This Adventure

The following is not really an introduction. It is, rather, a history of sorts, a retrospective. Because it seems to me that our website could use a simple explanation of how we got here. So I’m just going to briefly lay out what we are doing and have been doing on this trip. I guess it is an introduction of sorts: a hand shake with the birth of the adventure and its enactment up to date.

I use that word, “adventure,” with full awareness that it’s problematic.  It’s overused, beaten till swollen and sparse… type it in when looking for a blog and everything is an adventure: food and wine pairing, visits to the zoo, building your own hummingbird feeder.  But the struggle to replace the word with something more original or even more specific hasn’t resulted in anything other than procrastination on writing about our own. Specificity is too limiting and any other word does not connote the kind of activities we seek out.  My shitty computer dictionary defines adventure as: “an unusual and exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity.”  Sounds good to me.  I like hazards.  So adventure it is.  Our adventures while making our way “around the world” by land and by sea.

We left San Francisco in March of 2015 in our gold 1989 Toyota 4-Runner, loaded with all of our gear, favorite books, and a few small instruments we meant to learn (all of our worldly belongings). It was not a spur of the moment decision. We had been talking about and planning this trip for several years. Nothing concrete, not the kind of planning where you map out routes and buy plane tickets way ahead of time. The only thing we did which could be considered planning was to save money and to make several broad guidelines for our travels: we would try to get around the world (to provide some direction), we would not fly (to avoid having to make decisions ahead of time about where, exactly, to go), we would spend sparingly (to prolong the trip, we are not wealthy), we would find work when we ran out, and we would seek out the outdoors as we always have, especially rock climbing and mountaineering and bike touring and surfing. What this left us with was a decision to head west via sailboat laden with camping and climbing gear.

However, we did not decide to do that immediately. Our departure from San Fran was the beginning, both physically and emotionally, as we left behind our jobs and routines and began to take up the moving mentality. But first we spent a few months building my mom a tiny house. Then we decided to drive across the country for some months in pursuit of big rocks to climb and unknown states to see. While SF is close to home for me, Tucker calls Maine his place of origin, and we posted up there for some months to fix up the old family wooden boat (during which time we decided NOT to bring our own boat on the trip), to climb, and to enjoy the immaculate Maine fall. But once the weather started getting cold, we headed south with bags painstakingly packed for a trip of indefinite length. Our general direction-trend was, of course, west (back the way we had just come), but first we had to head south to Panama to find a ship crossing the Pacific and jump on as crew. The vague and round-a-bout method to our travels begins to become apparent.

 

 

That first step south was made a little over a year ago, and we have come 3500 miles west and 5200 miles south of SF since.  It is not that far for 2 years of travelling, but accounting for the 3000 miles east we traveled first and the main means of travel (sailing, which is almost as fast as walking, and the only way to get across the South Pacific without flying) it’s not too bad.  And we are in no hurry. We spent as much time as possible in the places we went: especially the States, Mexico, Panama, the Marquesas, the Tuamotus, the Societies, Niue, Tonga, Fiji, and now New Zealand. Our bags are heavy, but considering we decided to be fairly ready for what we call “anything”, they are fairly minimal.  What is anything?  Free climbing.  Camping. Sailing.  Surfing.  Mountaineering. Photography. Reading. Writing. We even brought small instruments (still learning). We’ve also picked up hobbies (free-diving and spear-fishing) and gear (fins, masks, wetsuits, a surf board) along the way.  And we’ve modified our perceptions and intentions as we go.  “Back-packing” is no longer on the rostrum, we don’t want to be toddling down the road with bag on the back and one in front, staying in hostels with very young and drunken and overly sexually charged other travelers.  Better to buy and sell vehicles, find cheap apartments, stay for free on boats, camp. We never imagined we’d spend so much time on boats, jumping from sailboat to sailboat as crew, but it has defined our past year, a life on the ocean and in it. And of course, that’s the beauty of travel, isn’t it?  The unexpected introduction of new shit that it turns out you love, but you never would have encountered in your more localized life-style.  And also the base idea behind our more relaxed approach to travel planning, which at this point, I’d say has been a resounding success. If you don’t plan too much, you find yourself in places you would not have expected being, doing things you did not know you could do. In countries you had never heard of, swimming with the whales or the sharks or the rays. Why fly over places if you don’t need to? Couple that with the variety of new people you meet, and you have the meat of what this blog is supposed to be about.  Pictures of and meditations on all that new stuff, including the new ideas that all that exposure to newness births.  That’s the gist of it, at least. Because adventure starts to feel fairly empty without some way to use all the experiences/people/new information you’ve encountered as inspirations for your own creativity.  Moving through the world with your mouth open like a filter feeder, catching all the delectable particles of experience, is stimulating, but even in its motion you can start to feel kind of sedentary if you can’t make something new from the bits you’ve collected.