My Story

        I have often introduced myself as a large hairy uncivilized heathen from the Midwest.  Sadly this is not completely accurate as I am actually quite skinny now.  But in all seriousness I am from the Midwest, born and raised in Wyoming in the Laramie area where I still have family that ranches and then I went to school both there and South Dakota.  The uncivilized part comes in because while I don’t mind, I truly don’t appreciate the Beatles and will gladly state that they are just a boy band from the 60’s and for the life of me I can’t name one song that Mic Jagger sings after a couple drinks.  As for the heathen part I don’t quite warrant a stake burning I still don’t attend church anywhere near as often as my mother would like and have on occasion used organized religion as the butt of several jokes.

            In the summer of 06 I got bored in South Dakota and took a position in Philadelphia as an Account Executive selling bright flashy things.  Now for a kid from the Midwest this was a great gig.  I got to travel from Boston down to Richmond and taste all the different cultures between.  For about 4 years I got to enjoy the highs and see just how bad the lows got and all in all life was great.  Luckily I landed in a great town just outside Philly, small enough so you couldn’t walk to the grocery store without having at least 4 people say hi and one of them offer to buy you a beer.

But all the oysters in Boston, crazy nights in NYC, Philly cheese steaks, crab cakes in Baltimore and the great friends to enjoy them with got overshadowed by the fact that it was just time to leave.  Work was getting tense with the bad economy, and on top of that I couldn’t help but wonder if my clients would be better off spending more time with their kids then working harder to pay for the shiny I was trying to sell them.  In some cases it was the perfect deal for all in all, but not always, and it was getting tough justifying it to myself selling when there really wasn’t the justification to buy.   Then there was just the general rat race of the east coast; literally the traffic was driving me nuts.  You could take a rabid squirrel, hop it up on hallucinogens and meth, and it would still possess more humanity than your average Philly soccer mom behind the wheel.

           

         And so I decided it was time to wander again, but to where?  There are a lot of cool places in North America but I have seen most of them, and so I decided it would be a lot of fun to wander around Australia.  For quite a few years I have wanted to go, never really knew anything about it but knew I would have fun and the more I learned the more I know I am right.  But the bad part about Aussie is that it is huge and I can’t hang out with my friend Jeff and consume beers and terrible horror movies there, and lots of big and little nasties to eat me.  And so to learn how to wander on my own, and to have the chance to say bye to my friends and fam across the country, I decided to take a long bike ride to get ready.  Guessing it will be around 3,300 miles all in all.