This is a story of wanderlust... helpless, hopeless, irresistible and awe inspiring wanderlust.
A Whole Different Kind of Journey 
Just getting a little bit nostalgic about a whole different kind of journey in life. Almost 10 years ago to the day I sat down to interview poet Robert Creeley for a feature that would later air on SoUP Radio (Society of Underground Poets) hosted by Troy Teegarden at WRVG-World Radio. I intended it to be the first of many public radio features I would start producing for SoUP and several other programs. I finished editing the piece a few days before starting my new job as a News Writer at CBS Network Radio News. An hour into my second day of training a hijacked passenger plane struck the first of two World Trade Towers. In that moment I had to redirect 110% of my energy and focus into hard news and there was no longer any time to pursue my more creative public radio or documentary pursuits.
Those few weeks were a milestone for me, as they were for so many people, that shaped my career for the past decade. I don’t regret the direction of my professional career. I had the honor of working with one of the absolute best teams in broadcasting on a series of events that continues to shape a generation. I also had the opportunity to hike much of the Appalachian Trail, live and work in Tokyo, Japan for a year and eventually travel all the way around the world. I suppose I am just a bit nostalgic as I look at how singular events can so profoundly impact our own personal journeys. I may no longer that bright eyed and well caffeinated journalist of 23, but neither is my journey anywhere close to being over. I hope you enjoy listening to the interview as much as I did putting it together.
My new morning walk. It may not be downtown Bangkok, but it has its perks. For the next few weeks I get to wake up every morning and wander through the woods of Eastern NC with two incredibly well behaved & loving canines. It’s hard to tell which of us is happier about it :)
#MyPhoto from the #TopOfTheRock. It’s a picture of the #EmpireStateBuilding after it rained. The views are so beautiful from there.
Absolutely amazing NYC photo from my good friend Duane at Tollison.net. Each time I start to think that every great New York photo has already been taken a million times, he surprises me with something like this. Thank you, Duane!
via duanium
I just entered my first ever travel photo contest! I still haven’t gone through all the photos from our around the world trip this Spring, but this one certainly stuck out in my memory… along with too many others, so it was a tough call. I’d love to hear what anyone thinks of the photo and if you like it, please feel free to vote on the contest website!
Travel Skills for Real Life…Or Something Like It
It’s been quite a while since my last post here at Untraveled World. The reason’s pretty simple. No more travel. I guess that’s not exactly true since I’m technically without a permanent home & on the road back here in the USA. Thanks to some diligent work by Collette, we’re house sitting for a nice couple in Cary, NC while we figure out our next move. We used a service called HouseCarers.com which I have to recommend. It’s also a great way to extend long term travel on a budget.
All this brings me the point of this post, which is to share a couple life skills I developed while backpacking around the world that have proved helpful now that I’m “back” and looking for a new career:
1. LIFE ECONOMY: Learn to live out of a backpack for 6+ months and this starts to come naturally. How much stuff do you actually need from day to day? Not much. So why do we want so much? I’ll leave that one to you. You quickly learn what’s important & discard the rest.
2. HEALTHY EATING: I may vomit if I’m stuck with another meal of sterile, prepackaged food loaded with sodium, sugar & lord knows what else. Now that I have grocery options, I appreciate fresh, nourishing food more than ever before. It’s not like I lived on Pop Tarts before, but I’ve enjoyed an extraordinary number of salads over the past few weeks.
3. BROADER OUTLOOK: The cool thing about traveling without an agenda is that you have no agenda. Suddenly there’s no place you NEED to be. The possibilities are endless so you go where you want & find what makes you happy. That doesn’t have to end.
Those are just a few lessons learned. Now I hope to keep them up as I look for a new career, home and everything else here in the States.
Layover in Detroit
After something like 2.5-days trying to get from Zakynthos, Greece to Ashland, Kentucky I missed my final connection in Detroit by 20 minutes. I could have slept on the floor in the airport, but I’d done enough of that over the past week or so on multiple overnight ferry trips. That means it was off to the Howard Johnson. I was thankful for a decent night’s rest, but the coolest part came during the mornings continental breakfast. Looking across the hotel lobby I quickly recognized all the paintings of far away places. Venice, Rome, charming Greek islands. I’d been to them all over the past four weeks. That certainly made the bad coffee and bagel go down a little bit better.
It’s time to go home. I’m sitting in the Athens airport at the moment awaiting a flight to JFK and then further South to see the family. We wrapped up our adventures celebrating with our friends Aaron & Ginny for their big Greek wedding on Zakynthos (the photo). There could have been no better conclusion to four-and-a-half months of incredible travel. It was also nice to see some friendly & familiar faces.
I have little idea what comes next. In the short term I’m headed to Cary, NC for a month while I search for a new job/career or what not. And I’m open to suggestions…. I will continue to post on this little travel blog. For one, I enjoy it, but it was also always meant to be about more than going places. I may be taking a temporary break from my world travels, but I intend to continue experiencing new things in life. I’m never just trying to get somewhere, but I’m always going somewhere. That may start to sound a little hokey, but whatever. I need to find another cup if coffee before this flight.
