Standing in line for a taxi, in a hot and unfamiliar country thousands of miles from home, Tony and Karen Webb were feeling overwhelmed.
It was October 1987 in Freeport, a popular tourist destination in the Bahamas. Tony and Karen were visiting the island from Surrey, England. The couple were in their early 20s. They’d met as teenagers at a church youth club, fallen in love and enjoyed a recent, joyful wedding celebration. Never having traveled much before, they’d decided to go big for their honeymoon, stopping off at Miami, heading out on a Bahamian cruise and enjoying a stint in Freeport to soak up sandy beaches, sunshine and new experiences.
Arriving in Freeport, they’d marveled at the blue of the ocean and gasped at palm trees. They couldn’t wait to explore.
“It was a big holiday,” Tony tells CNN Travel today. “Going over to the Bahamas… Wow, I never thought we’d do something like that.”
But now it was time to make their way to their hotel, and Tony and Karen were suddenly feeling out of their depth. This was the era before smartphones, and the couple couldn’t recall the name of the accommodation. Waiting for their cab, they were both panicking a little, trying and failing to hide their stress from each other.
“We were flapping around with paperwork, looking up where our hotel was, and what the hotel was called, standing in line, in a taxi queue,” recalls Tony. “We were obviously looking very naive and inexperienced. And then we had a tap on our shoulder.”
Tony and Karen turned around to a grinning man, dressed in a brightly colored shirt, sunglasses balanced on his head.
“How’s it going?” he asked, cheerfully, in an American accent. “Sounds like you might be going to the same hotel as us.”
“We were obviously looking very naive and inexperienced. And then we had a tap on our shoulder…”
Tony Webb, recalling the moment he met Mary Beth and Alan
He gestured to the woman standing next to him, who was also smiling welcomingly. The two introduced themselves as Alan and Mary Beth Balkin, a young couple visiting from Massachusetts.
Mary Beth had noticed Tony and Karen looking stressed in the taxi line. Somehow, they looked even more stressed now that Alan was suddenly addressing them.
“I was worried that he was scaring the heck out of them,” Mary Beth tells CNN Travel today, laughing.
She wasn’t totally off the mark with this observation. Karen recalls hearing a “loud Yank” speak up in the line and immediately thinking: “Oh no.”
“I didn’t know any Americans back then,” she says. As a self-confessed introverted Brit, she was worried they were going to be stuck making polite chitchat with an extroverted American and further delay their attempts to get to their hotel.
But Alan was unperturbed by the British couple’s reaction. He noted that they “looked like scared mice” but recognized they were simply inexperienced travelers who needed a friendly face and a helping hand.
He mentioned he and Mary Beth had visited Freeport before, stayed in what sounded like Tony and Karen’s hotel on that occasion and remembered how to get there.
And that’s how Tony, Karen, Alan and Mary Beth ended up bundled into a taxi together, luggage piled in the back.
Tony wasn’t unhappy about this turn of events.
“I valued being guided around, if I’m honest,” says Tony. “We were somewhere that we didn’t really know much about.”
And as the American couple quizzed the Brits during the cab journey, Tony and Karen found themselves warming to Alan and Mary Beth. The Americans were friendly and welcoming.
“They’re just fantastic,” Karen recalls thinking.
When Alan discovered it was Tony and Karen’s honeymoon, he told the British couple it would be their honor if he and Mary Beth could buy them their first drink in the Bahamas.
When they arrived at the hotel, the foursome headed straight to the bar, “where they bought us our first Bahama Mama,” recalls Tony. “That was an introduction in itself to a lovely drink, which we continued drinking through most of the trip.”
“As one does,” adds Alan.
The two couples clinked glasses of the rum-based cocktail together and toasted the beginning of Tony and Karen’s marriage — and the beginning of their vacations.
What the foursome didn’t realise was that this was also the beginning of a friendship that would span decades and continents.
“This was a real chance encounter that has stood the test of time,” says Alan today.
After that first night drinking cocktails, Alan, Mary Beth, Tony and Karen spent the whole weekend enjoying Freeport together. They turned out to all be on the same boat back to Miami, and enjoyed a night out there, too.
