europe. By the time
I was twenty. You know, you could buy a train
pass and I had backpack and I was off on
every one of those holidays. So by the time I
got out of school, I was looking to go to
places that nobody was into yet, and nobody my age
(06:15):
was looking for because they want to go have a
good time in Paris. So I started doing most of
the trips by myself then, and then it just became
clear that I was going to learn more about a
place if I was on my own, and I was
going to meet other travelers. In the early days with
the youth hostels, and there were books that I would take.
It's so easy now at the internet, but Let's Go
(06:38):
books are still my favorite to this day. I will
get a Let's Go book and a Fromer's the highest
end and the lowest end of spending money and compare
the two and figure it out from there. I'm in
the midst of planning a trip that I'm about to
take in two weeks, which is probably the most monumental
for my heart. My dad is turning eighty this year,
(07:02):
And I think, like a lot of our listeners, aging
parents is something we don't talk enough about and how
much work it is and how many decisions there are
to make, And I don't know there if anybody has
a predecessor at this everyone has the ability to live
much longer if they survived the middle part of their life.
(07:23):
And how do we keep our parents as a part
of society. How do we keep them interested? How do
we keep them from becoming feeble if they're home and
they're alone. My dad asked my son to go to China.
This was the strangest thing. My son is about to
turn eighteen. He was visiting colleges in Florida. I'm from
(07:45):
New York. All the people I know in New York
retire in Florida. It's God's waiting room. So my son
was looking at the University of Miami. I think mostly
because he's obsessed with his grandfather. And they went down
to tour it to get I set my son and
they stayed in a hotel and they had a great
time for two days. And my son asked my soon
(08:06):
to be eighty year old dad, what's on your bucket list?
As an octagenarian, what do you still want to do? Grandpa?
And my father said, I've always wanted to see the
Great Wall of China. I got to tell you, I
have never heard of this life dream of his. Never, never, ever.
My father loves the golf channel. It doesn't leave very much.
He doesn't even fly to see us for holidays. He
(08:28):
would rather be home. He's like an old school spy
rather than anyone know his Floridian whereabouts. He'd miss a
holiday with us, which I think adds to the mystique
for my seventeen year old son. My son came home
from this college tour completely annoyed with me, like, Mom,
what is wrong with you? This is your whole deal.
(08:49):
You drag your kids around the whole world, trying to
teach them things about people and food and culture, and
that we're not the center of the universe, nor is
this place that we started from. But you all to
take your father to his life's dream at the Great
Wall of China. I explained that I didn't know this
was his life stream and really wondered how much I
wanted to tell my son about my journey with my father.
(09:13):
When I was growing up, my parents were married my
entire life. They got divorced when I was in my
early thirties, But my dad's main priority was my mom,
which was a really interesting thing to see. You know,
I have children now and you hear all these stories
about people having children and it's like your heart walking
(09:33):
around outside your body in them, and that everything you
do is for your kids. That was not my experience
in my house growing up. My father's goal was to
be closer to my mom, and his kids were kind
of in the way of that. It did not lead
to a great dynamic between us. My mother was also
an alpha female, an outspoken woman who was way ahead
(09:56):
of her time, and that was it's hard for us
as kids inside the house and outside of it. But
then she gets sick. Also. My mom also died from
cancer nine years ago now. She died of pancreatic cancer,
and her sickness, like most, was as soon as she
(10:16):
found out she had it. She knew it was chronic
and terminal and this would be how she went. And
that was not an easy time for my family. Like
so many people around death, there became camps, There became sides,
There became ideas of how things should be done, how
people should behave, and it really split us up. By
(10:38):
the time my mother passed, I hadn't heard from my
father and over a year and a half. They were
divorced twenty years by then, but once she became sick,
my father's goal again was to try and take care
of my mom, even at the cost of our relationship.
(10:59):
After she passed, it took me a solid year to
even consider speaking to my dad. By then, he had
started reaching out saying, that's enough time, that's enough time
for us not to be talking. Please call me, And
then a month later I'd get another voicemail and the
please would be gone, and then I got some yelling voicemails,
(11:19):
and then I had to block him for my own
health and the health of a possible relationship someday. So
a year and a half after my mother died, I
(11:41):
cut off all connection to my dad. I had three
little kids. I was working on a TV show in
la It was called Splitting Up Together, the one that
I did with Lindsay Price, and it was a really
hard time. I also was going through a divorce myself,
three kids after twelve years of marriage, which in the
(12:01):
wake of my mother's passing. Not speaking to the rest
of my family. It was really dark, so I cut
off all contact for the hope of what could be
later when I did some healing on my own, and
I did a lot of healing. There was a lot
of therapy. There was a lot of traveling with the kids.
The first thing I think I did once my mom
(12:23):
had passed and I was no longer married, was I
took them to a dude ranch in Wyoming. Our family
goal has always been one country a year and two states.
If we're American, we must see America. We must learn America,
because it's so polarized at the moment. What I feel
in the city of Los Angeles or growing up in
(12:45):
New York feels like it has nothing to do with
Kentucky at the moment, or Nebraska or Texas. So I've
taken my kids to two states every year. So we
were in Wyoming at a dude ranch because there was
a lot of physical life activities for them, and I
knew I could keep them safe even though I was
a single mom. My dad knew nothing of my whereabouts.
(13:09):
And this whole year went by, and at the end
of it, I thought, Okay, let me bee a big girl.
I've been to a lot of therapy. I had sort
of mourned the relationship with my father I thought I
wanted and I was willing to accept the one I had.
That was a lot of conversations about what I wish
he had said, or what I wanted him to say,
(13:30):
or what I wanted to be when I wanted to
be in focus when my mother was dying. And when
I unblocked him on my phone, this strange thing happened.
I basically allowed his emails and his phone his phone
number to come into my phone number, and it released
twelve voicemails from him over the course of that year
(13:51):
that I had blocked him. My father left me a
voicemail once a month. They were still angry in the beginning.
The first three of them were demand about what I
was required to do duty what he believed was my
job as his daughter, and the next three we're a
little more passive, and then the last six were a
(14:13):
straight progression upward to the relationship we really want to
have with me. By the last one, he was saying,
I love you very much. If you call me back,
that's great, and if you don't, I just wanted to
let you know that today, and that felt like exactly
where I wanted to be. That felt like the relationship
(14:33):
I wanted to have. We had our first conversation two
and a half years after my mother's passing. I had
called a friend beforehand to sort of warm up, to
give myself a time limit, and the same friend was
willing to take my call. After this call with my dad,
it went pretty well, and then we had to do
(14:55):
some figuring out, so we went back to text for
a while. In the beginning, you would send me a
lot of pictures of my mother who had passed before
she was sick, to remind me who she was and
who he missed, and I had to keep saying to
him gently, I don't miss the same woman that you miss.
