“There’s a particular kind of people that I despise. Those who seek some sort of a higher purpose or ‘universal goal,’ who don’t know what to live for, who moan that they must ‘find themselves.’” -Rand

My story begins in Western Washington State. I spent my childhood between three towns: Port Townsend (a hippie town on a peninsula in the Strait of Juan de Fuca at the end of the road), Kalama (a hamlet on the Columbia River across from a nuclear power station in Oregon) and Gig Harbor (a slightly larger hamlet—or suburb of Tacoma—on the Puget Sound).

My traveling began as it does with most people with parents. First, we traveled the amber plains, verdant mountains and long sandy beaches of Washington State. In my teens, we would take extensive road trips around the western and northern United States, Canada and Mexico thus wetting my appetite for travel.

I attended university in Washington, DC, in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Whilst on the East Coast, I traveled with varied friends across the remainder of the United States and took my first trip with then girlfriend to the UK and Ireland. Admittedly, my first trip to Ireland was for St. Patrick’s Day and to drink. Nonetheless, these islands intrigued me and I vowed to return.

After university, I found myself a bit lost for year back in the Seattle area, bouncing from menial job to monotonous joblessness. Then one fateful afternoon in January an old friend from university sent me an advertisement to live and work in central Europe through teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL). I seized the opportunity and was on my way to Prague by June.

During my first tenure as a certified English teacher, I was able to travel central Europe extensively. I made my way to Oktoberfest, Bratislava, Kris Kindl Markts in Berlin, all around the Czech Republic, Copenhagen, Norfolk and Dublin.

My second employ found me living in Moscow. Whilst working I was able to travel around the Golden Ring (the old villages surrounding Moscow) and St. Petersburg. After my contract expired, I set out with my future wife (a lovely English woman named Anna) on the Trans-Mongolian from Moscow to Ulaan Baatar to Beijing in February. Even the Russians thought we were crazy for choosing to go to Siberia in the dead of winter.

We spent the next two months traveling Mongolia, China, Hong Kong and Thailand at a cost of $100 each per month. When our money ran out, we crewed a 54-foot sloop across the Indian Ocean, visiting the northern Maldives, Oman and Djibouti.

After that adventure, we returned to Europe and spent sometime in Paris, Rhodes and the UK before moving to Prague and founding an English language newspaper called The Alsoran. It consisted of a restaurant and bar guide to the city surrounded by film, book, music and theatre reviews, political and social commentary and all the other substance that goes into a foreigner newspaper.

As publisher, I got my first non-collegiate taste of the writing world and loved it. I also wrote political commentary for a paper in Berlin called Jurnalo. After a year with the paper, our feet were itching, so we decided to move. Within a week, we were on a plane from Prague to Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur to Jakarta.

We lived and worked in Indonesia for 7 months. We traveled Java, Sumatra, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. We even found time to travel around the world to Brazil for our honeymoon. I survived Typhoid, but had to flee to Singapore for real medical attention.

And, now, I pay the bills by freelance writing. I have co-authored a book with my wife called An English Teacher’s Guide to the Planet. Currently, I am in Kuala Lumpur readying for my next adventure across Asia from the Pacific to the Indian to the Atlantic…From Singapore to Istanbul and all the mysterious, ancient, mythical, eminent and dazzling places in between.