Stuck in Europe, his ticket home was eBay bid
In two months, across four continents and 17 countries -- including a wrong turn into Poland on their way to Prague -- two young men ate cockroaches and learned to drive tractors and swam in cold rivers. They watched snake charmers in Morocco and rode dirt bikes in Vietnam. By their estimation, they drank 300 beers.
Last week, one of the men, Smith Anderson, got ready to fly home to Boston. But his friend, Josh Minney, kept getting the same message from every ATM machine he met -- insufficient funds. So, Minney, 20, stranded in England, posted an ad on
On Monday night, the trip that began in Tokyo ended at a psychic tea room in Quincy. Darlene Anderson (no relation to Smith), whose family owns Regina Russell's Tea Room, claimed her $935 prize. As Anderson, 54, and her family waited at Logan International Airport, she held a sign that stated: "Josh Minney, Welcome back to the USA."
When Minney walked through the security gate, he was startled by the size of the crowd waiting for him -- Anderson's family, Smith Anderson and another friend, and a few reporters. "First things first," he said, walking toward his former traveling buddy. "I've got to give this guy a hug. It's been way too long."
Then he met his new employer and hugged her, too. "I've had a good flight, a great trip, and now I'm going to Quincy," he said. "It couldn't get much better than this."
The idea for the trip was conceived in May, when Smith Anderson, newly graduated from Northeastern University, impulsively bought a one-way ticket to Japan. He called Minney, a fellow student from Northeastern, and asked him to meet him there. In early June, the friends arrived in Tokyo. They documented their trip in their blog, "Stories from the Road," promising "an epic adventure that could lead [to] disease, sickness and, more than likely, death."
"Had a great lunch by the train station where I ate a wasabi something or [other] and started sweating from every pore; all the Japanese laughed at me," Minney wrote on his second day in the country.
They traveled to Thailand and Vietnam, where they rode dirt bikes through the countryside, dodging water buffalo, and played soccer with children. "We pass people who have never seen Americans and we feel like rock stars the way they wave at us, and come out of their houses when they hear us coming," Minney wrote on the blog.
They flew to Morocco, where they lamented the dearth of alcohol, and, finally, to Germany for the last leg of their trip. Along the way, Minney lost his cellphone in Cambodia, his watch in Japan, and his video camera in Italy. By the end of last month, Anderson was getting ready to fly home, but Minney had spent all of his money.
The two friends began plotting to get Minney home. They considered staging "Bring Back Josh" fund-raising parties around the world. Minney thought about hopping on "a boat headed anywhere and arrive somewhere at sometime." Then Anderson came up with the idea of selling Minney on eBay.
They posted the listing, which described their two-month odyssey, and ended with Minney's plea for retrieval from Europe in exchange for a week's worth of labor. He offered to do pretty much anything, including painting, baby-sitting, ditch-digging, singing, opening junk mail, and lawn-mowing.
His parents, who decided to let their son find his own way home, were skeptical: "I thought, 'Who would buy my son?' " Minney's mother, Maureen, said in a telephone interview from their Los Angeles home. She was relieved, she said, when she learned who had bid the highest.
"I feel more positive about this," she said. "Better a psychic than a psycho."
Minney said she didn't have money to bail out her son. Smith Anderson thought he saw a parental lesson in the making.
"If it came as a last resort, I'm sure his parents would buy him a ticket," he said. "His father had the mentality, 'You got yourself in this mess and didn't budget your money correctly; you get yourself out of it.' My Dad would say the same thing. We knew we were out for a decent amount of time; we had to budget correctly."
Bidding started slowly the night of July 20: Someone offered $2.50. Two days later, he was up to $9.97, not even enough for cab fare from Logan to Northeastern. But, by the end of July 23, 14 bidders had raised the price to $410. Someone asked Minney whether he knew how to dig graves.
"It's kind of a gamble," Smith Anderson said as the two were waiting for the bidding to end. "He could end up doing something terrible. He could end up doing something really fun with someone who is really generous and understands what it feels like to be in this situation."
And then the bids took off. In the final two days of the auction, two bidders, Anderson and an anonymous bidder duked it out until Anderson won Minney, for $935.
At the tea room, Minney will work the host desk, greeting customers and taking information about their psychic reading requests. Anderson, who is a psychic herself, had heard about Minney's plight in a news report.
"I was in a similar situation once and I was stuck in Europe," she said. "I felt bad for him. It just happened to work out."
And, she said, "Being a psychic myself, I knew it was right."
Mary Ann Georgantopoulos can be reached at mgeorgantopoulos@globe.com. Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com. 