We don't have the same experience. Please stop sending me pictures,
(15:16):
and over time that was hurt. It was a very
slow rule. It took five years before I saw my dad.
We brought him here for Christmas with the kids. My
kids missed him terribly. He's really fun, isn't it amazing
the difference between a parent and a grandparent. He was
a really good time for them. So cut to three
(15:37):
years later, my son is visiting with my father and
makes this request to go to the Great Wall of
China as a non traveling person to my seventeen year
old kid. Now, my son comes home and he's totally
annoyed with me for failing to do this for Grandpa.
And I have to say to my son, do you
know how hard it is to go to China. It's
(15:58):
a really longflo there's nothing direct, there is no English
on the ground. When we get there, our cell phones
won't work, our credit cards won't work. I know, Bijing
is opening up from the communist government that's been there
a long time, and it's opening itself to travelers. Air
(16:18):
quality is really bad. Your dad is eighty years old.
The Wall, the Great Wall is a lot of walking.
Oh and he wants to see the Terracotta warriors. Okay,
well that's in a different city than Beijing and requires
a plane ticket. The truth is, as soon as they
said it, I knew I was going. I didn't really
want to go. Nor is a moody teenager and an
(16:42):
octagenarian my favorite travel buddies. But the only thing I
could hear as this was happening was bucket list. Bucket List,
this is my dad's bucket list dream, meaning he's not
going to be here for that much much longer. He
has spent more time on the planet than he has left.
(17:04):
And the truth is, I don't have that much time
with my son before he goes off to college. My son,
like I was saying at the beginning about my brother
and my mom watching Shannon on nine O two and zero,
there's very little my son asks to do with me
at this phase in his life. I got to stay
home a lot of time when they were small. It
(17:24):
was the joy of being an actor. There were hiatuses,
there were times where I could be home for a
lot of it. That's been dwindling with these teenage years.
That's been dwindling quickly when he got his license. So
I have about five more months with my son every
day in the house, and then he starts his own journey.
(17:44):
So the two of them have concocted maybe the most
difficult place I could ever imagine, with the most gigantic
time zone, the longest flight. And I put it to
both of them because this is supposed to be a
learning experience and said, okay, the Chinese government requires a
visa for Americans to visit, so if you want to
(18:05):
go on this trip. Here's my only ask. I'll do
everything else. I'll do the immunizations, i will work out
the credit cards and the phones and find the one week.
The three of us can do this, and frankly, I
will pay for it, because I'm the only one with
a job out of the three of us. But you
guys just have to get your own visa, because the
visa is an eleven page document you must fill out
(18:28):
and then go to a consulate and wait online two
times for you wait online to drop it off, and
you wait online to pick it up. I'm just going
to go ahead and admit that neither one of them
did their visa and we're still going to China. The
prep for this has unleashed some things about why I
think traveling is so important, about why I think I
(18:52):
learn more from it than anything else. In the eleven
page visa process with my dad, the Chinese government wanted
to know a lot of things that mostly pertained to
working people. Who was your last employer, what is their
cell phone number? What are your parents' names? Do you
have anyone of Chinese descent? What are your grandparents' names?
(19:15):
Most of this doesn't really apply to my eighty year
old dad, but there's no option to opt out of
these questions. We had to find my father's and worked
in twenty years. We had to find old supervisors and
phone numbers. We had to find birth dates of relatives
he's never had. We are not Asian, but I understood
(19:39):
the diplomacy between our countries is always a little bit tough,
so we were filling in everything as best we can.
It became clear that my father didn't know his grandfather's name.
He'd only met him once. He was tracking down nieces
and nephews to try and ask them, he couldn't find it.
I spent a lot of time on the phone with
(19:59):
my father well, digging through boxes, boxes of information about
his family that he started sharing with me and that
I started sharing with my son, And quickly it became
clear to me that this is the reason why we
were planning this trip. Sometimes I find like the tourist
things really boring. After I had finished most of Europe
(20:21):
and some of South America, I made a promise to
myself that I never needed to go into another church.
I never needed to visit another stained glass window. I
had seen enough of those when I'm going. I'm kind
of going to figure out what a local does on
New Year's Eve or Christmas Eve or their version of
Fourth of July, depending where I am. But the lead
(20:43):
up to this trip was teaching me things about my
father and my son that I didn't know that are
kind of maybe be more important than the trip itself.
By the time we found my father's grandfather's name, me
and my son and my father were overjoyed. It was
like we had accomplished something and we hadn't even gone yet.
(21:07):
Waiting online at the embassy with my son here in
Los Angeles. My son is half Korean, his dad is Korean,
and we're walking in and it's mostly Asian people applying
for vieces and I was probably the only white person
inside that day. And when we got up to the counter,
(21:28):
the woman behind it did something really interesting. It was
like one of those moments where you think people are
different and you look at language assessment and you believe
it has something to do with intelligence. And in one
moment she looked at me and said, where is his
father from? No, sorry, she said, where is your husband from?
(21:48):
I was so taken. Aback, I haven't been married in
nine years now, and I said, Korea. What she was
trying to do is find out was if we were
of Chinese descent, because that would be a very big
difference in the visa. And she didn't ask him, and
she didn't ask me about him. She just asked me
(22:09):
like a three step out question because she needed the
information to make sure they were safe. It was the
most like crazy James BONDI diplomatically done question I ever heard.
And I was like, well done, lady at the consulate.
It took three days. We got our visa. My father
had to fly to New York and visit all of
(22:29):
my brothers. So family happening all over the place from
this one trip, and we're leaving for my sun's spring break.
