Everyone seems to be discussing statistics and making weekend plans. The stores are full of people loading up on snacks and beer. Is it time for the World Series or the Superbowl? No it’s hurricane season and South Louisiana is about to experience the main event. Hurricane Gustav has been beating up islands in the Caribbean for days and now it’s our turn. Read the rest of this entry »
After leaving my sister’s home in late May, I spent a week in Oregon and Washington catching up with family. From there I flew back to New Orleans where I was met at the airport by my parents who I hadn’t seen in 15 months. After settling in and playing with the Bassett Hound/Labrador Retriever mix next door (look like a Retriever with sawed off legs) so that she wouldn’t bark at me everytime I went outside, I set about finding a job in the local area. After sending out about 10 resumes, I ended up with offers from two different companies. (My trip was on the resume so as to explain the gap in work history.) One was the company that I worked for before I left. They were offering a job similar to the one that I had when I left. The other was from an engineering contract company which would move me around between different sites. So began an agonizing few days of going back and forth about which job to take. I was also trying to decide whether I wanted to return to engineering in the first place.
First I figured I would have to make the decision about whether to accept any of the jobs. While I do take risks in life (the trip), I am not one who likes to exist on a razor thin edge (show up somewhere with $10 in my pockets and hope for the best.) I like to have some sort of a back up plan. While planning for the original trip, I had set certain financial criteria that I needed to meet before leaving and didn’t leave until I met them. I wasn’t broke when I returned from the trip, but I didn’t feel I was in a strong enough financial position to just throw caution to the wind and try to invent a new life doing something completely new. In the end I decided to take one of the two job offered to rebuild my financial strength.
With one decision down, it was time to tackle the next one. From a financial perspective, both jobs were equal in the first year but the engineering firm won out by year two as the increased pay made up for lower benefits. From a comfort level, my previous employer (from now on P.E.) won out as I already knew the job and the people I would be working with. My P.E. would also provide stronger job security as engineering firms tend to suffer more in weak business cycles. The engineering firm offered a more flexible work environment with alternate work schedules, overtime pay, and easier access to unpaid time off which would be great if I wanted to do a longer trip.
To solve this problem, I put all my engineering skills to the task and try to quantify what was essentially a values decision in both Excel and mental spreadsheets. In the end I chose the engineering firm. While the pay was better (I will be making 30% more than when I left), this was not what made me choose them. I have no desire to become superwealthy and I don’t have extravagant tastes. (I won’t turn down an opportunity to put myself in a better financial position if I can though.) It was the perceived flexibility that won out in the end. I am a big proponent of work/life balance. I believe in working hard when I am at work but I also want to be able to enjoy the fruits of that hard work. Starting on June 23, I will reenter the working world for the first time in 16 months. It will be an adjustment, but it will be nice to have income coming in again. I plan to stay at my parent’s home for the next two to three months and then go buy a house. From there the future is open. Currently I plan to continue to travel to exotic locales but just for shorter time periods. My plan for the near term is to try to set myself up so that I have some sources of income that don’t depend on me going to a job site everyday. This way, if I do decided to take another long trip, I can still make money.
As I sit here in my sister’s house surrounded by scenes of American surburbia, I find that the memories of my trip are beginning to fade as they always do. The tastes, smells, and sounds are starting to dull and are becoming harder to recall. It appears that I will remember my trip not in vivid memories and perfect recall but in flashes of familiarity brought on by what I encounter in daily life (a news story about China, a mountain view, or a movie filmed in New Zealand for example). This doesn’t bring on a feeling of depression that I thought I might encounter at the end of my trip. Rather it provides a bridge and helps to ease the transition between two very different lifestyles.
