Modern travelers all have blogs. Few update them. While I never intended to neglect this as long as I did, things happen, priorities change. While traveling, I often found it difficult to summarize my experience, as there was so much crap happening at any given time. I made good money, I was broke, I traveled through the first world and the third. I got bed bugs, I got rid of them. I traveled alone, I traveled with friends, I traveled over land, sea, and air. However, at any given time I didn’t know how to fit what I was seeing and doing into a larger context - in retrospect, this might’ve been valuable and my recorded thoughts at the time would certainly differ from my current recollection, just as my future recollection will be differ from the present.

I’m back in the United States, though only for a month total (about three weeks to go). There’s a lot I want to get down on paper and online, both as a public record and for my own benefit. Lots of people have asked me about what I’ve been doing, and I’ve found myself unable to really get into it - if only because there were so many individual places worth remarking on. So, I intend to go back through my mind and my journal and reconstruct the journey from Hong Kong onward. I also have about, oh, a thousand photos or so that need to get off my hard drive and up on flickr.

As an overview and to get myself started, I’ve put together some statistics on the trip:

Days spent traveling, from US departure stamp to US arrival stamp: 363

Countries visited: 5 (6 if you count Hong Kong, which really qualifies as a different country)

Kilometers (miles) traveled over land: ~27,000km (16,777mi)

Kilometers (miles) traveled via air: ~44,000km (27,340mi), or just over once around the entire world at the equator.

Kilometers (miles) driven: ~17,000km (12,427mi), or from NYC to San Francisco and back twice. About 10,000km of that was in the last month in Australia.

Number of jobs held: 4

Number of dives done: 8. My advanced open water in Thailand + 3 dives on the Great Barrier Reef

Number of photos taken: >3,800

Number of photos in my flickr stream: 674 :(

Highest elevation hiked, in meters: >3,200m, or 2 miles

Deepest elevation dived: 30m, 98 feet.

So, yeah, I owe some exposition on the remainder of the trip. Looking at the numbers, especially the distance traveled overland, I’m a bit boggled because it happened easily - a train ticket here, a road trip there, add it up and it becomes something a lot larger. But I’ll explain more as I go. I left off before departing to Hong Kong, so that’s where I’ll start. Good place, since HK was really where the trip started to come together for me, and it’s definitely the most amazing city I’ve visited thusfar.

More soon.

I didn’t know what to expect from Kuala Lumpur. Prior to making the trip to KL, I don’t think I had any idea about the city whatsoever, but if I had to think about it my idea of the trip from the airport to KL proper went something like this: Arriving in a sweltering tropical heat, I would descend onto the tarmac and make my way past guards carrying automatic weapons to the security checkpoint, where my details would be checked by a sneering customs official who spoke no English. After that, I would hop aboard a motorized rickshaw that would carry me at breakneck speeds down potholed streets, dodging motorbikes and pedestrians alike. So, that’s about 50% right. The heat upon arrival was sweltering, especially after leaving Perth in autumn. The guards at the airport did carry automatic weapons, which is not that unusual outside of the US. The customs official was a friendly Muslim woman wearing a head scarf, an immediate reminder that the majority of Malaysia is Muslim. I was greeted in English (as I was more or less everywhere). And the whole bit about the potholes and rickshaws – I was totally wrong about that. When I think back, my idea of Malaysia was that it would be relatively poor and still very much developing. Kuala Lumpur was neither. The city center was full of modern skyscrapers that wouldn’t be out of place in New York, including the Petronas Twin Towers – the tallest twin towers in the world, and from 1998 – 2004 the tallest buildings in the world. At the same time, half a kilometer from the city center you’ll still find the guesthouses, open air markets, and street vendors often associated with developing nations. However, KL definitely surprised me – while headscarves were ever-present, dress was otherwise western. Everyone seemed to have the latest gadgets, cars aside from taxis were all late model, and the roads and expressways looked better than what I’ve seen in New York. Developing is a bit of a misnomer here. I can’t speak for the rest of the country, as I just stayed for a few nights in the city. I had an excellent guide I met through couchsurfing.org named Hunch, who kindly put me up in his place during my stay. He also showed me around town, introduced me to some local specialties and even arranged for tickets to the Petronas Towers, saving me the hassle of having to wake up at the crack of dawn to get them. He also suggested a performance at the tourist center that featured folk dances from different states within Malaysia, which was excellent. (Couchsurfing, and Hunch’s philosophy particularly, will probably be the subject of another post.) Basically, over the course of the week I’ve been wandering about, checking out the malls and markets in Chinatown and Little India, and eating a lot of very cheap, excellent food. Malaysia is a confluence of three major cultures (Indian, Chinese, and Malay), and the influences definitely show in the kitchens. You can have roti canai (flat bread fried in ghee with lentil curry) for breakfast, laksam (a white fish-based soup with flat noodles) for lunch, and chicken tikka for dinner. On the street, you can more or less always get away with a meal for under 10 ringit, which translates to $3.30. The most I spent on any one meal was $21, and that was four courses for two people plus two drinks. My breakfast most mornings only cost me 3 ringit, for roti canai and a nescafe with sweetened condensed milk. On the other hand, I could have spent nearly 25 ringit for a cappuccino and pastry in Starbucks. All the American chains were present all over the city, but were massively overpriced compared to the fresher, tastier food being prepared right outside. At the moment, I’m sitting in Air Asia’s terminal waiting to board my flight to Hong Kong. By the time this posts, I’ll be arranging for my visa. Again, I don’t know quite what to expect. I’m hoping it’ll be like something out of Blade Runner – massive skyscrapers, seedy underbelly, floating blimps calling me to move to the Outer Colonies. Expect some photos soon!