Which leads me to the other most important rule of
travel that I have had for thirty five years that
has never done me wrong, and that is the five
day rule. When I go traveling with anyone, I have
(22:52):
a five day rule. This started with like being twenty
two years old, meeting a guy in Vietnam and he
seemed kind of cool, and you had a little bit
of broken English, and you had a great time, and
you had a mad crush and there was lots of
making out, and then on the fifth day, you guys
went out to meet some other travelers for dinner, and
(23:14):
you realized you hated his coat, and therefore you didn't
like him at all. It was like the crushes that
I would have on either a country or a person,
or a place or an itinerary. Some crazy activity like
I don't know, river boating in New Zealand could last
for five days no matter what. I could have a
good time with absolutely anyone for five days. But after
(23:36):
five days doesn't feel like friendship anymore. It's starting to
feel like need. It's starting to feel like family. It's
starting to feel like people lean on each other in
a way that isn't really conducive to spending twenty four
hours a day together. So I have a five day rule.
When my parents come to visit me from LA I
have a five day rule. You can stay in Los
Angeles as long as you want, but you can stay
(23:57):
in my house for five days. I have a boyfriend
now of two years, and I kind of employ the
same role. He's from Iceland. He lives in Hawaii. When
he comes to stay here, we stay together five days.
So China is a really big trip to take. It's
a really big trip to take for only five days.
(24:18):
But again I go back to moody teenager who does
not like to get up even in his own house
when we have.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Something to do on a Saturday, and octogenarian dad who's
really going to be out of sorts. This is really
different food, really different weather. It's twenty hours of flying,
We're staying in hotels.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
It's a lot. I don't need to push my dad.
I know what he wants to see. I know what
he wants to do. We're doing five days. We're going
to take a little smaller, easier trip. My daughters are
(25:05):
both away at school and they go to school in Switzerland.
So after five days there, I'm going to take them
to Switzerland for four because they felt like a nice
easy country to see. Because I would love my son
to see where his sisters go to school. I would
love my daughters to get to have their grandfather visit
them where they're doing their education. And it's a lot
(25:29):
slower to do. We can order French fries in Switzerland
because I know how to say that word. So that's
how we're washing off. And this five day rule was
absurd when I first said, it's my father that we're
going to go all the way there and we're only
going to spend five days. When I expined him, we
land at four o'clock in the afternoon, and that night
we go to Tianeman Square to take an eighteen year
(25:51):
old boy to Tiananmen Square on his first night that
far away. My family has been to Korea before because
the kids of Korean descent. We also visited Japan. I
have been to Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong.
(26:16):
I went to Hong Kong this summer. It was passed
back to China to see it before it changed over.
We have been to India, Keshmir, I have. I'm trying
to remember them off the top of my head. I'm
seeing a map in my head I've been to I
(26:38):
think I've been to more of Asia than anywhere else.
But Tianneman Square, for a boy who's about to go
off to college, feels like the most meaningful thing I
could do with him. We've hired a college student there
who speaks Chinese and speaks English to and he happens
to be Mexican and he's going to walk us through
(26:59):
the square and go through the history of it and
take us into the Forbidden City. There was nothing I
wanted to do more for my son before he goes
off to college and gets to question everything I've ever
taught him about the world than to show him when
people paid the ultimate price to stand up for what
they wanted. The next day we see the Great Wall
(27:19):
of China. That's the whole day. I'm hoping it's not
really eight hours. I'm hoping it's six. And then Dad
and I and my son I'll go back Ben. The
third day, we fly over to see the Terracotta Warriors.
If you're not familiar with this, it's the coolest thing.
An emperor a really long time ago, for his mausoleum,
he made an army of ten thousand unique soldiers. I
(27:45):
think the idea was that if you were approaching, you
would not be able to tell that they weren't people.
Each has an individual face. There are slight differences in
their uniforms, there are slight differences in rank, their hands,
their feet, every single one is uniquely. It was only
found in the last I think thirty or forty years
(28:07):
that's our third day, and then we go back and
we have a fourth day to see around Beijing with
our college student who's going to take us around in
a taxi. And then we have a day of rests
where everybody can take a nice break for each other.
And eventually my dad came around to the idea of
I think it's enough if the point of the trip
(28:29):
is for you to see this thing you want to see,
and the point of the trip for my son is
to do this with you. The point of the trip
for me is not to lose my patience with either
of these men that I love. These are the only
men that I'm related to in my immediate family. These
are the only men that I claim as my nuclear family.
(28:54):
I don't want to argue with them. No city in
China is worth that to me. So I'm keeping small
like I always have. Last summer, when I finished Fire Country,
I went to meet my partner, my boyfriend in Malta.
It was a country I was considering for retirement. It's
part of Europe. It's a little smaller, it's a little
(29:17):
less expensive, and it's really close to North Africa. It
has sort of like the best of Southern Italy and
the best of North Africa, a little bit of Marrakesh
meets Sardinia. If you can imagine if Marrakesh and Sardinia
had a baby, it would be the big island in Malta.
And we went to go scuba diving in Gozo. If
(29:39):
you haven't seen The Deepest Breath, that is the best documentary.
That's what inspired me to go. So some of my
trips come from watching documentaries. I'm an avid documentary watcher,
maybe because I work in television and I don't entirely
shut off if I'm watching a scripted show. Documentaries are
(29:59):
my jam. This was one of the best documentaries I've
ever seen about traveling because it has a huge pull
on your heart. It has a love story between people.
It as a Romeo and Juliette love story. So we
went diving for the blue pearl. We went diving for
the blue hole. Sorry yeah, and it was absolutely worth it.
(30:23):
So on that trip I had to make one exception
because we had gone so far and it was a
long break. I had been filming for months and I
wanted to see some other places in Europe. So what
I did for my five day rule to adjust it was,
I reduced it to four days in multiple places, so
four days in Malta, four days in Sardinia, same travel mate,
(30:47):
and then two days to see other friends in Italy.
So as long as I had a little bit of
a break with my five day rule, I could apply
it towards places and know that the change would help
keep us fresh and keep us as friends, and keep
us respectful of each other, and still keep it to
a time limit where the exhaustion of travel and the
(31:11):
overwhelming part of traveling we were doing on our own.