Now that I have been back in the US for two weeks, I have begun to look for a job and re-establish all the things needed for a “normal” life. I find that it is not as hard as I thought to make the jump back to my previous life. It just goes to show how adaptable humans are and how quickly the exotic becomes the norm. My trip ended at a good time. Towards the end I was the kid who ate too much candy and ended up with a stomache ache. Despite being surrounded by exotic locales and vistas, it was hard for me to feel any of the awe that I had at the start of my trip. My brain and body now needs time to absorb and deal with all that I have seen and been through. I am content for the time being to spend time with friends and family and reenter the workforce. The latter brought on as much by necessity as wanting to feel productive again. All that being said, I am once again starting to feeling a very small kernel of wanderlust. The roving lifestyle is once again beginning to look exotic and full of promises of new adventures. Who knows how long it will be before the calls from my backpack become too loud (Central Asia - the “Stans” fascinate me) to ignore and I feel the need to head out again. If I do, rest assured that I will do my best to document for anyone who wants to come along. In the meantime, check back with the blog every few months. As the trip is officially over, I will no longer do weekly updates, but plan to do updates if anything interesting happens in my life (like blog book deals, new big adventure about to begin, things like that). I still plan to do trips whenever work permits and they will definitely show up.
I will be in Indiana until May 21 attending tea parties, watching Sesame Street, playing My Little Pony and dollhouse, and all the other things men submit to when confronted with a bright smiling three year old face. These activities will occasionally be broken up with bouts of bug hunting and being used as a private jet (I like to think of myself as a tough fighter plane to make up for the My Little Pony sessions) for flights around the house. I will then go to Oregon for a week to visit other family, and return to Louisiana on May 28.
Since my return to the US, I have been asked some questions mulitple times so I thought it would make a good blog topic to answer them. Read the rest of this entry »
For those interested in such things, I have decided to write a page with some statistics about my trip. Hopefully some will be useful to someone and some will probably just be odd but here they are anyway. Read the rest of this entry »
Day 8 in Iceland dawned bright, but windy. I packed the car and continued my trip east. The drive today was dominated by the icefield of Vatnajokull. This is the biggest icefield in Europe. It stretches for 150 km along the coast and into the interior. Numerous glaciers descend toward the coast from the icefield. After leaving Vik, the farmland quickly gave way to miles of wasteland or polar desert. The road past through large swathes of terrain made up of braided river channels and gravel fields. Wherever the glaciers descended, the wind really picked up in speed. Dust and gravel blew over the road in visible clouds. I was very concerned that the car paint would be damaged as you could hear it hitting the car. I stopped at several points to look at various glacial terminuses. When I exited the car, I had to be careful to hold onto the door to keep it from being snatched open in the wind. (I met another group later whose car door was damaged in this manner. It would no longer shut straight.) The highlight of this portion was the glacial lake of Jokulsarlon. It was formed in the early twentieth century when the glacier retreated. From the parking lot, I walked down to the shore of the lake and sat for a while and watched the large ice blocks moving in the lake. Seals could be seen in the distance bobbing up and down in the water. The outlet of the lake was a small river which led to the ocean. Icebergs floated down this outlet to the ocean where they were ground up on the beach. It was great just to sit there and listen. Over the howl of the wind, one could hear the ice creaking, groaning, and breaking up in the water. While I was doing this, a spotted seal surfaced right near me and swam on its back watching me. While walking along the lake shore I came across a dead baby seal that must have been crushed in the iceflows. Read the rest of this entry »
The Norrona sailed out of Torshavn harbor at 5:00 pm sharp. After checking in, I went to find my cabin on deck 6. I was happy to discover that this time I had a cabin to myself. After plopping down my bags, I went out to the open deck to watch as the ship sailed away from the islands. The ship did a small sightseeing trip before heading out into the open ocean. We sailed up close to and between some of the islands that I hadn’t got to visit. It was very impressive to see the massive cliffs from a different angle. The air was full of seagull which nested amongst the rocks. With the huge cliffs in the background dwarfing the birds, they looked almost like a swarm of bees buzzing around the cliffs. After about 1.5 hours, we left the islands behind and headed out into the open ocean for Iceland. The wind picked up due to the increased boat speed and lack of land so most people went inside. I walked up to the front of the boat to watch the water pass below us. I was alone except for a young Frenchman (Laurent) and women (Marie). After I stood there for a while watching the waves, the French group waved me over and politely informed me that the Frenchman was going to strip naked and take a picture standing in the cold wind on the front of the boat to fulfill a bet. They hoped I wouldn´t mind. I replied that it didn’t bother me and went back to looking at the waves. (If a man is going to take a naked photo, a cold environment is probably not the wisest place to do so for several reasons.) After the bet was satisfied and clothes put back on, Laurent and Marie went back inside and asked if I wanted to join them in the bar car where they had to finish a bottle of wine. Marie ended up going to bed and I visited with Laurent while he finished the bottle. Laurent was going to work in Iceland for two months as a tour guide for French groups. His friend Marie just came for a vacation. They were driving to Akureyri. I was offered a ride if their friend didn’t show up when the ship docked. Read the rest of this entry »
I am now sitting in the library of Reykjavik using the Internet, but I do not have enough time to do a full blog update. Internet access has been difficult to obtain here. Everywhere has wireless, but I have no computer. I will be at my sister’s house tomorrow and will work on the update then.