Hello? Anyone there? *taps mic*

Alright, alright, so it’s been a while. You’ve been asking for photos, and I owe some and probably an explanation of why I’m now on a different continent.

When I started my trip, I didn’t want a Rarely or Never Updated Travel Blog. The trap seemed obvious - you either spent all your time updating, or disconnected entirely. How do you connect with your new place while maintaining a connection with the old? Weekly updates? Monthly? What if nothing’s happening? Do you just talk about what you see and feel?

And what if you’re not seeing anything knew and feel like shit?

So, last I wrote here I was feeling pretty good. I came back to Sydney with a mission - I was going to build my savings back up, and find a contract gig. However, it didn’t work out that way. I started with some decent leads from agencies, but ran into snags - everyone wanted me full time for account management, and I didn’t want that. I was OK with that on a contract basis, but a 3-5 year time commitment? No thanks. I didn’t want to commit to something I couldn’t deliver, and the leads dried up.

My plan went belly up, and I couldn’t see the next step. I was burning money. Got a night shift at the hostel to slow teh burn, but working nights for a little cash didn’t get me enough to save. It did, though, ensure that I was constantly exhausted.

Slowly but surely, I got depressed. Tired of waiting for phone calls, exhausted from night shifts, too much drinking, no exercise.

Once I realized what was happening, I started trying to take better care of myself, and the first step was to give myself permission to be totally miserable. So I was, for at least a week. Stayed in bed, watched all five seasons of The Wire. Stopped worrying about a job.

Then, a plan started to hatch: Go to Western Australia and work where my expenses can be covered out in the outback, or go haul oysters up in Broome. So, I called my friend Marc who was heading west, hopped a flight to Adelaide, and got myself to Port Augusta. Then, we drove more than 2900 kilometers across the Nullarbor Plain to Perth.

Outside of Perth, Marc and I ended up staying with a friendly community through WWOOF. Spent a week just enjoying not being on the road, and eating good food with the community. Lots of pot lucks!

However, my plan started to get a bit messed up when I realized that nobody was going to hire me for the 6 weeks I had between then and when I wanted to be in Bangkok to hang out with a friend visiting from the US. So, a second plan started to hatch.

Fly to Kuala Lumpur, then to Hong Kong via Air Asia. Visit my friend Mike in Suzhou, an hour outside of Shanghai. Travel back down south through Vietnam and Cambodia, through to Thailand, and escape with enough money left over to float for a bit in Australia. For the same money, I could stay in Australia and not move at all.

So, I’ve been in Kuala Lumpur for the past week. Couch Surfing most of the time with an awesome host named Hunch, getting acclimated to tropical weather just in time to head back to the temperate zone.

I’ll be working on turning this into something more than a Rarely Updated Travel Blog, especially since I’ll be moving much more quickly. In less than 12 hours, I’ll be in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. I hope to be on my way to Shanghai less than 72 hours after that.

I do, though, owe you a better update on KL itself - it’s a pretty fascinating city, and definitely not what I expected. So, look forward to that.