And that's where I learned so much, so much about
my life this trip to China. At the end of
the day, I feel like it's the final frontier in
healing with my dad. I feel like we had to
(31:31):
learn how to claim each other after the loss of
my mother. When one member of a family dies, I
know that it affects everybody's role to each other, especially
if it's a matriarch or a patriarch. I know for
friends that I've had that grew up with one sick
person in the family, so much of their life was
(31:53):
defined by that sickness, by the energy that sickness takes,
by the care that sickness takes from the rest of
the family. With my mother's passing, there was a chance
for my father and I to do it differently. The
thing that I know, it takes far more courage to
say I'm going to take a break and not speak
(32:14):
to this person right now than the courage it takes
to go to China with him. There will be highs
in China, and there will be exhausted points because of
the jet lack and being sort of out of control,
not knowing the language. But the courage it took for
me to say I need to take a break from
this person or the relationship will be permanently ruined is
(32:38):
one of my proudest things to find when that year
was done, that he hadn't detached from me, that he
hadn't disowned me for it, that he found his own
way to meet me where I was. It is kind
of what I needed. It's kind of what I needed
(32:58):
all along. It's what I needed growing up. It's what
I wished for when she was ill, and we only
got it because we dug a little deeper. For the
people that are looking to travel but feel little limited
by costs, you might hear that nothing that I've spoken
about today had to do with fancy flights, fancy hotels,
(33:22):
really expensive restaurants, the things that have become grammable today.
I think the things that I'm the most interested in
when I look at someone's photos of a trip has
nothing to do with how fancy it is. It has
to do with the meaning behind it. I don't know
what will come out of this trip with my father
(33:43):
physically on the ground, but I know what it's doing
for the three of us. I know that the three
of us have this common bond, and some of it
is surviving each other and surviving our trip to China,
which is really the most important thing people ask me
all the time. Also, just traveling the globe make me
(34:04):
appreciate homework. No, traveling the globe makes me appreciate the globe.
It makes me appreciate the fact that I am not
the center of the universe. The place that I started
is not necessarily the best place in the world, just
because it's mine, the country that I began and can
exist without the countries alongside it. And in this moment,
(34:27):
when America is going through such a transition, it feels
really important to remember that, like we're all connected, now,
there's no version of isolationism that's going to work. It
doesn't work in my heart when I'm home, and it
doesn't work for my country at the moment. So the
traveling is really me reminding myself that there's always more.
(34:51):
There was a day when I went to Anchor Tom
in Cambodia. An Krowad is the most famous, but Anchor
Tom is right next to it. They're both great, and
her time is prettier. It's so old, it's older than
the pyramids. They are religious temples. There are I don't know,
two or three hundred year old trees grown on top
(35:11):
of the walls. That's how old it is. So I
had just lost a friend at the time. A lot
of my travels, my biggest travels come after the loss
of someone. And I was passing by the outskirts of
the temple on my way in, and I was having
a conversation with my friend that passed. Which if that's
(35:31):
not something you do regularly, I highly recommend I have
spectacular relationships with the people in my life who have passed,
because they're easy to talk to. I know what their voices,
and I can share my innermost thoughts and believe that
I can get an answer back. So this friend of
mine who had just passed, I was really feeling her
(35:54):
and my back was hurting as I was hiking around
on these rolling hills alongside the timp pull and air
cut tom and right outside non Pen and I said
to her in my head, I think I'm just getting
old now. I think I was thirty one at the time.
(36:15):
And I looked to my left and there was one
of those enormous trees growing on top of a ten
foot wall. So the wall was I don't know, four
hundred years old and the tree was one hundred and
fifty years old. And it made me burst into laughter,
like literally burst into laughter that I thought I was
(36:37):
really old at thirty one, and there was like, you know,
three centuries but standing beside me, still standing, standing awkwardly
standing on top of each other, is still standing? To me,
that was one of those moments of Okay, I'm not old.
The more I move around the earth, the more I
connect with my spirit and the spirit of the people
(36:59):
that I love, And this is how I learn. Okay,
my friends, I think that's all I have for this
episode of Let's be clear. I really want to thank
Shannon Darty and her friends and her family for keeping
this going, for giving me this hour to speak, for
hopefully inspiring someone to take that trip, and inspiring someone
(37:20):
to maybe take a break from a family member that
they're not feeling right with, because I think that's how
healing can happen. Anybody that's meant to be in your
life will come back when the time is right, and
the little courage to do some honest questioning about what
you want most might lead you to a better relationship. Anyway,
I hope we've awakened your spirit of curiosity and adventure,
(37:42):
and I'm wishing you all safe, happy and healing travels.
Thank you,
This is let's be clear with Shannon Dherty. Hello, let's
be clear. Family. My name's Diane Farr. I like Shannon
Dherty and an actress who's been around for a really
long time, almost the same exact amount of time. We
lost Shannon at fifty three. I'm fifty five. I was
in high school when sorry, I was in college when
(00:24):
she was on nine oh two and Zer and not
working yet, and not working for a long while. It's
took me a long time to get going. But her
impact on my family is maybe unique, or maybe it's
the most universal kind there is. My mom and my
next brother down on the family had a standing date
every week to watch nine oh two and Oh. Today,
(00:46):
I have a teenage kid who's about the age my
brother was then. It's really hard to find things to
do with your teenage son that he's willing to do
with his mother. Most of them don't have it in public.
You're not allowed to touch them, you're not allowed to
touch their hair. Especially the idea of my mother and
my brother sitting on the couch every week so excited
(01:09):
mostly to see what Shannon was going to do, is
one of the best memories I have of them. And
then when I was out of college and in La
hustling looking for work, Shannon had moved on to Charmed.
I got to say, she's clearly a woman ahead of
her time. She was speaking about things long before women
(01:31):
were allowed to speak about them. I've long felt that
America has trouble with ambitious women. They often feel like
we should be in a small box, that women who
use their voice and use their voice to save themselves
are frowned upon. This is like something that's still ongoing.
We're making headway, but I admire Shannon and I'm really
(01:55):
happy to be here today as a guest host. Lindsay
Price was going to join me the morning A nine
on two and o Alum, who's a friend of mine.
We did a show together called Splitting Up Together. We
were so excited to come on and talk about her
experience there, but she's sick. So if I'm ever invited back,
she can't wait to be here. Also, so people will
(02:15):
know me from one of three camps. Mostly it's Rescue
Me and maybe The Job, the first show that I
did with Dennis Leary, the first show that I did
playing a firefighter. I'm currently on a CBS show called
fire Country. Playing a firefighter again. My first time was
just after nine to eleven, playing a New York City firefighter,
(02:35):
and now I play a cal firefighter. I play the
chief now and it's just after the LA fires, So
I have a really strong connection to firefighting. And then
I've been playing it on and off for twenty five
years and it just really gives me an idea of service.
Other things people know me for are either numbers or Roswell.
(02:56):
And the beginning of my career, I was a talk
show host on LOVEE Line with Doctor Drew and Adam Carolla.