The more reserved British couple surprised themselves by how comfortable they felt in Alan and Mary Beth’s presence, while the Americans enjoyed hearing about life on the other side of the pond.
The group suggests that back in the 1980s, there seemed like more of a gap between American and British experiences. Alan and Mary Beth had never really befriended Brits before the fall of 1987. Tony and Karen had never really encountered any Americans in Surrey.
“So we were finding out about each other and where we’d all come from — different places, culturally, family-wise, it was a bit of a discovery time,” recalls Tony of that first weekend in Freeport.
In between discussions of cultural differences, the couples went out dancing, staying out into the early hours, drinking Bahama Mama cocktails together and sharing stories.
And then their vacations took them in different directions, and they had to go their separate ways. The two couples promised to stay in touch, not totally believing it even as they said the words and swapped addresses and phone numbers.
“I remember thinking, ‘What a fun weekend,’” says Karen. “We were so pleased that they’d made that whole weekend, but not thinking we’d become friends.”
They all figured it’d become “the usual kind of holiday relationship,” as Tony puts it: fun, but fleeting.
“In all honesty, none of us probably could have imagined what then started to happen over the years.”
Looking back today, neither couple are sure who made the first move once they were back home.
Maybe Tony and Karen wrote a letter to Alan and Mary Beth, thanking them for making their honeymoon so special. Or perhaps Alan and Mary Beth sent a postcard to Tony and Karen, wishing them the best back home in the UK.
All they know is, somehow, a letter correspondence began. And despite the ocean between them, the slow international mail, the return to busy lives and jobs, the correspondence didn’t die off.
“And then the letters turned into audio tapes,” recalls Tony.
The two couples would record themselves chatting into their cassette player, talking about their lives, the ups and downs of their week, reminiscing about the Freeport weekend. Then they’d package up the cassettes into parcels and mail them across the Atlantic.
Receiving the post was so exciting, says Tony: “Honestly, the anticipation when we got these audios…”
It was thrilling for everyone. Mary Beth remembers sitting with Alan, listening to what were essentially early voice notes from Tony and Karen, recorded from their apartment in the UK, now reverberating around Mary Beth and Alan’s Massachusetts living room.
“We used to listen to them all the way through the first time,” she recalls. “And then the second time we’d listen, but we had to take notes, because we need to answer them back. And then we’d sit down and get ready to do it. It was all part of the experience.”
The four friends rarely phoned one another, international calls were too expensive back then. But via their cassette tape recordings and letters, a plan started to form: They’d reunite in the summer of 1988.
Tony and Karen — who’d enjoyed their first taste of travel adventure on their honeymoon — booked tickets to fly to Boston to visit Mary Beth and Alan.
When they were reunited, the conversation was just as easy, if not more so, than their time in the Bahamas. The friendship had deepened over the year apart, thanks to the cassette tape correspondence. The two couples settled into an immediate, easy rapport.
Tony and Karen loved getting an insight into Mary Beth and Alan’s everyday life. They were introduced to all their neighbors and friends. They were introduced to Mary Beth’s parents on a day trip to New York City. Everyone marveled at the story of how the two couples had met in a taxi line and become friends.
“At that time, people generally didn’t meet people from other countries and keep in contact,” reflects Tony. “It was fairly unusual, but we really did keep in contact through the audio tapes.”
“This was a real chance encounter that has stood the test of time.”
Alan Webb, on the enduring friendship with the Balkins
In person, it was all the more obvious that the friendship was defined by a sense of equality. It wasn’t that Tony and Alan were friends, and Mary Beth and Karen were another, separate twosome. Instead, they all valued each other’s company, got something different out of each interaction and each pairing.
“We’re all quite different in our own personalities, and I think we complement each other, so being around as a group of four, it’s always quite an easy thing to do,” says Tony.
“It sounds corny, but we all shared the same value system, as well,” adds Alan.
That summer, Mary Beth found herself reflecting that Tony and Karen were some of the first friends she’d made outside of the school, college or work bubble. It was the first friendship she’d had to work at, but it didn’t feel like hard work at all.