The Tasman Peninsula, looking towards Cape Pillar.

Click through for more of Tasmania and Melbourne on my Flickr photostream.

It’s amazing what you can get used to. Sleeping 10-12 people per room on bunked beds, for months at a time. Packing all your personal belongings into something that you can carry on your body, living with 4 or 5 changes of clothes. Waking in the middle of the night when people stumble back, drunk. Dealing with a symphony of snores rather than a single snorer.

Backpacking is definitely not for those who enjoy creature comforts and a great deal of personal space. What’s interesting, though, is how flexible the definition of necessity is. What’s a necessary amount of personal space? A house? A one bedroom apartment? A studio? I used to think that I needed more space than I had in a 700 square foot apartment. Most of us enjoy a huge amount of space to acquire and keep a dizzying array of things. Books, clothes, dvds, video games, gadgets. Furniture. Appliances. All take up space, and the more we accrue the more we need.

All of this occurred to me after returning to Sydney a few weeks ago, when I was ecstatic to get the first bit of truly enclosed space I’ve had since arriving in Australia: a food locker. Not even a place to sleep or hold anything more than spices and a few dry goods. After spending weeks getting things stolen off of communal shelves, having a place I can actually safely store some coffee and a bit of olive oil felt like a luxury. Similarly, today I (finally!) got a bottom bunk in my room. Which means I can put up a curtain (read: sheet) to block out the light and have a private place to read, journal, or whatever. An added bonus: my new room has a balcony that only my roommates can get to. Which, many days, means a spot in the sun to be uninterrupted and away from the common areas of the hostel.

I’m sure many people would read this and think that it sounds like a sort of poverty. And compared to the status quo in America and most of Europe, it is. However, I’ve found that I’ve learned quite a lot about what I need and what I don’t. Removing the wardrobe and closets means that I can’t be concerned with what I wear as much. Acquiring more is not an option, as my backpack is overfull, so I don’t. I focus on function rather than fashion. Removing the private space altogether made me realize how much I need and value conversation and interaction with others. The 700 square foot apartment that was an absolute necessity before now feels not only extravagant for one person, but misguided given how much I need other people to balance me out.

So, how does this sound to you all back at home? I’m curious about whether information and musings like this are valuable for people. Have you ever run into a situation that changed how you thought about space in a similar way? Might reading something like this change how you think about it yourself?

Chris Guillebeau over at the Art of Nonconformity had a great post yesterday titled Beware of Life. Money quote:

Instead of trying to live a risk-free existence, let me tell you a few things that are truly worth worrying about:

The road not taken.
The destination not explored.
The adventure not pursued.
The life unlived.

If we’re going to lose sleep over something, it seems to me that those are the things that should keep us awake.

Life is dangerous. It’s risky. It’s worth it.

This is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. The unfortunate fact is that no matter what you do, living is a risky behavior. As human beings, we spend an unbelievable amount of time and energy trying to minimize risk. We create committees and pay professionals to quantify risk to financial portfolios. We collect statistics on disease and fatalities. We pay experts to tell us about what foods we need to eat and exercises we need to do to minimize risks to our health and extend our lives. We take our shoes off at airport security. We buy insurance policies. We wear our seatbelts. But ultimately, the time and worry and money we spend trying to push off and avoid death will always be wasted. There are no guarantees, and we can only delay the inevitable. Risk is absolutely a fact of life.

Wow. Ok, that sounds morbid. Bear with me for a second, cause I’m getting to the hopeful point.

The reason that we try to reduce risk in so many ways is that the fact that risk is a necessity is really, really uncomfortable. We don’t want risk. We want security, we want safety, we want a steady paycheck, a nice house in the suburbs and a car with front and side airbags. We don’t want a world in flux, we don’t want constant change, we want and insist on a sure thing. And, lo and behold, there are a lot of people who sell us on both safety and a sure thing. Why are there so many more employees than entrepreneurs? Being an employee, we’re told, is safe. Do a good job and keep your head down, and it’ll be OK. What, you’re not happy? You know most small businesses fail in the first five years, right? Don’t you need a degree for that?

The ironic thing is that, despite our attempts to avoid risk, we’re all intimately and viscerally familiar with the risk inherent in life. In fact, it’s so familiar it’s cliché. How many times have you heard someone say “You only live once”? How many times have you said it? What would it mean, though, to actually live with that and accept that fact, to deeply believe it? Would you behave differently?

