Vagabonding begins!

I’ve been in Indonesia for the last 2 months…just renewed my visa in exciting East Timor to go back for round 3.

If you haven’t checked it already, I’m blogging about the trip on www.vagabondinglife.com.

Cheers!

Greg

Been a while since I updated, mostly because I’ve been busy working on my backpacking travel site and as always, still maintaining my vagabonding blog.

Luckily, since I quit my job at IBM back in 2005 I’ve been avoiding cubicles and a proper rat race job since. I am still living from a rucksack, even while at home trying to save money. All in all, despite the lack of funds - missions accomplished!

Even if every expenditure in the US makes me cringe, my one year backpacking travel trip has turned into 3 years of no longer contributing to society and I couldn’t be happier!

I miss the old blog and my readers, if you haven’t yet - come join me at my new home www.vagabondinglife.com

Life is good!

The unknown road - no place like it!

After nearly 3 years here at BNA, I’ve decided to move my blog to a new home.  Gasp.

Being an ex-Dilbert type IT engineer, it made sense to put my blog on the same server as my other travel websites, so the appropriate gnomes have been bribed, the sacrifice was made to the internet gods, and now I wait to get some love from the oracle. (Google)

The hardest part of doing this is the fear of loosing faithful readers who have stuck with me over the last 3 years through the good times, the Thai buckets, the snakes, sharks, bears, and scuba disasters…..so if you will, please change your bookmarks and join me at my new:

Vagabonding Blog  (http://www.vagabondinglife.com)

There you will find among other things a continuation of my vagabonding + articles and insight into the life of a vagabum. Plus even a neat broken RSS counter with which you can subscribe!

I chose Vagabonding Life as the new name of the blog because…what was supposed to be a 1 year exit from the rat race turned into 2, then 3, etc, etc….it is actually my new lifestyle and I want to share it.

Thank you to everyone that has read this over the years….somehow this meager blog full of bad English meant only to let family know that I was still alive has attracted lots of interesting people that have become new friends. It has even brought opportunities and writing gigs….who would have thought?! I hate to let something that has enhanced my life die a slow death, so come join me on the new website.

Lets play.

Yes….I am home. Surprise.

I have been trying desperately to write about our recent road trip through the American West, but I keep getting distracted by things such as
trying to earn enough money to eat. Its not that I don’t enjoy the writing anymore….in fact, I miss it quite a bit. Unfortunately my eyeballs can
only handle so much time basking in the radiation from this screen, so I have to prioritize.

I can say, that I am planning something potentially big for this blog. To be announced soon.

I still have 380 photos from our trip through Yellowstone, Jackson Hole, and even a video of my solo climb in Boulder, Colorado (which still makes me wake up in a sweat).
I’ll get there soon enough.

I can say that South Dakota has some of the finest asses in the states.

While driving through Custer State Park (yes, the same General Custer that made a career limiting decision at the Battle of Little Big Horn) they would walk right up to the car and even stick their heads inside if you weren’t fast enough to get the windows up! Probably a by-product of idiot tourists supplementing their natural diets of grass and berries with nachos and chips.

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I struggled to control my breathing as I walked up the trail.

I swung my Nikon out in front of me like it was an M16, scanning each shape and movement before moving my other foot forward. My ears analyzed every sound. My senses were working at 100% capacity and it sent a warm sensation of excitement through my entire body. This was an old familiar feeling, I’ve cherished it many times before either with a camera in my hands, hunting, or while in the Army. It felt like I was right where I needed to be.

The tall grasses on both sides of me were the perfect place to get ambushed by a bear, they were even the right color to hide a young grizzly’s blond coat. My imagination was running wild in hopes that I would see something, anything…..this year’s dreadful lack of adventure has taken its toll on the common sense part of my brain that is responsible for simple calculations like “bears have claws”, “you have fingernails”, “claws + fingernails = dead vagabond”.

Suddenly, there was a snap, a flash of movement, and 2 dark eyes staring at me from just meters down the trail…..

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Finally - something big.

I saw Mount Rushmore for the first time from the road, and just the sheer size of the thing was enough to make me sit in silent wonder as we got closer. The size of the crowd pushing strollers and toting camera bags was equally disturbing, but I was able to peacefully coexist.

I had always envisioned the monument as being up a short hike, or secluded in the South Dakota mountains….but surprisingly you can pretty much drive right up to the thing. In fact, the lumpy, RV-driving tourists which were absolutely everywhere probably wouldn’t think twice about doing a drive-by snapping of some pictures then marking it off their list of life goals as “done”.

Luckily for me, we had time to walk the short trails that go around so that I could tune in to the energy of the place. Strangely, one of the first things that I felt deep inside was a sudden realization that, like all other great world civilizations, this giant monument was destined to lay in ruins one day as a testimony to a fallen world power. Sure, it won’t happen within my generation….but I don’t doubt that it will happen. Every great world power has always thought they were the sh*t and that they were here to stay…..now take a look at the countries which once ruled the world….the Persians(Iran), Egypt, the Khmer in Cambodia, the Burmese, the Mayans, the Romans, the Greeks. They all had their time in the spotlight (like America) and they all built gigantic stone monuments (like this one!) which now lay in decay.