The article should be well worth the wait. It will regale you with tales about stunning scenery, treacherous roads, snowstorms, monster trucks, and lest I forget, naked French people.
I will also put up a trip statistic section with cost and other things like how many pairs of sunglasses I have gone through.
The Faroe Islands have got to be the most unusual place (terrain wise) that I have seen on my trip. Not only is the complete and utter lack of trees striking enough (even deserts have small shrubs, but not here) but the lack of variety of other flora is also unusual to me. The whole island is covered in a type of grass which now is brown but in the summer must turn the islands emerald. (It reminds me of a science fiction story I once read. An alien that came to Earth was amazed at the trees as it’s planet had only grass.) Outside of the capital of Torshavn (which is the largest city about 20000 in a nation of 48000 and sits in a broad plain) most of the the towns consist of 1000 people or less. It sits at the ends of fjiords or in small flat areas on the water that back up into steep hills (mountains highest point is 2894 ft). Torshavn is just now starting to develop a small suburban area as people move here from the outer villages. The villages are full of single or double story brightly colored wooden buildings. Each village also has an old wooden or stone church with an attached graveyard. The people all speak Faroese language which is descended from Old Norse. Their alaphabet has a few extra characters like ø, æ, å which I have great trouble pronouncing along with lots of accent marks. Due to the rugged terrain, the road system that connects the islands consist of steep two lane roads and many long tunnels. There are also ferries to islands not connected by tunnels. Read the rest of this entry »
After saying goodbye to Brian and his roomate, I took the last train of the night to Charles de Gaulle Airport. When I arrived, I had to go to all the terminals before finding out from which one I would fly. I finally learned this from a guard as the computer screens were inaccurate. Around 2:00 am I finally settled on a spot on the hard floor to try to get some sleep. The spot I picked was near some very loud Italians, but I decided to go with security (the airport was nearly deserted and I figured they would let me know if someone was rifling through my pockets while sleeping) instead of ease of sleep. I probably managed about half an hour and finally gave up around 4:30 am. At 5:00 am, the electronic ticket machines came on and I checked myself in. I then went through security and got on the plane at 7:00 am. I managed to sleep most of this flight. I landed in Copenhagen at 9:00 am and took the train into the city. After arriving at the central train station, my first action was to buy my train ticket to Thisted for April 10. As I was supposed to meet my next couchsurfing host later in the day, I next put my bags into a locker and got my first sticker shock. (Scandanavia is very expensive. So this whole blog won’t be about how expensive it is here, I will make a comment now that I often feel a bit lightheaded when walking into the shops. With the weak dollar and just the normal high prices here some things are about 3 times what I would expect to pay as opposed to double in Paris. I hope that I don’t go into a catatonic state by the time I am through with Iceland which should be 4 times more expensive. ) The locker was 30 krone (4.7 krone = 1 US dollar). To be fair the locker rental was for 24 hours (you can only open it once) but I only needed it for about 4. Read the rest of this entry »