Once you’ve accepted that risk is a part of life and that there aren’t any do-overs, a remarkable thing can happen. You can focus on figuring out what you want to do rather than accepting the options that are given.

That’s what I’m trying to do right now. I can’t pretend to have all the answers, but I can keep trying to ask good questions. I do know that I don’t want to get stuck with a life unlived.

How to begin?

I’ve wanted to do something special with this blog for a while. Though I’ve only cranked out two small updates about my travels so far, there’s been a whole lot that I’ve wanted to talk about: things I’ve seen, observations I’ve made, shifts in the tectonic plates in my head that are my thoughts and beliefs. The difficulty is that I frequently find I don’t have the words to adequately describe what’s going on, or that there’s too much to explain before I can really get to the meat of what I want to talk about. Things in my head tend to be a bit complicated.

You see, coming to Australia hasn’t just been about traveling. At least, not in the usual sense of heading to a particular place to see sights and get wasted in new and exotic locations. A lot of what I’m trying to do on this trip has more to do with my own head than it does with what goes on in the world outside, and a big part of that is forcing myself outside my comfort zone. Less than a year before I left for Sydney, I got my first passport to go to Belize. A week prior to that trip, I nearly canceled it altogether because it felt like the world was going to come down around my ears if I left at all. The prospect of taking a vacation at all felt absolutely lavish, undeserved. Who was I to spend the money when I still had debts to pay? Didn’t I know I needed to punish myself for getting the loans in the first place? What if the job dried up and I needed that money? What if people resented me for taking the time off? What if I wasn’t really supposed to, even though work said it was OK? On and on and on.

A few months after that came the layoffs at work. And though I dodged that bullet, a lot of people I cared about didn’t. All of a sudden, the security we supposedly had at work became an illusion and the What Ifs started rushing back to the surface. I couldn’t count on the job anymore, and what did that mean? Saving as much as possible and making myself feel miserable about spending anything outside of work, since I Could Be Saving More. I got stuck in this endless negative feedback loop of feeling like shit and being a lump, then going out to feel better (spending money in the process), then feeling like shit about spending money… etc, etc, etc.

Clearly, something needed to change.

A few things happened at the same time. I discovered TED Talks. I somehow stumbled across Chris Guillebeau’s Art of Nonconfirmity, Brief Guide to World Domination, and 279 Days to Overnight Success. Chris led me to Seth Godin and his excellent work, and ultimately to Havi at The Fluent Self. Suddenly, there were a whole bunch of new ideas to think about. Here was a guy who makes his living while traveling the world and helping enable people to get outside of a life within a cubicle. Here was another guy who, rather than focusing on the world falling apart, focused on the opportunity created when you focus on being excellent and improving people’s lives. Here was a woman who had a successful business built on a method of moving past your procrastination, who talked to her walls and monsters and had a duck for a business partner. Engaging in these ideas led me to a whole bunch of interesting places. What if, instead of trying to force myself into a mold (job description) in a large corporation, I could focus instead on trying to find my own way of improving things? What if I could take the time to focus on talking to my stuck, and find a place where I can live without having to apologize or compromise things that are important to me?

So, as I said earlier, I’ve wanted to do something special with this blog for a while. Doing the typical “Oh, hey, went here, saw this and that! Here are some pictures!” thing didn’t feel quite right to me because, again, that isn’t how I’m doing this trip. The important parts haven’t come when looking at the Sydney Opera House or while hanging out in the Melbourne arcades, or even when watching penguins come ashore on the St. Kilda pier. They’ve come when I was staring out of a window of an airplane coming back from Hobart to Sydney, or when meeting a Swiss couple who had spent the last two years driving from Switzerland to India in a camper van, then packed the thing in a crate and moved it down here, where they continued their trip around the entire continent of Australia. Or when meeting 19 year olds who had the presence of mind and courage to live on their own in a camper van for months, finding work as they go. The important parts have been about expanding my ideas about what’s possible, and changing my ideas about what’s necessary. If you had told me 9 months ago that I’d be content living out of a backpack with very little or no private space for months, I’d say you were crazy. But one of the big “aha!” moments I had here came when I realized that, despite thinking I’m an introvert, I’m actually an extrovert. Hostels are perfect, because there are always people here to talk to. One bedroom apartments, however, can feel like a prison if I’m not careful.

