Who I Am
If you are to enter the parallel universe of my life through regular reading of my blog, it would be smart to introduce myself. I’m a restless world wanderer, disguised as an ordinary human being. I look like others, but I don’t settle down and stay in one place all that well. Always, there’s a dream cooking in my noggin about the next new continent that I would like to roam around in, and it’s not the classy tourist spots that attract me. It’s not the really awful places, either. It’s the untrammeled countries where I won’t run into droves of Westerners out on vacation. The Unknown! Adventure! Different stuff and things you can’t always predict. That’s all very elusive and you never know if a trip will deliver even a handful of it. Such moments can’t be planned for; only opened up to.
I’m descended from sea captains. My great-grandfather was a tall ship’s captain out of Bermuda, who sailed the world between 1863 and 1899. My father set out to sail around the world in the tiny vessel, The Cimba, in 1935, and is Russ in the sailor’s classic, The Saga of Cimba by Dick Maury, published in 2000 by McGraw-Hill.
I grew up in a small town, Winter Haven, Florida; studied Journalism at the University of Florida; married a doctor and raised two children. For so long, this travel bug lay dormant until, after my divorce when I was living in Aspen, Colorado, and became involved in the new field of travel that developed with the opening of the USSR. Westerners wanted to meet the Soviet people and I began to plan and lead groups going there for homestays and professional information exchanges. Russia had no tourist infrastructure, so it was a great place to learn about freeform travel and that opened up all the possibilities within my mind for other countries. I now have a huge appetite for grabbing up a guidebook and just launching out to see where I will wind up.
Oh, I’m not actually quite as footloose and fancy free as I might sound. Long spells at home go by between these big odysseys while I write my books and let the bank account refill. My son lives in Clearwater, Florida, as I do. My daughter and son-in-law live in Denver, Colorado, with my two grandchildren – 10 & 12. So, my life is very similar to yours (or has been) except that I have the heart of an Old World Explorer.