We did two hundred episodes on MTV that was me
with the very short hair and the big laugh, and
we were talking about sex, drugs and rock and roll
and the amount of visibility I had was so high
and the money I was making was so small. It
(03:19):
was a crazy time in my life. I imagine, probably
the closest I ever got to what the teenagers were
feeling at nine o two and zero. But I survived
it like everyone there did and went on. I really
thankful that I get to work as an actor. The
most consistent thing in my life that I think tracks
with Shannon, which is I think why I'm here today
(03:43):
is travel. I have been a traveler my whole life,
and I think there was a difference between a traveler
and a tourist. I think I've been to about one
hundred countries. There's an app on the phone called bin
b E E N and you can track all the
places you've been, and it says I've been to forty
four percent of the world. I've done most of this
(04:05):
traveling by myself. I did it mostly when I was impoverished.
I remember my first year out of drama school. I'm
twenty two. I am a full time waitress. That is
the only place I was making a living, and I
was spending almost all of that money on headshots and
mailings and these little workshops you could do to try
(04:27):
and meet an agent. And when I was doing my taxes,
I didn't get the math gene. Know one in my
family got the math gene. So I used to go
home to my parents' house and visit with our nextraor neighbors,
and they would help me with my taxes. I made
fourteen thousand dollars my first year out of school entirely
as a waitress, and I had been to seven countries
that year. So my traveling has nothing to do with money.
(04:50):
It has nothing to do with the hotels that I
stay in. When I go to places, it's mostly to learn.
It's not really like, oh, this would be fun for
me to go somewhere new. Is a little bit like
the pull towards the center of the earth. There is
a gravitational force. It's how I've learned everything in my
life of value. I didn't get a lot out of school.
(05:11):
I watched my teenage kids bored out of their mind
most of the time in school. But I can remember
the first time I was in Israel, traveling to the
Dead Sea and looking around, going, oh, that's what they
were talking about in geography, Or the first time I
was in New Zealand and I saw a fjord and
(05:32):
I was understanding how water could cut land and how
that affects us, And oh, that's what was happening in
the Grand Canyon, and that's what that iceberg in Iceland,
that's what they were talking about, were cut through and
why there's so many of them there. It's also been
really healing for me. Who I travel with, where I go,
(05:53):
how long we do it for, and why we're going.
I went to college in England, so I had traveled
a lot around a lot of Europe. By the time
I was twenty. You know, you could buy a train
pass and I had backpack and I was off on
every one of those holidays. So by the time I
got out of school, I was looking to go to
places that nobody was into yet, and nobody my age
(06:15):
was looking for because they want to go have a
good time in Paris. So I started doing most of
the trips by myself then, and then it just became
clear that I was going to learn more about a
place if I was on my own, and I was
going to meet other travelers. In the early days with
the youth hostels, and there were books that I would take.
It's so easy now at the internet, but Let's Go
(06:38):
books are still my favorite to this day. I will
get a Let's Go book and a Fromer's the highest
end and the lowest end of spending money and compare
the two and figure it out from there. I'm in
the midst of planning a trip that I'm about to
take in two weeks, which is probably the most monumental
for my heart. My dad is turning eighty this year,
(07:02):
And I think, like a lot of our listeners, aging
parents is something we don't talk enough about and how
much work it is and how many decisions there are
to make, And I don't know there if anybody has
a predecessor at this everyone has the ability to live
much longer if they survived the middle part of their life.
(07:23):
And how do we keep our parents as a part
of society. How do we keep them interested? How do
we keep them from becoming feeble if they're home and
they're alone. My dad asked my son to go to China.
This was the strangest thing. My son is about to
turn eighteen. He was visiting colleges in Florida. I'm from
(07:45):
New York. All the people I know in New York
retire in Florida. It's God's waiting room. So my son
was looking at the University of Miami. I think mostly
because he's obsessed with his grandfather. And they went down
to tour it to get I set my son and
they stayed in a hotel and they had a great
time for two days. And my son asked my soon
(08:06):
to be eighty year old dad, what's on your bucket list?
As an octagenarian, what do you still want to do? Grandpa?
And my father said, I've always wanted to see the
Great Wall of China. I got to tell you, I
have never heard of this life dream of his. Never, never, ever.
My father loves the golf channel. It doesn't leave very much.
He doesn't even fly to see us for holidays. He
(08:28):
would rather be home. He's like an old school spy
rather than anyone know his Floridian whereabouts. He'd miss a
holiday with us, which I think adds to the mystique
for my seventeen year old son. My son came home
from this college tour completely annoyed with me, like, Mom,
what is wrong with you? This is your whole deal.
(08:49):
You drag your kids around the whole world, trying to
teach them things about people and food and culture, and
that we're not the center of the universe, nor is
this place that we started from. But you all to
take your father to his life's dream at the Great
Wall of China. I explained that I didn't know this
was his life stream and really wondered how much I
wanted to tell my son about my journey with my father.
(09:13):
When I was growing up, my parents were married my
entire life. They got divorced when I was in my
early thirties, But my dad's main priority was my mom,
which was a really interesting thing to see. You know,
I have children now and you hear all these stories
about people having children and it's like your heart walking
(09:33):
around outside your body in them, and that everything you
do is for your kids. That was not my experience
in my house growing up. My father's goal was to
be closer to my mom, and his kids were kind
of in the way of that. It did not lead
to a great dynamic between us. My mother was also
an alpha female, an outspoken woman who was way ahead
(09:56):
of her time, and that was it's hard for us
as kids inside the house and outside of it. But
then she gets sick. Also. My mom also died from
cancer nine years ago now. She died of pancreatic cancer,
and her sickness, like most, was as soon as she
(10:16):
found out she had it. She knew it was chronic
and terminal and this would be how she went. And
that was not an easy time for my family. Like
so many people around death, there became camps, There became sides,
There became ideas of how things should be done, how
people should behave, and it really split us up. By
(10:38):
the time my mother passed, I hadn't heard from my
father and over a year and a half. They were
divorced twenty years by then, but once she became sick,
my father's goal again was to try and take care
of my mom, even at the cost of our relationship.
