MOIESE - What they wanted to do is sail around the world.

The French couple dove into the project, studying sailing, learning about navigational charts, researching ports of call, mapping out routes, spending holidays at sailing camps.

Every night before they turned in, they turned out the lights in their bedroom in Paris and tied knots in ropes. They wanted to be so good at it they could do it in the dark.

Four years into their mid-life adventure, the husband and wife have tied up here for a several days, in landlocked Moiese.

As they prepared to sail around the world, you see, they discovered something.

The husband gets seasick. Very seasick.

Nothing was capable of preventing it, or lessening it.

Undeterred, the couple is still out to see the world.

They're just driving around it.

They've driven through the northernmost reaches of Finland and sand dunes in the Middle East. They've spent a year and a half criss-crossing Australia.

This latest leg of their journey began in June in Vancouver, British Columbia, and has taken them to Inuvik, far above the Arctic Circle, and now down into Montana.

When they're done with this part of the trip, they'll be in Argentina, at the southernmost point of South America.

Their names are Robert and Martine, and while they told us their last name, they asked us not to use it, with good reason. The kidnapping of foreigners is a serious threat in some countries they'll be visiting, and they don't want to advertise their arrival.

Together for 20 years when they began the trip in 2005, the couple says they always talked about the places they'd like to see when they retired.

"It was in the air for many years, that we'll travel when we retire," says Martine, who is 50. "I just brought it up before retirement age, and we jumped the gun by a few years."

She was an executive "headhunter" in Paris, often hooking up American corporations starting up in Europe with the local talent they would need. Robert, 51, was in the software business, working for American corporations such as IBM, Dun and Bradstreet, and Oracle.

"Which probably explains why we both speak English better than you might expect," Robert says.

"It was an exciting, fast-paced life," Martine says. But, her husband adds, "One day you realize life is going on and you're not doing the things you wanted to do since you were 12."

So they decided to see the world while they were both still relatively young.

They're in no hurry. Robert and Martine estimate it will take between three and four years to travel through North, Central and

South America before reaching Ushuaia, their ultimate destination in Argentina.

"We were in a fast-paced rat race in our former lives," Martina explains. "The last thing we wanted was to be on a schedule again. This trip is not about the landscapes, it's about the people, getting to know their cultures. We want to build friendships. That's not done by rushing through a place."

There have been times when they have averaged as little as 30 miles a day - often because they spend several days in one place.

They sleep in their vehicle, cook most of their own food, and rarely pull into a campground unless they're in a national park. They want to meet locals, not other tourists. Robert and Martine have found their best bet is driving up to a farmhouse and asking if they can park there for the night.

"Farmers everywhere are the same," Martine says. "They are friendly, glad to have visitors and intrigued by what we are doing. Most make us breakfast before we leave."

In addition to different peoples and cultures, their journey is about cuisine and, for Robert, fly-fishing.

They have countless stories about how their interest in food has connected them to people in different countries. They've eaten reindeer meat made by the only aboriginal people in Scandinavia, the Sami, and believe they discovered that the French pastry mille-feuille - called a "Napoleon" in English - actually originated in Lithuania.

That, Martine learned, is where Napoleon first ate one, as he prepared to invade Russia. He ordered his chef to learn how to make it and the recipe returned to France with them.

The couple use Internet sites to explain what they're doing and make contacts in countries they're soon to visit.

Due to the nature of their former jobs, they also know people around the world, which is part of the reason they're here in Moiese. They're staying with American friends they met years ago in Paris.

Joanna Shelton was deputy secretary general at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development; her husband, Richard Erb, was No. 2 at the International Monetary Fund, and both were based in Paris.

Shelton and Erb moved to the Moiese Valley in 1999, and have been showing their old friends the area for the last couple weeks. Robert and Martine especially enjoyed a trip to the People's Center in Pablo, where they got to try deer meat being dried by members of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

Robert and Martine are on their second vehicle as they move from continent to continent.

The current one is a hoot - a 15-year-old Mitsubishi Canter whose steering wheel is on the wrong side of the vehicle for driving in North America. It has a handmade chart taped to the speedometer to convert kilometers to miles per hour, an ancient camper strapped to the bed and a set of caribou horns they found in the Yukon tied to the top.

