Traveling can fill you with emotions.  The obvious ones: excitement, joy, exhilaration, wonder and so on.  I’ve tried to express here that, like life, it isn’t always roses. There are times of frustration, anxiety, loneliness, fear, and sadness. Traveling isn’t a ‘vacation’ and it becomes ‘life’ of a different sort.   But those of us that love it, love it all and know the benefits far outweigh any negatives.   These people tend to live their lives with the same positive outlook as well.

Through my travels I have directly and indirectly met dozens and dozens of people with this same attitude.  I have met them face-to-face all over the world from Hanoi to Ecuador to Egypt. But I also have met many people online through this blog.  Because of this little website – I’ve made contacts for jobs and made good friends that I’ve met in person and seen several times thereafter.

I answer just about every email I receive (except for those spammy ones – no, I won’t advertise your on-line gambling company).   About two years ago, I received a fun comment on a blog post about Ecuador from a girl named Reed in Hoboken, New Jersey (my home state!).   She had found me through a podcast I’d done with Chris Christensen on the Amateur Traveler about how I worked around the world.

We had some nice, easy emails back and forth and she told me she was working in New York City and at the same time ‘planning her escape into the world’.

Like I do with many of my new email friends, I saved her email as a reminder to try and meet up with her next time I was in New York.  I could tell that this was someone I wanted to know.   This was someone with whom I would most likely become friends and know for a long time.  I could tell she had the same attitude as me and was really living.  And this is what life is all about to me – making connections with people and sharing ideas and a lot of laughs.  A year later, I emailed her to let her know I’d actually be in Hoboken and hoped maybe she could meet up for drink prior to a dinner engagement I had.

The email I received back hit me like a ton of bricks:

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This month marks the five-year anniversary of LLworldtour — my first around the world trip and the start of this blog.  It also marks the fact that the last time I worked a full time job was also five years ago.  Holy cripes!  When I started blogging not only didn’t I even want to have a ‘blog’, I didn’t even like the word blog.  Blahhhhg.  Who would want that?  What is that?  It sounds like something you do after a long night of drinking.  ‘Oh, man I think I’m gonna blaahhhg.’

Like so many travelers I know, I just wanted an easy and fun way to keep in touch with friends and family back home.  Plus having a blog, gave me some structure, something ‘to-do’ as I traveled.  It gave me a home, a nucleus from which I could write and hone stories I would later pitch to publications.  It gave me some work which I like.   As a professional writer and television producer, I had already spent my career ‘telling visual stories’ and knew that travel, more than anything, would inspire me to write and share my photography with anyone who was interested.   Little did I know that this fun and easy project would become hard, at times, all-consuming, and would turn into my full-time work.

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Want to enter to win a freakin’ free trip?? Read on my friend.

Some of us travel to get away and do virtually nothing.  While others travel for adventure and often need a vacation when they return from their travels.   You can put the participants of the Mongol Rally far deep into the latter category.   The “Mongol what” you ask?

The Mongol Rally

The Mongol Rally is just another hair-brained scheme dreamed up by those nuts over at The Adventurists.  To explain to you what they do, I felt it best to put it in their own, beautifully crafted words (I love this):

“There is nothing new under the sun” said a beardy ecclesiastic, thousands of years ago. Although with the power of hind sight you could have argued that the entire American continent would have been new to him and fell into his category of being under the sun, it seems that humans have always worried about the world being boring.

Moany old git. He had nothing to whinge about. He probably didn’t have a TV constantly mind shovelling him factoids about every corner of the earth. It’s also historically unlikely that he had a GPS. I doubt the Lonely Planet had shat forth all manner of papery monsters telling you which colour toilet you need in Nicaragua. No, the beardy one had it easy. His maps had edges. Ours go round in a globe shape. Rubbish.

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Today I went for a run in New York City.  I am back for one of my many visits.  This city gets me every time; one way or another it gets me. Do you know what I mean?  As I ran through the brownstone-lined, charming side streets in Chelsea, I couldn’t help but get all nostalgic.  Coming back here always brings up various memories, one of the largest centering around my grandmother who lived in Chelsea for around 3 decades.  That was my ‘home’ whenever I was in the city.  She was the center of it all.  Running right past her building brought instant tears to my eyes. How strange is it, even two years after her death (she was 94 and lived an amazing full life), to not be seeing her here in her city.  She loved it here.  She always said she could go right out of her door and get everything and anything she needed – and she did.  She was fierce and independent, qualities I realized much too late that I had learned from her.

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So it is probably apparent by now, that one of the main reasons I love travel is the enriching experience of meeting new and interesting people all over the world.  I meet new people during real travel, in my daily ‘travels’ at home in Chicago and virtually, online by way of this blog mostly.   I have realized how much I love connecting with people and sharing stories and ideas and inspiration. So it will come as no surprise that I chatted up the guy next to me on a recent flight to Philadelphia.  He looked like a cross between Geraldo Rivera and Borat (see video clip below for his exclusive impersonation of Borat!) But, it turns out, this was no ordinary man. Not only was he THE most interesting (and funny) guy I had ever sat next to on a plane, I was in awe as we peeled back the layers and I learned whom I was really sitting next to.  This was better than any celebrity; this was the real Indiana Jones. Holy cripes!

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