The first time I thought about starting a blog was in 2017. I was 21 years old and spending six months studying finance in Winterthur, Switzerland, a town just outside of Zurich. I was fresh off of the most exciting and fulfilling 6 month stint of my young life. I spent the previous summer living and working in Grand Teton National Park. It was there that I recognized my love for the outdoors and my desire to pursue it further. Because the Swiss semester didn’t start until late February, I found myself with three months of winter break. I knew I couldn’t sit at home in Florida for that long.
At that time I was reading Alastair Humphrey’s book Grand Adventures which fueled me with the desire and a game plan to undertake a new experience. It talked about planning, saving for, and executing adventures for little cost and had accounts of adventurers who accomplished crazy feats very little money. The author himself rode a bicycle around the world for 4 years on his life savings of 7,000 pounds. Biking around the world was only one of his many adventures and probably not even his craziest one. I decided that I would do a road trip for the entire month of January. Not only would I road trip cross country, but I would never pay for a single place to stay-simply lodging at friend’s places along the route or camping at free campsites. I was also determined to pay for as little food as possible, so I assembled a car food container and only stopped to get fresh or refrigerated ingredients sparingly along the way. I mostly lived off instant coffee and peanut butter and oatmeal. Trader Joe’s turkey chili was another healthy and simple essential for $2 a can (still is). I always promised myself I would get to campsites in the daytime but somehow always got there it night. It was lonely and scary and I would berate myself for putting myself in that situation yet again. Then I would pitch my tent, begrudgingly fall asleep after convincing myself that the sounds outside my tent were natural and then wake up. More often than not, when I woke up it would be beautiful and I would wonder what the hell I was so scared of the night before. This happened again and again. It was a lovely and informative experience of becoming an adult.
My favorite part of these experiences were the characters I met along the way and the stories encountered from my time spent putting myself in novel situations. I met a man in Tucson who had hiked the same mountain 1,581 times because the approach had the most diverse flora in fauna in the whole state. I met a boy in a small Arkansas town on a snow day who loved rocks and wanted to talk about them more than anything in the world. I met college student photographers in New Mexico who offered me a place to stay and gave me a peak into their profession. Along the way I tried to keep a journal to log my experience of all the encounters but found that I was not very successful.
Fast forward to Switzerland in the Spring of 2017, I found myself quite lonely and homesick. Despite getting exactly what I thought I wanted (a paid opportunity to study inn one of the most beautiful and mountainous locations in the world), I felt quite lonely. I wasn’t socializing nearly enough. I was utilizing my time spent near the mountains to adventure out for many weekend hikes albeit often alone. One day my mom was talking to me and realized that I was quite unhappy. She suggested that a start a blog to talk about my encounters with others. She believed it would be a good way to capture the stories of the characters I met (anyone that knows me knows that I’ve never met a stranger and can talk for days). I began to research what it took to start a blog and the process of buying and setting up a domain name. I did some research on wordpress and got oh so close to making the move to start a blog. Eventually I felt overwhelmed by the prospect of the work it would take and just threw my hands up and lied to myself saying it “wasn’t for me”.
Fast forward another 6 years and I finally decided that I was worthy of starting a blog. Accepting this meant acknowledging that I owed it to myself to fulfill my creative urges and honor them more faithfully than I had in the past. I still feel the same anxieties and trepidations, (i.e. still clueless about wordpress and would love guidance/help from anyone willing to teach) but I know that NOT writing would be lying to my authentic self. Not writing would be denying what I really value in my own life and my personal development. I love telling stories and sharing experiences with others. I find that putting words to paper helps me to make sense of life. It gives me a medium to reflect on events in my life better than any other outlet I have tried. I don’t have a specific goal in mind with writing this, other than to get better at writing and create something that I can reflect on with pride and joy. If I’m really lucky, perhaps it can bring joy to others along the way as well.