“And they were really our first friends that didn’t live nearby,” she reflects.
A couple of years later, Mary Beth and Alan traveled to the UK to visit Tony and Karen. On this vacation, the British couple introduced the Americans to their gang of close friends in the UK.
At first, Mary Beth and Alan felt slightly on the outside.
“They were all talking amongst themselves…” recalls Alan.
“….And we couldn’t understand what they were saying,” says Mary Beth.
But once the Americans tuned into the Britishisms, they felt quickly welcomed into Tony and Karen’s friendship group. They all got on together, and Mary Beth and Alan enjoyed getting an insight into how twenty and thirtysomethings lived in the UK.
“There are certain myths that Americans think about Brits, and they were all crushed. Like these guys stay at pubs all day long. Well, that’s just not the case,” says Alan, laughing.
After Mary Beth and Alan’s trip to the UK, a pattern emerged: They’d oscillate between visiting Tony and Karen in England and hosting them in the US. They also channeled the spirit of their first meeting and started planning vacations together — to destinations like the Spanish island of Lanzarote or the beaches of Portugal.
And as they made their way through their 20s and 30s, the four friends only became more entwined in each other’s lives, despite the distance.
Traveling to visit each other only added “to the excitement and the joy of doing stuff together,” says Tony.
And as time passed and technology changed, phone calls gradually became cheaper and helped maintain the transatlantic friendship.
“You might not actually have physically seen each other for a year, but it doesn’t feel like that. It’s just so easy.”
Karen Webb
Plus, whenever they reunited it was like they’d never been apart.
“You might not actually have physically seen each other for a year, but it doesn’t feel like that,” says Karen. “It’s just so easy.”
In time, Tony and Karen welcomed two children. Mary Beth and Alan never had kids, but quickly became surrogate parents to their British friends’ sons. And as the children grew up, that relationship became its own thing too.
“Our kids are just as comfortable with them as we are,” says Karen.
“They ship their kids over here,” says Alan. “They say, ‘Go stay with Uncle Alan.’”
“They’re family,” says Karen, smiling.
Today, nearly 40 years since Tony and Karen encountered Mary Beth and Alan in the Freeport taxi line, it’s one word — family — that the foursome feels defines their relationship.
When the friends speak to CNN Travel, they’re sitting in Tony and Karen’s home in the UK. Alan and Mary Beth are over from the US for the visit. They all sit side by side, laughing as they look back and look forward, referring to decades-old jokes while simultaneously making plans for the future.
They all still enjoy telling the story of how they met.
“We’ve all explained this story many, many, many times to many people. And I always say it’s just been a fantastic privilege,” says Tony. “That’s the word I would use.”
The four remain aware that their friendship is something special.
“We’ve all had holidays where we might meet people, spend time with them if you’re in a resort, maybe meet up for dinner, but never kept in touch like this,” says Mary Beth.
“We’ve all had holidays where we might meet people…but never kept in touch like this.”
Mary Beth Balkin
The four friends are now in their 50s and 60s. They’ve known each other for most of their lives. This includes being there for each other through good and bad times. They say they’ve all offered each other the support they need to navigate every chapter of life.
“A few of us have lost our parents,” says Tony. “When things like that happen, it’s a family. We share and help each other.”
“We know if we need them, or they need us, they’ll always be there and we’ll be there for them,” says Karen.
“We do rely on each other,” agrees Mary Beth.
The two couples also still enjoy adventuring together and making new memories: “Pretty much every year we’ve met up somewhere, and really enjoy each other,” says Tony. And over the decades Alan and Mary Beth have also become closer and closer to Tony and Karen’s British friends. For Alan’s 40th, 50th and 60th birthdays, “a boatload of Brits” of all ages came over to the US to help him celebrate.
“It’s an honor, it’s been an honor,” says Alan of becoming friends with the wider group.
“And it all came from these two,” he says, putting an arm around Tony and Karen. “It’s a love story. It’s been a love story for 38 years, it really has.”