(10:59):
After she passed, it took me a solid year to
even consider speaking to my dad. By then, he had
started reaching out saying, that's enough time, that's enough time
for us not to be talking. Please call me, And
then a month later I'd get another voicemail and the
please would be gone, and then I got some yelling voicemails,
(11:19):
and then I had to block him for my own
health and the health of a possible relationship someday. So
a year and a half after my mother died, I
(11:41):
cut off all connection to my dad. I had three
little kids. I was working on a TV show in
la It was called Splitting Up Together, the one that
I did with Lindsay Price, and it was a really
hard time. I also was going through a divorce myself,
three kids after twelve years of marriage, which in the
(12:01):
wake of my mother's passing. Not speaking to the rest
of my family. It was really dark, so I cut
off all contact for the hope of what could be
later when I did some healing on my own, and
I did a lot of healing. There was a lot
of therapy. There was a lot of traveling with the kids.
The first thing I think I did once my mom
(12:23):
had passed and I was no longer married, was I
took them to a dude ranch in Wyoming. Our family
goal has always been one country a year and two states.
If we're American, we must see America. We must learn America,
because it's so polarized at the moment. What I feel
in the city of Los Angeles or growing up in
(12:45):
New York feels like it has nothing to do with
Kentucky at the moment, or Nebraska or Texas. So I've
taken my kids to two states every year. So we
were in Wyoming at a dude ranch because there was
a lot of physical life activities for them, and I
knew I could keep them safe even though I was
a single mom. My dad knew nothing of my whereabouts.
(13:09):
And this whole year went by, and at the end
of it, I thought, Okay, let me bee a big girl.
I've been to a lot of therapy. I had sort
of mourned the relationship with my father I thought I
wanted and I was willing to accept the one I had.
That was a lot of conversations about what I wish
he had said, or what I wanted him to say,
(13:30):
or what I wanted to be when I wanted to
be in focus when my mother was dying. And when
I unblocked him on my phone, this strange thing happened.
I basically allowed his emails and his phone his phone
number to come into my phone number, and it released
twelve voicemails from him over the course of that year
(13:51):
that I had blocked him. My father left me a
voicemail once a month. They were still angry in the beginning.
The first three of them were demand about what I
was required to do duty what he believed was my
job as his daughter, and the next three we're a
little more passive, and then the last six were a
(14:13):
straight progression upward to the relationship we really want to
have with me. By the last one, he was saying,
I love you very much. If you call me back,
that's great, and if you don't, I just wanted to
let you know that today, and that felt like exactly
where I wanted to be. That felt like the relationship
(14:33):
I wanted to have. We had our first conversation two
and a half years after my mother's passing. I had
called a friend beforehand to sort of warm up, to
give myself a time limit, and the same friend was
willing to take my call. After this call with my dad,
it went pretty well, and then we had to do
(14:55):
some figuring out, so we went back to text for
a while. In the beginning, you would send me a
lot of pictures of my mother who had passed before
she was sick, to remind me who she was and
who he missed, and I had to keep saying to
him gently, I don't miss the same woman that you miss.
We don't have the same experience. Please stop sending me pictures,
(15:16):
and over time that was hurt. It was a very
slow rule. It took five years before I saw my dad.
We brought him here for Christmas with the kids. My
kids missed him terribly. He's really fun, isn't it amazing
the difference between a parent and a grandparent. He was
a really good time for them. So cut to three
(15:37):
years later, my son is visiting with my father and
makes this request to go to the Great Wall of
China as a non traveling person to my seventeen year
old kid. Now, my son comes home and he's totally
annoyed with me for failing to do this for Grandpa.
And I have to say to my son, do you
know how hard it is to go to China. It's
(15:58):
a really longflo there's nothing direct, there is no English
on the ground. When we get there, our cell phones
won't work, our credit cards won't work. I know, Bijing
is opening up from the communist government that's been there
a long time, and it's opening itself to travelers. Air
(16:18):
quality is really bad. Your dad is eighty years old.
The Wall, the Great Wall is a lot of walking.
Oh and he wants to see the Terracotta warriors. Okay,
well that's in a different city than Beijing and requires
a plane ticket. The truth is, as soon as they
said it, I knew I was going. I didn't really
want to go. Nor is a moody teenager and an
(16:42):
octagenarian my favorite travel buddies. But the only thing I
could hear as this was happening was bucket list. Bucket List,
this is my dad's bucket list dream, meaning he's not
going to be here for that much much longer. He
has spent more time on the planet than he has left.
(17:04):
And the truth is, I don't have that much time
with my son before he goes off to college. My son,
like I was saying at the beginning about my brother
and my mom watching Shannon on nine O two and zero,
there's very little my son asks to do with me
at this phase in his life. I got to stay
home a lot of time when they were small. It
(17:24):
was the joy of being an actor. There were hiatuses,
there were times where I could be home for a
lot of it. That's been dwindling with these teenage years.
That's been dwindling quickly when he got his license. So
I have about five more months with my son every
day in the house, and then he starts his own journey.
(17:44):
So the two of them have concocted maybe the most
difficult place I could ever imagine, with the most gigantic
time zone, the longest flight. And I put it to
both of them because this is supposed to be a
learning experience and said, okay, the Chinese government requires a
visa for Americans to visit, so if you want to
(18:05):
go on this trip. Here's my only ask. I'll do
everything else. I'll do the immunizations, i will work out
the credit cards and the phones and find the one week.
The three of us can do this, and frankly, I
will pay for it, because I'm the only one with
a job out of the three of us. But you
guys just have to get your own visa, because the
visa is an eleven page document you must fill out
(18:28):
and then go to a consulate and wait online two
times for you wait online to drop it off, and
you wait online to pick it up. I'm just going
to go ahead and admit that neither one of them
did their visa and we're still going to China. The
prep for this has unleashed some things about why I
think traveling is so important, about why I think I
(18:52):
learn more from it than anything else. In the eleven
page visa process with my dad, the Chinese government wanted
to know a lot of things that mostly pertained to
working people. Who was your last employer, what is their
cell phone number? What are your parents' names? Do you
have anyone of Chinese descent? What are your grandparents' names?
(19:15):
Most of this doesn't really apply to my eighty year
old dad, but there's no option to opt out of
these questions. We had to find my father's and worked
in twenty years. We had to find old supervisors and
phone numbers. We had to find birth dates of relatives
he's never had. We are not Asian, but I understood
(19:39):
the diplomacy between our countries is always a little bit tough,
so we were filling in everything as best we can.
It became clear that my father didn't know his grandfather's name.
He'd only met him once. He was tracking down nieces
and nephews to try and ask them, he couldn't find it.
