What a year!

It’s just over one year since I’ve worked full time, and I thought it would be fun to make a bunch of lists of what I’ve done in that year.

Distance

• About 33000 miles by airplane, visiting 14 airports
• Around 6000 miles by car
• 2000 nautical miles by sailboat
• 1000 nautical miles on the Alaska Marine Highway (a car ferry)

Types of vehicles

• My Slumbaru
• Airplanes
• Buses
• Taxis
• Pickup trucks
  • with dead goat
  • without dead goat
• Boats
  • Wonderland
  • Ferry from Haines, AK to Bellevue, WA
  • Ferry on Lake Geneva
  • Senegalese water taxi
  • Lanchas in Guatemala
• A camel
• A horse
• My hiking boots
• A zipline

Places

You can see a full list, as well as I can remember, at Tagzania. I ended up with 75 places, which means that in a year I moved to a new place on average every 4.8 days! Hopefully when Tagzania clears up some bugs, I can post a map visually showing all the places I was.

• United States
  • States: CA, NY, CT, MA, NV, UT, CO, WY, MT, AK, WA, OR, AZ, NM, VA, TX, TX, TX (so big it counts for 3!)
  • Notable cities: San Antontio, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Portland, Salem, Seattle, Whitehorse, Skagway, Haines, Telluride, Hyder, San Francisco, Pasadena, San Diego, Arnold, Roseburg
• Canada (Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon Territory)
• Portugal (Lisbon and several other small towns to the south)
• Spain
  • Ayamonte
  • Canary Islands (a special administrative region of Spain)
    • Arrecife
    • Las Palmas de Gran Canarie
    • Santa Cruz de Tenerife
    • Isle of Graciosa
• Senegal (mostly Dakar, but also a village on the Saloum River)
• Belize
• Guatemala
  • Flores
  • San Andrés
  • Livingston
  • Puerto Barrios
  • Coban
  • Panajachel
  • San Pedro
  • Quetzaltenango
• Mexico
  • San Cristobal las Casas
  • Palenque
  • Oaxaca
  • Puebla
  • Mexico City

National Parks

• United States
  • Great Basin National Park
  • Arches National Park
  • Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
  • Grand Tetons National Park
  • Yellowstone National Park
  • Glacier National Park
  • Klondike Goldrush National Historical Park
  • Joshua Tree National Park
• Canada
  • Waterton Lakes National Park
  • Banff National Park
  • Jasper National Park

Work (6 out of 52 isn’t bad, is it?)

• Tellme, Sysadmin, 3 weeks
• Tellme (Virginia), manual assembly, 3 weeks
• Freelance consulting, 2 sales calls (yes sales!)

Study

• 6 weeks one on one Spanish lessons
• 4 classes in 3 weeks with RedR
• bunches of American Red Cross classes

Languages I’ve heard (and sometimes spoken)

• English (Texan, American, English, International)
• Spanish
• Spanglish
• Dutch
• German
• French
• Italian
• Hebrew
• Japanese
• Several Mayan languages
• Wolof and one other Senegalese tribal language whose name I forget

People I met came from

• New Zealand
• Germany
• Edinburgh, Scotland
• Toronto, Canada
• Madras, India
• Australia
• Cameroon
• Argentina
• Uruguay
• Spain
• England
• Ireland
• United States
  • Washington, DC
  • San Francisco, CA
  • Berkeley, CA

Professions of people I’ve met

• First time resturanteur in Haines, Alaska
• American bar owner in Guatemala
• Dreadlock-wearing lawyer
• Doctors and nurses
• MSF Logisticians
• IT guys (but no gals, hmm)
• Electrician
• Tax accountant (it’s true, they really are boring)
• Teachers
• Civil engineers
• Retired British Army seargent

Stuff I would never leave home without

• My black REI One jacket
• My (now) battered and ragged pair of Chacos
• A notebook (mine’s from Lanzarote!)
• Leatherman
• My guardian angel keyring
• 2 500ml Nalgene bottles

Stuff I keep carrying, but never really use

• A mini Moosewood Cookbook
• Universal drain plug
• My Tilley Hat

My Quick Mental Checklist while Traveling

• Can you get out of legal trouble? Have you touched your passport?
• Can you buy yourself out of any other problem? Do you have 2 cards that work in ATM’s, more than one credit card, and some US dollars in $20’s and at least one $100? Are some of those things not in the same place as others?
• Will you be flying? Have you touched your flight paperwork?
• Will you be riding a bus? Do you have food and water?
• Is your shampoo in the shower still?
• Have you told your guardian angels where you’re about to go?

Things I learned

• In the middle of the ocean, steering through a squall, running aground is the last thing you think of. (But when you do think of it, you feel like an idiot since land is over 1000 miles away.)
• Construction (and most other engineering aspects of life) is the same in Guatemala and Senegal
• How to type on a US keyboard in Spánísh módé.
• The chicken salad sandwiches in Guatemala City won’t kill you.
• How to unlock a GSM phone.
• No one in London’s ever been to East Anglia. Trying to find someone who has is like trying to find someone in New York who has been to Rhode Island.