So, back to the point: doing something special with this blog. I think that there are a lot of people (myself included) who often accept options as given rather than creating opportunity or exploring alternatives. I don’t want to be one of them anymore. I want to build something different, find a method of supporting myself by being excellent without putting myself in situations that sacrifice things I find important. I don’t know exactly what form this will take yet, but I’m putting it out there because I want to commit to exploring it. I want to document the process, because I want to help other people do the same.

I truly believe that there are few forces more powerful than a seriously engaged person on a mission. I want to get to the point where ideals and life are in lockstep, where I honestly feel that I’m positively impacting people’s lives. And, while I’m not there yet, I think the journey will be helpful to others looking to do the same.

The more voices there are out there unwilling to accept the status quo, the better.

So what do you guys think?

Alright, so a bit’s happened since my trip’s began. I’ve filled probably 50 pages in my journal so far. However, most of that is not the most interesting stuff. There’s a lot of “ho hum, did this and that today”, particularly during the 3 weeks in Sydney when I was mostly hanging out and getting angsty about going on a cycling trip I honestly wasn’t prepared for. Up until the past week, the highlight of the trip was the journey between Sydney and Melbourne I made with Mark and Michael, two German guys I met in the hostel in Sydney. We drove this:

More than 1700 kilometers, on what’s essentially a 800 kilometer drive straight from A to B. We drove down roads like this (only 45 minutes outside of Sydney!):

The basic route went like this: South from Sydney to Bateman’s Bay, when we cut inland to go to Canberra. From Canberra to Cooma, Cooma back to the coast, where we stayed until reaching Wilson’s Promentory, south of Melbourne, where I saw one of the most beautiful sunsets of my life:

Along the way, I saw a ninety mile long beach:

Pelicans:

And my first kangaroo:

There were two pleasant surprises about the road trip, I think. The first was the landscape. Australia has microclimates like no other place I’ve seen. The entire coast is bordered by mountains - in order to get to the interior, you have to drive up switchback roads back and forth at 15% grades until you get to the top. Once you reach the top, it’s the same back down until suddenly the forests give way to open, rolling plains. It wasn’t uncommon, cresting a hill, to spot rain storms off miles in the distance, somewhere near the horizon.

Once we went back towards the coast, returning back down we ended up driving through eucalyptus rainforests. Sunshine and dry plains one minute, the next we’re driving into soft rain. We stopped off at a lookout on the road to Bega, where you can really see the difference. Moist air comes off the water, cools at the foot of the mountains, turns to mist and eventually rain. Despite being off a major highway to the capital city, there was noone else on the road during midday. Just the sound of birds, light rain, and beyond the mist, more plains and mountains.

So that was nice.

The second pleasant surprise was the people we met on the road. There were actually Australians! Honestly, one of the weird facts about backpacking in Australia is that you don’t meet very many Australians. Tons of Germans, Canadians, French, Dutch, Chinese, and a spattering of Spaniards, but Australians don’t backpack in Australia - just everywhere else. Aside from my friends in Sydney I met in NY, I don’t think I really hung out with Australians at all until I left. Along the way in random free sites and rest areas, we met a bunch of Aussies who were more than happy to help us out, tell us about the area we were in, give us tips about anything from how to select firewood (look for dry fallen gum limbs) to how to cook lamb shoulder at a camp site (in a dutch oven, lots of oil and garlic, hot coals and ample time).

The most remarkable person we met, though, was Gabriel.

Gabriel was, by chance, camping on the same mountain top near Cooma we selected at random from our book. When we arrived, the wind was blowing and it was cold enough that I could see my breath. (Despite what everyone says, Australia is not hot always and everywhere.) We got a small fire going, and he came over, beer in hand, wearing a Crocodile Dundee hat, black boots heavy wool coat and jeans. Introduced himself, and offered to find us more firewood. Sweet. So, the next few hours we just hung around the fire, drank beer, and listened to him talk about whatever it was he’s been doing for the past few years. I don’t know what you’d call his occupation - ranch hand? Jackaroo? But we learned all about bushwalking in the middle of nothing in Queensland, why you don’t need to worry about crocodiles if your boat is bigger than they are (they think you’re part of the boat), and how he one time ate a horse. Apparently on a ranch he was working on, the rancher didn’t want any wild animals. But there was a herd of wild horses, so he and the other hands would take potshots at them. Well, one day he hit one and decided that rather than leaving it to rot, he should at least put it to good use, so he field dressed it, put it on his truck, and brought it back to camp where they ate horse steak. He swears it was the best meat he ever ate. So that was worth freezing my ass off on the top of a mountain for a night.