I spent a lot of time on the phone with
(19:59):
my father well, digging through boxes, boxes of information about
his family that he started sharing with me and that
I started sharing with my son, And quickly it became
clear to me that this is the reason why we
were planning this trip. Sometimes I find like the tourist
things really boring. After I had finished most of Europe
(20:21):
and some of South America, I made a promise to
myself that I never needed to go into another church.
I never needed to visit another stained glass window. I
had seen enough of those when I'm going. I'm kind
of going to figure out what a local does on
New Year's Eve or Christmas Eve or their version of
Fourth of July, depending where I am. But the lead
(20:43):
up to this trip was teaching me things about my
father and my son that I didn't know that are
kind of maybe be more important than the trip itself.
By the time we found my father's grandfather's name, me
and my son and my father were overjoyed. It was
like we had accomplished something and we hadn't even gone yet.
(21:07):
Waiting online at the embassy with my son here in
Los Angeles. My son is half Korean, his dad is Korean,
and we're walking in and it's mostly Asian people applying
for vieces and I was probably the only white person
inside that day. And when we got up to the counter,
(21:28):
the woman behind it did something really interesting. It was
like one of those moments where you think people are
different and you look at language assessment and you believe
it has something to do with intelligence. And in one
moment she looked at me and said, where is his
father from? No, sorry, she said, where is your husband from?
(21:48):
I was so taken. Aback, I haven't been married in
nine years now, and I said, Korea. What she was
trying to do is find out was if we were
of Chinese descent, because that would be a very big
difference in the visa. And she didn't ask him, and
she didn't ask me about him. She just asked me
(22:09):
like a three step out question because she needed the
information to make sure they were safe. It was the
most like crazy James BONDI diplomatically done question I ever heard.
And I was like, well done, lady at the consulate.
It took three days. We got our visa. My father
had to fly to New York and visit all of
(22:29):
my brothers. So family happening all over the place from
this one trip, and we're leaving for my sun's spring break.
Which leads me to the other most important rule of
travel that I have had for thirty five years that
has never done me wrong, and that is the five
day rule. When I go traveling with anyone, I have
(22:52):
a five day rule. This started with like being twenty
two years old, meeting a guy in Vietnam and he
seemed kind of cool, and you had a little bit
of broken English, and you had a great time, and
you had a mad crush and there was lots of
making out, and then on the fifth day, you guys
went out to meet some other travelers for dinner, and
(23:14):
you realized you hated his coat, and therefore you didn't
like him at all. It was like the crushes that
I would have on either a country or a person,
or a place or an itinerary. Some crazy activity like
I don't know, river boating in New Zealand could last
for five days no matter what. I could have a
good time with absolutely anyone for five days. But after
(23:36):
five days doesn't feel like friendship anymore. It's starting to
feel like need. It's starting to feel like family. It's
starting to feel like people lean on each other in
a way that isn't really conducive to spending twenty four
hours a day together. So I have a five day rule.
When my parents come to visit me from LA I
have a five day rule. You can stay in Los
Angeles as long as you want, but you can stay
(23:57):
in my house for five days. I have a boyfriend
now of two years, and I kind of employ the
same role. He's from Iceland. He lives in Hawaii. When
he comes to stay here, we stay together five days.
So China is a really big trip to take. It's
a really big trip to take for only five days.
(24:18):
But again I go back to moody teenager who does
not like to get up even in his own house
when we have.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Something to do on a Saturday, and octogenarian dad who's
really going to be out of sorts. This is really
different food, really different weather. It's twenty hours of flying,
We're staying in hotels.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
It's a lot. I don't need to push my dad.
I know what he wants to see. I know what
he wants to do. We're doing five days. We're going
to take a little smaller, easier trip. My daughters are
(25:05):
both away at school and they go to school in Switzerland.
So after five days there, I'm going to take them
to Switzerland for four because they felt like a nice
easy country to see. Because I would love my son
to see where his sisters go to school. I would
love my daughters to get to have their grandfather visit
them where they're doing their education. And it's a lot
(25:29):
slower to do. We can order French fries in Switzerland
because I know how to say that word. So that's
how we're washing off. And this five day rule was
absurd when I first said, it's my father that we're
going to go all the way there and we're only
going to spend five days. When I expined him, we
land at four o'clock in the afternoon, and that night
we go to Tianeman Square to take an eighteen year
(25:51):
old boy to Tiananmen Square on his first night that
far away. My family has been to Korea before because
the kids of Korean descent. We also visited Japan. I
have been to Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong.
(26:16):
I went to Hong Kong this summer. It was passed
back to China to see it before it changed over.
We have been to India, Keshmir, I have. I'm trying
to remember them off the top of my head. I'm
seeing a map in my head I've been to I
(26:38):
think I've been to more of Asia than anywhere else.
But Tianneman Square, for a boy who's about to go
off to college, feels like the most meaningful thing I
could do with him. We've hired a college student there
who speaks Chinese and speaks English to and he happens
to be Mexican and he's going to walk us through
(26:59):
the square and go through the history of it and
take us into the Forbidden City. There was nothing I
wanted to do more for my son before he goes
off to college and gets to question everything I've ever
taught him about the world than to show him when
people paid the ultimate price to stand up for what
they wanted. The next day we see the Great Wall
(27:19):
of China. That's the whole day. I'm hoping it's not
really eight hours. I'm hoping it's six. And then Dad
and I and my son I'll go back Ben. The
third day, we fly over to see the Terracotta Warriors.
If you're not familiar with this, it's the coolest thing.
An emperor a really long time ago, for his mausoleum,
he made an army of ten thousand unique soldiers. I
(27:45):
think the idea was that if you were approaching, you
would not be able to tell that they weren't people.
Each has an individual face. There are slight differences in
their uniforms, there are slight differences in rank, their hands,
their feet, every single one is uniquely. It was only
found in the last I think thirty or forty years
(28:07):
that's our third day, and then we go back and
we have a fourth day to see around Beijing with
our college student who's going to take us around in
a taxi. And then we have a day of rests
where everybody can take a nice break for each other.
And eventually my dad came around to the idea of
I think it's enough if the point of the trip
(28:29):
is for you to see this thing you want to see,
and the point of the trip for my son is
to do this with you. The point of the trip
for me is not to lose my patience with either
of these men that I love. These are the only
men that I'm related to in my immediate family. These
are the only men that I claim as my nuclear family.
