I started this blog in 2007 on a trip to Utah. Back then I had not a clue how to hike, camp and live outdoors, let alone try to do it all in a foreign country. I have learned a lot through experience over the years. How to find cheap flights, stay connected, and avoid international entanglements. I am not the normal traveler. I am at home sleeping in a tent on a beach, or in the back of a rental car. This flexibility makes planning easier. Unfortunately I still over-plan my itineraries, and am continually trying to leave room for chaos to lend a hand. I decided to add some of my favorite travel quotes below to give you a feel for who I am.
“You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
—André Gide.
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
~ George Bernard Shaw
I hit him to get his attention. I shot him to calm him down. I killed him to reason with him.
~ Henry Rollins
I thought how far I was from where and when this journey began, how I was so distant from that fellow passing for me twenty months ago, the one so eager to learn the secrets of the river passage. Could he – the me of the moment – and I sit down together, he would want to know what I knew and absorb what I had experienced, and he would regard me enviously, just as I do those men who have returned from the moon. But there would be forever a difference between him and me: I went and he did not. He set the voyage in motion, but he could not take it. ― William Least Heat-Moon
You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.
-Azar Nafisi
“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news”
― John Muir
“I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.”
― John Steinbeck
The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
When the first Superman movie came out, I gave dozens of interviews to promote it. The most frequent question was: What is a hero? My answer was that a hero is someone who commits a courageous action without considering the consequences. Now my definition is completely different. I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. They are the real heroes, and so are the families and friends who have stood by them.
-Christopher Reeve
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
~ Joseph Campbell
There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
-Lord Byron
“Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travels sake. The great affair is to move.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson
When asked "What thing about humanity surprises you the most?", the Dalai Lama said
"Man…. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."
I will hold the candle, till it burns up my arm
I'll keep takin' punches, until their will grows tired. Oh I will stare the sun down, until my eyes go blind.Hey I won't change direction, and I won't change my mind
When he was six, he believed that the moon overhead followed him. by nine he had deciphered the illusion, trading magic for fact, no tradebacks. So, this is what it's like to be an adult? If he only knew now what he knew then...
-Vedder
“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.”
- D. H. Lawrence
“Adventure is a path. Real adventure - self-determined, self-motivated, often risky - forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind - and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.”
Mark Jenkins
“Men wanted: For hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success
-Sir Ernest Shackleton
Somewhere it is being prepared. Somewhere deep in the heart of Germany the shell is being made. Some German girl is polishing it right now and cleaning it and fitting the charge ito it. It glistens in the factory light and it has a number and the number is mine. I have a date with the shell. We shall meet soon.
- Vonnagut
When you understand that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.
- Chuck Palahniuk
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
-TS Eliot