http://blogs.bootsnall.com/zaab Travel is a way of living. Tue, 02 May 2006 04:47:27 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en These days I stockpile all the beans, rice and canned tomatoes that will fit on the cupboard shelf. My cereal is poured out of plastic bags and portrays a mascot that my inner child reviles as being the wrong one, a friendly enough looking but strange wide eyed animal that ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/zaab/cinco-meses.html  I sorted out my mess, filled bags and bags full of clothing, tapes, movies, papers, love letters (not really), you name it in an attempt to get the physical clutter out of the way that was feeding into my mental clutter. It worked. I feel free and and relaxed and ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/zaab/taking-out-the-trash.html Though money will be an issue up until the day I achieve true financial independence (read:pipedream), things are definitely looking up in the last week. I found, as of today, 2.5 k that I didn't know existed. That should be enough to fund my trip and I should have plenty left ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/zaab/bricklaying.html The curative for my major anxieties, the relatively minor ones will always be there, is simply that I've done this before in a different form. Several years ago I moved here, to Flagstaff, from across the country. I had meager savings. I had no prospects, no living arrangements. I had no source ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/zaab/out-of-the-smoke.html I dusted off the mountain bike on Friday and took advantage of the waning winter weather to ride to my job. The snows are winding down after just winding up in March here in Northern Arizona after a long dry spell. Right around two inches for almost the totality of ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/zaab/a-step-towards-frugality.html "At night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of his own dreams. ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/zaab/the-motorcycle-diaries.html The largest task at hand is taking each individual fear and quelling it. If I face whatever is there with the frame of mind of the survivor I know I can be, there is nothing really to be aprehensive about. I can save the money, easily, not just for the ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/zaab/as-of-today.html I got out the map and routed my journey. The first place I ever wanted to travel was not Nepal, or Morocco or Peru, it was Salisbury. Not the Salisbury in England, but a small nondescript suburb just across the political boundary of the industrial town I grew up in. ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/zaab/early-travels.html What started as plans for just another sensible, but ridiculously harried, two week vacation to a foreign land, grew. I looked at a map of Argentina spanning the depths of the Southern Hemisphere from the rainforest to Antarctic seas and I knew I'd need a month. I tried the thought ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/zaab/origins.html