Track Pete

I find it telling that it seems a majority of the interesting travel blogs I run across are written by solo travelers, most often women. I think there’s a reason why we write more than people who travel with friends or in groups and that it’s pretty self evident: it’s an outlet for our loneliness. In the last year and a half, the vast majority of my time has been spent away from home, alone. As I write this, it’s been over a month since I’ve conversed with anyone in my native language, and I can remember every single conversation in English for the month before that. The truth is, I don’t think I could have done this without the internet – without a blog to share my thoughts, without Facebook to see what my friends are up to, without the occasional e-mail to provide a façade of normalcy… without these things I’d likely have driven myself insane with my internal dialogue. Now, I grant, there’s a reason I travel alone and I do love it, but lately it seems all I run across in the blogosp...

The image of the giant stone heads of Easter Island has been engraved on my mind for as long as I can remember – even as a child, there was something mysterious and amazing about the idea. Seeing them for myself has always been on my list and yet, if I’m honest, I never quite expected to actually travel there. I simply haven’t looked into it until recent times, and was shocked to find that this island, considered one of the more remote locations in the world, happens to be the proud owner of one of the largest runways in the Pacific. This runway, the most remote in the world, was completed in 1987 and crosses the entire width of the island, quite literally from coast to coast. It was provided by NASA as an optional failsafe landing zone for the space shuttle, but had the side effect of massively boosting tourism on the island thanks to the ability to land planes as large as 767’s with plenty of room to spare. I would not at all be surprised to find that the paved surface area of the ru...

In spite of seeing it hundreds of times in surfing movies and documentaries, nothing quite prepared me for the intensity of being smashed beneath a wave at high speed and tumbling deep down into the ocean. Blurry disoriented vision combines with overwhelmed physical senses struggling against the pressure and noise to create a sharp stab of fear and pain, suddenly smothered as all sensation focuses precisely on the massive rolling wave moving over me. For a moment, that wave is my entire existence. Upside down, legs and arms akimbo, the light filtering through it defines depth and motion, a single moment in which everything stops to allow my mind to process this intensity. As the calm acceptance of the power around me settles into my mind a single thought escapes, unexpectedly shaking me from my reverence. ”How can I possibly capture this experience?”

Every time I travel, my world seems to shrink, my sense of time completely changes, and I often lose track of what’s happening “today.” I become completely disconnected from myself and almost feel like a passenger in my own body as I interact with the world outside. It’s especially strong when I travel outside North America, because I am instantly alienated by the world around me. There is a strangely surreal effect on one’s psyche to be completely surrounded by people speaking a different language, following different rules, and interacting in different ways. No matter how you try to submerge yourself in another culture, you are always an oddity, an outsider, and the ever present knowledge of this is what creates this strange mental disconnection.

One thing I learned when planning for last year – don’t get too caught up in any particular idea, keep everything as open as possible. It cost me more money in airfare to not plan months in advance but aside from the mistake of paying rent on a condo I wasn’t living in, the flexibility in that schedule allowed me a much greater set of experiences. After a fair bit of planning on thinking, I’m already seeing my 2011 completely change from how I imagined it two months ago. There’s still a month before anything really exciting starts other than preparation (paperwork, paperwork, paperwork), but as things are starting to come together I wanted to share my rough plans for 2011 as of right now:

On April 9, 2008, my life was irrevocably changed. Every risk I’ve taken in the last two years has been a direct result of almost a single moment in time. I remember looking at one of my best friends, Brad, and saying “I am going to quit my job and travel the world.” To hear Brad describe this moment is somewhat shocking, because he could see in my eyes how real this was, and he knew it would happen. It started out, as it always does, with a small risk. Brad wanted to do European Delivery on a new BMW and spend a couple weeks driving around Europe – for me to join him would require taking the longest amount of consecutive vacation from a job I had ever taken in my life, an entire two weeks . Our trip would end in Amsterdam, where some of the guys on my team worked, so I was able to justify it by finishing up with a week working out of our Amsterdam office. Brad’s brother Adam joined us for what would turn out to be a whirlwind tour across most of Western Europe and a defining experien...

I’ve been home from my scooter trip for a month now, and by far the most common question I’ve heard anyone ask is “What’s next?”  It’s a question that has consumed me for months, and needless to say, it’s not easy to answer. My plan for the next adventure is a bit more ambitious. If you’ve been following me, you know that I have two driving reasons behind my recent adventures: the first is to help people in need through charitable donations while the second is to inspire “normal” people to look up from their daily routine and see the amazing beauty of the people and world around us, to realize that we’re all the same and enjoying that is as (or more) important than focusing on our own small bubbles of existence.

One of the hardest things with any long journey is coping with the end – you feel amazingly free at first, but this quickly turns to boredom. Worse, you may find yourself changed in many ways, perhaps unexpected, and accepting this can be quite difficult. This is the fourth time in the last year I’ve gone through this, each time different. In November, 2009, I returned from one of the most bizarre and thought-provoking vacations anyone can imagine, where I rode a mototaxi thousands of miles across South America (I cannot recommend this type of experience enough). I had already made plans to quit my job, but I think everyone I worked with secretly hoped I would change my mind when I returned – unfortunately for them, this experience solidified my need to experience life at a different level. Immediately after my final day of work on December 31, 2009, I set out on a road trip across the US with the goal of getting the few remaining states in my “all 50 states” merit badge. Sleeping in...

