Blog Update #216

Welcome to my travel blog..  Unfortunately, you’ll likely be reading it backwards.  It’s posts go from recent to past.  

Before this one and a half month adventure, it had been 9 years since I had taken a bigger trip to where I traveled to Africa for 2 months.  Additionally even earlier on, it’s been 15 years since I embarked on my “Adventura Grande” around the world for one and a half years. Mostly, I felt like my blog would many times be a burden when I’m traveling as it’s surprisingly hard to find the time to update it while being on the road and I only have this little screen on a phone to work with.  At times during my posts, I really wanted to put a disclaimer stating to please excuse any errors as it was simply put together from an IPhone and most of the time while rolling down the road.  As listed in the title above, I’m surprised to reflect that I’ve now updated 216 posts to this blog and covered over 50 countries traveled.  When I started this blog, MySpace was very popular and Facebook was gaining popularity very quickly as well.  At the time of writing here in 2023, I’m probably too far out of the loop on what’s cool other than I have never jumped on the bandwagon in the world of social media much.  Everyone is always taken back when I say that I’ve never used Instagram.  Deep down, I dislike much about what social media has to offer.  It always seems like everyone is simply posting filtered depictions of what would make it seem like everyone has a perfect life full of endless fun.  I can’t imagine how much of a challenge this poses to the followers and especially the younger generations who are finding their way in this crazy world and establishing their own expectations for what to expect and how to be a part of it all.  In relating this thought to my blog, I will assure you this is not anything overly exciting containing filtered pictures portraying a dreamy lifestyle.  It is not something that I put out there to very many people that I have done a travel blog over the years as well.  I mainly use this as a way to document, reflect, share my experiences with people close to my heart, and look back on the adventures I’ve had.  Although many people over the years have expressed that what I have done is incredible to get to this many places, I like to say nothing in this blog is anything more than something that started with hard work, a goal, and an execution of said goal.  Additionally,  most of my travels have involved more moments of being uncomfortable and dirty rather than comfortable and dreamy.  If you were break this entire blog up into total money spent traveling, you might be surprised on how little I spent on average to get to these destinations.  Almost all transportation is public and accommodations are typically a dormitory option.  For a quick example, I have spent less than $50,000 on all of these trips combined taking me to over 50 countries traveling for somewhere around 625 days total.  There have been some more expensive layers that drive this number up some, but on average $50-60 per day is probably on the higher side of these figures.  

One day, sooner than we might prefer, we’re all going to realize that our time left is no longer. I’d like to assume most people have big dreams of the things they’d like to do before this moment comes.  I can assure whoever happens to actually read this message in it’s entirely, a lot of you would not enjoy many of the things I have done below. They were my dreams though and I’m grateful for the fact that I perused and lived them rather than making excuses or reasons to why it couldn’t ever be possible.  If you’ve managed to get this far, my greatest hope is that I might inspire you to act on an adventure of your own.  It really doesn’t require you to be rich or perfect.  Just a goal and a little hard work.

Buen Camino!