Our most epic travel day (days) to date! Forget flying around the world. Just try to get around the Mediterranean.
The start: Barletta, Italy on the Amalfi Coast. I don’t suggest visiting. The goal: Santorini, Greece, part of the inspiration for “MammaMia,” Collette’s Broadway gig for the past five years.
We checked out of our hotel in Barletta at 11am & caught a shuttle bus into town in time to catch the 12:14p local train (only two cars long) to Bari. Then it was a local bus through town to the port. After confirming our ferry tickets for that night & learning there was no room to upgrade to a real seat, we bummed around Bari until 5pm when we could board. Bari? I would recommend visiting. It’s all narrow alleys & old Roman town along the Adriatic.
At 7pm we depart. Here’s the trick with deck seats on these long distance ferries. You don’t get a seat or place to sleep. That said, it’s an unspoken rule that after the cafes & restaurants close everyone crashes wherever they can. Still, there are some places you can & some places you can’t. I slept part of the night on the cushions for a circular cafe booth while a carefully placed chair supported the rest of me.
Lord knows how many hours and a double espresso later and we’re in Patra, Greece at 12:30pm. A day earlier we would have been blocked from landing by a major Greek transportation strike, but not so today. After a three hour bus ride we arrive in Piraeus, the nearby port town for Athens & gateway to the Aegean.
At this point we have no real plan. We luck out & get a few of the remaining seats on the night’s ferry to Santorini. It leaves at 11:59pm & we have deck seats again. Realizing we have another rough night in store, we spend the afternoon between a couple cafes eating cheese pies & Greek salads so we’ll at least have something good in our stomachs. We also scramble for hotel reservations for our first night on the island.
We board at 9:15pm & scope out a good spot… on the floor. Much of the time is spent debating whether it will be OK to sleep here or there & we’re not alone. One family throws a blanket over some life vests on deck & calls it home for the night. We’re at least able to share some of what little we learned the night before with a group of first time ferry travelers from South Carolina. They’re thankful, but we all remain baffled by this bizarre system.
We make port at Thira (Fira), Santorini at 9:25pm, but our journey still isn’t over. We have to catch a pair of local buses across the island to the remote town of Oia, perched atop the cliffs of an ancient volcano.
Our bus skips our stop, so I enjoy a third double espresso of the day and take in the stunning view. Then we hop another bus one stop back to quiet Hotel Finikia Place.
It’s 12:45pm, over two days later and definitely shower time. That’s 49 hours and 45 minutes in transit. There was a time change in there somewhere but I’m not bothering to figure it out. I just don’t want to move again for days….
If anyone’s actually kept up with this travel blog, they’ll know I end up talking about coffee from time to time. Maybe too often, but it’s something important to me & I went too long in Asia with too few decent cups. I expected all that to change the moment I stepped down onto the tarmac in Milan, Italy.
Now I’m no coffee super snob, although I sometimes fantasize about being one. I don’t always need a perfect espresso or even a great cup of coffee. I appreciate them when they come along, but 13 years of bad newsroom coffee has left me bitter enough to be pleased with a decent cup on a regular basis.
So here’s the lowdown on my Italian coffee experience to date. Northern Italians don’t drink a lot if GREAT coffee. They can, however, get a really GOOD brew almost anywhere (I hope to learn about southern Italian coffee in the weeks ahead). It seems like every hole in the wall cafe, bar, tobacco shop or whatever has a $10k+ super-automatic espresso machine on the counter. The coffee may not always be great, but is always better than average.
I still have mixed feelings about this. I’d expected to have my taste buds tingling with excitement every morning, but instead they’re just… happy. That said, I’ve already enjoyed more good espressos and Americanos than is my normal routine.
This brings me to the photo. The thing I’m happiest about with the coffee here is that the cheapest, most easily disregarded or even shunned coffee can still get me excited. What I’m saying is this. I’ve already consumed a lot of… vending machine espresso! It sounds amazing, but I can plunk €0.50 into a machine and pull a tasty, freshly brewed espresso out of the bottom 40 or so seconds later. I even feel a bit sinful about the whole thing, but that’s also part of the fun. Does it taste great? No. Does it taste good? Absolutely. It even trumps some espressos I’ve had at nicer US joints which is really just a shame because it is basically little more than a coffee pod centered machine.
It has now become my custom to score one of these sinful little brews every time I take the train to a new city. Machines are right on the train platform usually & I get a Lungo, or long pour espresso. I got one for the ride from Pisa to Florence today. I already plan on getting another for the long ride to Rome tomorrow. Think what you will, but at least give the worst of the consistently good a shot the next time you’re in Europe (I ran into a machine last year in Paris too). Ciao.