The sun flees behind me, sullen, as I pass it by. Night slowly smothers my world, until all that exists is a shrunken cone of light, a feeble token of my unwillingness to fully surrender to the darkness. The smooth dark curves of the mountain road reveal themselves by this light, tantalizing glimpses of yellow and white paint keeping me within the night road’s embrace. Each curve is a new mystery to explore, the road leaning away from the light and refusing to reveal itself. They must be felt, intimately, each meter of the curves coyly unfolding itself under my touch as I slide along it. The sharpness often stabbing, forcing an unexpected response, rapid deceleration followed by careful, thoughtful exploration. Mysterious shapes slide by, tugging at my mind, familiar yet completely foreign. The road consumes my attention, even to consider what lies beyond, in the darkness, is a risk not worth taking. Somewhere above lights in the sky beg to be revealed, but the curves before me refuse ...

I’ll be the first to admit it – when it comes to typical Americans, I’m pretty jaded. As a general whole, our culture in the US is very self-centered and “me first,” as can be seen from the way we view work to our politics. Having spent about half my life in the developing world, I’m always saddened by this back home because it’s amazing how people with (what we perceive as) very little are so much more willing to share. One of the things I love about traveling is meeting people who let you intersect with their lives for just a brief moment, bringing you into their bubble in a way that many of us wouldn’t normally do to strangers. Something about the romance of being on the road seems to open people up to things outside themselves and as you get to encounter some of the coolest people (or, perhaps it’s just that this willingness to engage with a stranger is what makes them the coolest people and I just randomly bump into them while traveling). I’ve met many great people on this trip, f...

I created this blog to chronicle my first major solo adventure in late 2008, when I rode my motorcycle over 4,200 miles in just over three weeks from the east coast to the west coast of the USA.  That was the longest amount of contiguous time off I had taken from a job in nearly eight years and it solidified a slowly building realization that I wanted something different out of life – I wanted adventure! In the year and a half since then, I’ve completed major overland trips on two more continents along with another 10,000+ miles around the USA and I’ve gained a strange need for the challenge of open sky around me.  While I was driving an auto-rickshaw across India I started to think about what I wanted to do next, and it’s been bouncing around in my skull ever since.  I want to drive across Africa, I want to cross Australia, but most urgently I want to visit the Arctic Circle! Originally I thought about just flying up to Alaska and spending a month or two puttering ar...

This time next week, I will be on my second leg of a four leg flight to Siem Reap in Cambodia.  Over the next three months I will be flying all over the place, logging over 20,000 airline miles and making at least fifteen transfers. I simply can't afford to deal with misplaced baggage on this trip, and I need to be mobile enough to easily pack and move without worrying about carrying around multiple bags.  So, how do you travel for three months with a carry-on?  It's actually easier than you might think... Clothes: Clothes take up the most space in any traveler's bag, so if you want to travel light you need to eliminate them.  There are a few easy tricks to this, but the best is simple - use synthetics, wear bulky gear, buy local, and donate on the way out.  For this trip, I'll only be bringing the following with me: Wearing when traveling: New pair of jeans (they will wear out most likely) North Face Hyvent waterproof/windproof shell (if I go somewher...

As some of my friends know, shortly before leaving to South America for the 2009 Mototaxi Junket I gave notice at Blackboard where I have worked for the last 4+ years .  On negotiation with my management we decided on a final day of December 31, 2009, which is now rapidly approaching. The first question people ask on hearing this is inevitably " Where are you going? " implying that I'm leaving because I have a better position lined up - in fact, I do not.  I decided to quit my corporate job in the middle of a recession to focus on improving myself outside the workplace as well as to position myself towards new opportunities that simply aren't available within a company like Blackboard (I've been carefully planning for this financially for years). I'm approaching my upcoming freedom with great joy and figured I would share some of plans, since so many of my friends keep asking what I will be up to.  The nutshell is simple - six months of personal improvemen...

I've now been back in the States for just over a week - still adjusting in some ways, but the motoventure is also rapidly fading from visceral experience into warm memory. With most of the media from the trip and the fallout all sorted, I figured it was a good time to end with a final recap: - Rob & Will from Valsalva Victory made it! They were the first team to actually drive a mototaxi all the way from Huancayo to Asuncion. Of everyone on the Junket, I spent by far the most time with them, from carrying their extra weight on mountainous terrain to the hectic side by side drive down towards Abancay in the pitch black because their lights randomly cut out... Definitely stoked that they pulled it off! - Danny Smith from 633 Squadron also made it, along with some others. What makes Danny special is that he's the craziest most accident prone loony in the entire Junket (while also being a stand up guy and great to hang out with). His mate had to leave partway through an...