(28:54):
I don't want to argue with them. No city in
China is worth that to me. So I'm keeping small
like I always have. Last summer, when I finished Fire Country,
I went to meet my partner, my boyfriend in Malta.
It was a country I was considering for retirement. It's
part of Europe. It's a little smaller, it's a little
(29:17):
less expensive, and it's really close to North Africa. It
has sort of like the best of Southern Italy and
the best of North Africa, a little bit of Marrakesh
meets Sardinia. If you can imagine if Marrakesh and Sardinia
had a baby, it would be the big island in Malta.
And we went to go scuba diving in Gozo. If
(29:39):
you haven't seen The Deepest Breath, that is the best documentary.
That's what inspired me to go. So some of my
trips come from watching documentaries. I'm an avid documentary watcher,
maybe because I work in television and I don't entirely
shut off if I'm watching a scripted show. Documentaries are
(29:59):
my jam. This was one of the best documentaries I've
ever seen about traveling because it has a huge pull
on your heart. It has a love story between people.
It as a Romeo and Juliette love story. So we
went diving for the blue pearl. We went diving for
the blue hole. Sorry yeah, and it was absolutely worth it.
(30:23):
So on that trip I had to make one exception
because we had gone so far and it was a
long break. I had been filming for months and I
wanted to see some other places in Europe. So what
I did for my five day rule to adjust it was,
I reduced it to four days in multiple places, so
four days in Malta, four days in Sardinia, same travel mate,
(30:47):
and then two days to see other friends in Italy.
So as long as I had a little bit of
a break with my five day rule, I could apply
it towards places and know that the change would help
keep us fresh and keep us as friends, and keep
us respectful of each other, and still keep it to
a time limit where the exhaustion of travel and the
(31:11):
overwhelming part of traveling we were doing on our own.
And that's where I learned so much, so much about
my life this trip to China. At the end of
the day, I feel like it's the final frontier in
healing with my dad. I feel like we had to
(31:31):
learn how to claim each other after the loss of
my mother. When one member of a family dies, I
know that it affects everybody's role to each other, especially
if it's a matriarch or a patriarch. I know for
friends that I've had that grew up with one sick
person in the family, so much of their life was
(31:53):
defined by that sickness, by the energy that sickness takes,
by the care that sickness takes from the rest of
the family. With my mother's passing, there was a chance
for my father and I to do it differently. The
thing that I know, it takes far more courage to
say I'm going to take a break and not speak
(32:14):
to this person right now than the courage it takes
to go to China with him. There will be highs
in China, and there will be exhausted points because of
the jet lack and being sort of out of control,
not knowing the language. But the courage it took for
me to say I need to take a break from
this person or the relationship will be permanently ruined is
(32:38):
one of my proudest things to find when that year
was done, that he hadn't detached from me, that he
hadn't disowned me for it, that he found his own
way to meet me where I was. It is kind
of what I needed. It's kind of what I needed
(32:58):
all along. It's what I needed growing up. It's what
I wished for when she was ill, and we only
got it because we dug a little deeper. For the
people that are looking to travel but feel little limited
by costs, you might hear that nothing that I've spoken
about today had to do with fancy flights, fancy hotels,
(33:22):
really expensive restaurants, the things that have become grammable today.
I think the things that I'm the most interested in
when I look at someone's photos of a trip has
nothing to do with how fancy it is. It has
to do with the meaning behind it. I don't know
what will come out of this trip with my father
(33:43):
physically on the ground, but I know what it's doing
for the three of us. I know that the three
of us have this common bond, and some of it
is surviving each other and surviving our trip to China,
which is really the most important thing people ask me
all the time. Also, just traveling the globe make me
(34:04):
appreciate homework. No, traveling the globe makes me appreciate the globe.
It makes me appreciate the fact that I am not
the center of the universe. The place that I started
is not necessarily the best place in the world, just
because it's mine, the country that I began and can
exist without the countries alongside it. And in this moment,
(34:27):
when America is going through such a transition, it feels
really important to remember that, like we're all connected, now,
there's no version of isolationism that's going to work. It
doesn't work in my heart when I'm home, and it
doesn't work for my country at the moment. So the
traveling is really me reminding myself that there's always more.
(34:51):
There was a day when I went to Anchor Tom
in Cambodia. An Krowad is the most famous, but Anchor
Tom is right next to it. They're both great, and
her time is prettier. It's so old, it's older than
the pyramids. They are religious temples. There are I don't know,
two or three hundred year old trees grown on top
(35:11):
of the walls. That's how old it is. So I
had just lost a friend at the time. A lot
of my travels, my biggest travels come after the loss
of someone. And I was passing by the outskirts of
the temple on my way in, and I was having
a conversation with my friend that passed. Which if that's
(35:31):
not something you do regularly, I highly recommend I have
spectacular relationships with the people in my life who have passed,
because they're easy to talk to. I know what their voices,
and I can share my innermost thoughts and believe that
I can get an answer back. So this friend of
mine who had just passed, I was really feeling her
(35:54):
and my back was hurting as I was hiking around
on these rolling hills alongside the timp pull and air
cut tom and right outside non Pen and I said
to her in my head, I think I'm just getting
old now. I think I was thirty one at the time.
(36:15):
And I looked to my left and there was one
of those enormous trees growing on top of a ten
foot wall. So the wall was I don't know, four
hundred years old and the tree was one hundred and
fifty years old. And it made me burst into laughter,
like literally burst into laughter that I thought I was
(36:37):
really old at thirty one, and there was like, you know,
three centuries but standing beside me, still standing, standing awkwardly
standing on top of each other, is still standing? To me,
that was one of those moments of Okay, I'm not old.
The more I move around the earth, the more I
connect with my spirit and the spirit of the people
(36:59):
that I love, And this is how I learn. Okay,
my friends, I think that's all I have for this
episode of Let's be clear. I really want to thank
Shannon Darty and her friends and her family for keeping
this going, for giving me this hour to speak, for
hopefully inspiring someone to take that trip, and inspiring someone
(37:20):
to maybe take a break from a family member that
they're not feeling right with, because I think that's how
healing can happen. Anybody that's meant to be in your
life will come back when the time is right, and
the little courage to do some honest questioning about what
you want most might lead you to a better relationship. Anyway,
I hope we've awakened your spirit of curiosity and adventure,
(37:42):
and I'm wishing you all safe, happy and healing travels.
Thank you,
Host
Shannen Doherty
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