Activities Include Support Meetings : Travel Agency Offers Fun but Sober Trips

Diet soda flowed like wine at the Club Med bar.

Earlier this month, 400 recovering alcoholics and drug users and their families took over an entire Club Med village on Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas. The vacationers, 150 of them from the Los Angeles area, were on an activity-packed but drug- and alcohol-free holiday planned by a Westwood travel agency that specializes in trips for recovering alcoholics and addicts.

Sober Vacations International, one of a handful of such programs nationwide, is the brainchild of Steve Abrams, 38, and his brother Guy Grand, 41, of Century City.

Abrams, the founder of Abrams Travel Inc., which operates Sober Vacations, has been in the travel business for more than a decade. He is also a recovering alcoholic, who once regularly drank a fifth of Scotch a day.

“Steve got sober before me,” says Grand, who admits to a 20-year heroin habit that frequently had him in trouble with the law. “Steve’s younger, but he got smart quicker.” (In a pre-sobriety attempt to change his life, Grand legally changed his name from Richard Abrams to Sir Guy Grand, the name of a character in “The Magic Christian.”)

Joined Self-Help Group

Three years ago, Grand joined the same well-known self-help group that his younger brother had joined five years earlier (in deference to the group’s policy of anonymity, the men asked that it not be named). Abrams and his newly sober sibling went to meetings every night. Days they began brainstorming about vacation trips for people such as themselves.

So far, Sober Vacations has offered a ski trip, rafting on the Snake River and two “Sober Villages” at Club Meds. The trips are much like other vacation packages, except that no alcohol is served and recovery-group meetings are scheduled each day.

Largely through word of mouth in the recovering community, almost 200 people signed up for the first Sober Village two years ago in Ixtapa, Mexico.

That wasn’t quite enough to take over the village, so it meant some delicate negotiations with Club Med. “They got nervous,” Grand recalled. “I guess they were afraid we’d walk around with Bibles and grab people and try to convert them.”

Instead, Grand said, the nondrinkers won over the club staff. They did no proselytizing. And they turned out for scuba and other activities in droves. “Our people participate,” Grand said. “They aren’t hung over in bed. They get out and do things.”

Ironically, the group also spent a lot of time--and money--in the bar. At Club Med, guests carry no cash, but at the start of their stay they buy detachable plastic beads that they trade for drinks. “Our people spent more money in the bar than any other group they had had all year,” Grand said. “Virgin” daiquiris and margaritas were a favorite, and so were tall iced cappuccini. The village ran out of Diet Coke. As 30-year-old Carol Lepak of West Los Angeles, who went on the Eleuthera trip, said: “We do drink fluids. We just don’t drink alcohol!”

Grand said all kinds of people sign up for the trips--doctors, clerks, engineers, clergy. Their common bond is their desire not to drink again or use drugs. “On this last trip,” Grand said, “we had a lady who was three days sober and a lady who was 33 years sober.”

The brothers said the absence of alcohol is probably a minor attraction for most participants; most have learned to cope in a culture in which alcohol is as close as the nearest supermarket. “It really isn’t the availability of alcohol that matters,” Abrams said. “It’s the availability of people who understand.”

People who have taken the trips said the intense camaraderie of the group is what makes them most memorable. Charlene C., a 51-year-old dancer who lives in Santa Monica, said she usually travels with a friend or family member but went to Eleuthera alone because “I felt safe” with recovering peers (“My 11th birthday is June 19,” she said, referring to the day she stopped drinking).

Charlene, who asked that only her last initial be used, said the daily meetings became support groups that helped participants cope, not just with their addiction, but with the fears and anxieties that often go with meeting new people and trying new things--anxieties they no longer ameliorate with alcohol or drugs. As Abrams put it, “You can go to meetings and then do things that frighten you.”

Bolstered by Group

Others agreed. Carol Lepak, a recovering cocaine user, said she has been extremely fearful since she was raped, robbed and shot in 1987. Bolstered by the group, she took some calculated risks on the trip--she learned to water ski, for example. Lepak drew the line at using the circus trapeze that was a feature of the village. She had had brain surgery after she was shot, she explained. “I figured the last thing my doctor wanted was for me to fall on my head.”

The brothers are planning future Sober Villages, a dude ranch vacation in Colorado and an Alaskan cruise. Both say the vacations, which they go on, are one of the unexpected pleasures of getting straight. Abrams said he remembers thinking when he stopped drinking, “I wouldn’t ever have any more fun.” Instead, he said, “that was when my life began.”

Richard Wilkins, 43, a recovering alcoholic who lives in South Laguna, recalls looking around the beach in Eleuthera and thinking how lucky he was to be alive and sober and able to enjoy the sand and the sun. “Everybody there,” Wilkins said, “was like a miracle.”