Why they're driving it is not so funny.

The couple began in 2005 with a Land Rover Defender they named "Allistair," custom-fitted with a solid pop-up roof, and it served them well as they began by traveling through Northern Europe, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and - after shipping it across the Indian Ocean - in Australia.

Martine says there's a vibrant Land Rover community online, and they often used that to make contacts in coming countries. Indeed, in Australia, local Land Rover owners revived an old tradition and inducted Robert and Martine into their "Rover's Bush Restaurant."

What's that? Well, they all headed into the outback, where a pit was dug, a fire built, and a gourmet meal cooked in Dutch ovens.

Tables were set up, white linen tablecloths, wine glasses and fine china placed on them, and just before dinner, everyone disappeared back in their Land Rovers and emerged in black suits and ties, and long formal dresses, and they all sat down in the middle of nowhere in the Australian bush and ate dinner.

Much to Robert's consternation, Martine had made him pack dress clothes. The outback is the only place he's ever worn them.

When they were done in Australia, Robert and Martine shipped the Land Rover back to Europe, and flew home to Paris.

The vehicle arrived at a port in Holland, but when they went to retrieve it - and the mounds of equipment they'd left in it - they discovered both axles badly damaged, the wheels sitting at angles, the chassis bent. The Rover's shipping container, Robert says, had obviously been dropped by a crane at some point.

The only good thing was that the car had been shipped across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, and then across the Atlantic to Europe.

"So Allistair got to complete the trip around the world before we did," Martine says.

They licensed their "new" vehicle - they've named it "Cristobal" - in the Yukon. It has Japanese writing on the doors and pictures of a bear holding a wooden bat. They came upon some Japanese tourists in Canada this summer who told them what the writing said: Big Mountain Lumber Company.

Richard and Martine will exchange the Yukon plate for a French one once they get to Mexico, in the hopes it will help them get through border stations as they make their way through Central and South America.

"Can you imagine what they'd say if they saw French passports, a Japanese car and Yukon license plates at some borders?" Richard says.

They're also having a camper custom built for the Mitsubishi that they'll pick up in Sacramento, Calif.

What's this all costing? About what they'd be spending if they were sitting at home doing nothing, Martine says, but paying for rent, lights, heat and other necessities.

"You have to eat no matter where you are," she says with a shrug. Robert adds that fuel is their biggest expense, which is why they wanted a light vehicle and one reason they putt down the highway, taking their own sweet time.

"The slower you go, the cheaper it is," Robert says.

They've driven about 50,000 miles so far, which Robert notes is about what a typical American might have put on a vehicle since 2005.

"We try to move with the seasons," Martine says, "but we travel year-round, and you have to be somewhere in winter."

They were in Canada when the recent cold snap hit, and it got down to 3 degrees, the lowest they've seen.

It was 125 degrees when they were in Saudi Arabia.

One of the friendliest places they've been: Syria.

The most frightening?

"It's surprising, but it was Poland," Martine says. She was afraid to use an ATM because men kept following her, and a policeman not only warned them it was not safe to leave their vehicle parked on a city street in mid-day, he seemed overly interested in what they might have that was worth stealing.

Martine says 2008 was a horrible year.

It began with the discovery of the damage to the Land Rover. While moving the 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of equipment and personal belongings they had in the vehicle, Robert suffered a triple hernia and underwent surgery.

Then Martine was diagnosed with breast cancer.

"I think it shows how committed we are to doing this," Martine, now cancer-free, says of their resumed journey, "and I think it's an important message to send, that there is life after cancer. You can go back to your dreams."

"It's not about what life did to me," Robert says, "but what I did with the life given me."

With more journeys hoped for in Asia and Africa in coming years, Martine says travel writer Bill Bryson has best explained the sense of discovery she feels as she and Robert drive around - and up and down - the world.

"He equates it to being a 3-year-old all over again," she says. "Sometimes you're in a country where you can't read, you're not even sure when it's safe to cross the street. You rediscover the basics, and if you ever took for granted the way things are, well, no more."

They'll resume their driving this week. They're scheduled to arrive in Ushuaia, Argentina, whenever they feel like it.

Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at (406) 319-2117 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com.