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Thanks to a certain mammoth sized department store, any retail presence that begins with the sound “WAL…” gives me a gag reflex.

I was relieve to find out however that Wall Drug spells their name with two “L”s and is actually a famous little drug store in South Dakota that turned celebrity somehow. I still don’t understand it.
Yes, its a neat wooden place with lots of old decorations and animal heads, plastic oversized Jack-a-lopes, and tourists snapping pictures of anything that will hold still for them. The reality is that it is a bunch of souvenir shops and ice creams joints under one roof that are laid out to look like an Old West type of place. Plastered over every inch of the compound are signs giving the distance to Wall Drug in placed like Afghanistan, Iraq, even the South Pole!

Why are people so inspired by this place that they think about it while dodging land mines or exploring some place as exotic as the South Pole? I have no idea. Sure, the ice cream was good….but not THAT good. Unless you desperately need to stock up on your plastic jack-a-lopes or South Dakota shot glasses, this place holds very little for the average person.

There was a nice little chapel set up for wanderers and nomads and it even had a sign “welcome travelers”. I loved the concept….it was just like some of the small temples in Asia. There is no preacher, choir, agenda, or set worship times…just a place to go and be.

The highlight of this stop was overhearing 3 girls speaking Russian in one of the shops. Since I can’t miss an opportunity to make an ass out of myself in another language, I did my best to start up a conversation with them in my pitiful Russian and introduced myself. Their eyes widened and their mouths dropped open. Either I had accidentally just called their mothers a vacuum cleaner in their language (yes, my Russian is that bad) or they hadn’t heard a tourist attempt their native tongue in a while.

We played back and forth until it was obvious that I was going to have to start asking them things like “where is the bus stop” or better yet “where is the toilet?” since my vocabulary is entirely travel oriented. It turns out that lots of Russian, Polish, Ukraine, and even Bulgarian students have chosen this place as an exchange stop during the summer.

I really hope that Wall Drug isn’t their only impression of American life that they get before going home to tell people that we all wear cowboy hats, carry cameras around our necks, and eat ice cream every meal!

Hey baby….wanna go vagabonding?

Roadtrip Day 3.

As the seas of corn on each side of us reluctantly gave way to mile after mile of prairie, some small signs of life started to appear. Here and there, rusty old oil wells dotted around the prairies slowly pumped away trying feebly to free us from the Middle East. Occasionally a coyote or group of antelope would come into view for a moment and then vanish. Even evil little rodents that I’m sure are somehow in collaberation with the squirrel’s plans to take over the world.

When it wasn’t my shift to drive, I was mesmerized by a bizarre and highly entertaining non-fiction book I picked up at a used book store called “Shen Ku - The Ultimate Traveler’s Guide“. Check it out when you get a chance, take my word for it - it is not your usual traveler’s tips book by any means.

Around noon, we rolled past Rapid City, South Dakota and directly into the Badlands National Park. Finally a state that has more to offer me than grain!

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I can sum up the first 2 days of our family road trip with one word:

Corn.

I had no idea so much existed in this universe, let alone in between my state of Kentucky and anything remotely of interest that might lie West of here. As the miles and hours burned up 2 different time zones for us, the bug splattered minivan always vigilantly pointed West and humming along at 80MPH, we were greeted by only one thing for our stiff-necked, caffeinated efforts:

Corn.

The only salvation from the ocean of amber fields on both sides of us (also known as Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa) was the occasional toilet break at a desolate rest stop or restaurant. Now I know what a survivor in a life raft drifting on the vast Pacific has to feel like. Our minivan seemed to be the last bastion of civilization afloat on a sea of grain and boredom. I know that places like this are a necessity to feed the world and that we would be hungry without them, but wow I’m glad that I’m blasting through as fast as possible.

Actually, there was one sightseeing stop to break up the monotony. As mile after mile evaporated, we started seeing billboards advertising the world famous “Corn Palace”. Yes…they grew so much corn they had to build a freaking structure out of it. While this sounds like my idea of a living Hell on this earth, one look at the glint in my dad’s eye told me that yes…we would be stopping at the corn palace…and you can pretty much guess what we would be seeing at such a palace:

Corn.

At night, we stayed in towns that had 4-digit populations listed proudly on their welcome signs. These are the forgotten places where weeds poke up through abandoned tires and old tractors go to rust. Even trains come here to die. Where was the classic route 66 of my Hollywood dreams? Where were the small town diners, muscle car races, James Deans and Marilyn Monroes? Maybe they were still out there…just buried beneath a sea of corn.

There was never any time, nor desire, to venture outside of the budget motels. A free continental breakfast was always gobbled up at a ridiculous hour in the morning, and we found ourselves back behind the wheel to burn up the miles toward our first destination worthy of me even turning on my camera - the Badlands. Let’s see them try to grow some blasted corn there!