The best part, though, was the next morning, when he came by to say he was leaving to go look for work, then straightened up and in an official tone said “And, well, on behalf of Australia I’d like to extend warm greetings and welcome you to our fine country.”

I like to think that’s when I officially arrived.

Hey! Remember back before I left New York when I said I’d be blogging all about my trip?

Hahahaha! Oh, those were the days.

First: Sorry! I know you all wanted to keep track of what’s going on with the trip, and I really love that you didn’t want me to fall off the face of the Earth, so I apologize for doing precisely that. Blogging means putting my face (and more to the point: words and thoughts) out there for the wide world to see, and that’s not very easy for me. Tweeting was too much pressure for me, this is a lot harder.

But! I’m getting over it. So, here’s a condensed version of my stay in Sydney, and some stuff about my future plans. I’m getting a bit better at this traveling thing, and I’ve been learning a whole ton about myself in the process, so I should have more to say from here on out aside from “Uh, I don’t know what I’m doing?”

Hooray for that! And enough about me, let’s talk about Australia.

First: Sydney!

The first few weeks were spent in Sydney, partying a bit, relaxing, and meeting people around the hostel. Original Backpackers in Potts Point is definitely recommended, especially if you don’t mind being in a neighborhood full of hookers and clubs for 19 year olds. Honestly though, the atmosphere at the hostel was good enough that my original 3 day plans turned into a 3 week stay. Totally makes up for the hood.

I made some good friends at Originals, and with one I took a 3 day excursion up to the Blue Mountains and did some bushwalking. Our method of carriage was a 60s minibus with six bunks in the back that had a didgeridoo for a gear shifter. Our “guide” was Moe, a 21 year old Austrian kid who was about as professional as you would expect a 21 year old to be. Honestly, though, Moe’s tour was much better than the boring bus tours that are the norm here.

The highlight of that trip was the National Pass, a full day hike down a load of stairs cut into the side of a cliff next to a huge series of waterfalls. We descended down the face, hiked around the base of the falls, took a shower beneath them, then meandered back up under the cliff and returned the way we came.

We saw the Three Sisters (apparently, a famous rock formation that everyone wants to see), and spent a day hiking to the Broken Castle, which offered an amazing 360-degree panorama of the Blue Mountains, and my first taste of why everyone here complains about Australian flies. Seriously, they get EVERYWHERE! I’ve never had a fly try to crawl inside my nose or ears before, but here they do. I’ll never complain about American flies again.*

After the Blue Mountains trip, I waffled around about when I was leaving to cycle up the east coast. After a day of 40 degree heat, I decided cycling in what could become 40 degree heat wasn’t a good idea, and postponed the trip until it cools off further north. That left an interesting question. Namely: “Well, shit, what am I going to do in Australia?” I spent some time trying to figure this out and got a bit bored with Sydney, so I sketched a plan for a 9 day road trip together with two friends I met in the hostel. Sydney to Melbourne in 9 days.

That part’s coming up next. Also to come: Melbourne, and my trip to Tasmania so far (Hobart and Mt. Wellington). There should be some great stuff to see soon. I’m renting a bike and leaving on Wednesday to cycle up the east coast of Tasmania, and back through the central plain. The plan is for a two weeks. And then, I’m reeeeeeally hoping to spend New Years out in the middle of nowhere on the West Coast of Tasmania on what’s called the Overland Track. 6 day hike out into some of Tassie’s most remote country, through the world’s only deciduous rainforest and what’s supposed to be a hiker’s paradise. It’s a bit of an investment, and I’m a bit anxious about going solo, so it’s up in the air. I’ll keep you posted!

Miss you all dearly, and I’ll be updating more frequently in the future. Thanks for reading.

If you’d like, please leave a comment! I’d love to hear what you want to hear more about, if there are photos you liked or if you want to hear more about something in particular. I want to make this interesting for my audience as well, so feedback is good. I want to hear from you all, too, even if it’s just saying “Hi!”

Alright, goodnight for now, friends! Next up I’ll talk about the road trip, and how I met a cowboy who ate a horse.

*Disclaimer: I’m lying. I will most certainly complain about American flies in the future.