Hello! Allow me to introduce myself. I retired in early 2023 and have shaped my life around exploring the world through work exchanges and pet sitting ever since. My goal was to be able to stay in one location, living with local people, for weeks or months, as a way to gain a better sense of what life is like in other places. In order to afford these excursions, I exchange my time and talents for a place to stay and meals.
Join me on a few adventures, some very recent, some from decades ago. I will share some amazing places and the people I met there. I will also describe my doubts, fears and mistakes, all of which brought color and depth to the experiences.
Along the way, I will describe some of the travel tricks I use to stay safe and enjoy the ride.
I won’t make recommendations about places to stay or eat. I won’t even be making suggestions on places to go. I want you to discover your journey based on your curiosity, interests, budget and sense of adventure. My hope is that reading through my stories inspires you to take a tiny step toward your best discoveries. They might be right around the corner, they might be on the far side of the planet. Where is not the question. You best adventures will come when you decide to open your heart and take control of your flight plan.
Travel can mean many things – going somewhere, seeing something, booking flights, trying new restaurants, meeting new people. The more important meaning of travel is letting go of what we are most familiar with to make room for what we don’t know. It is the act of creating mental and emotional space that allows us to truly engage with the unknown. To begin the adventure, we set boundaries to feel safe, them step through them as we evolve as explorers.
We can each play a little part in making the world better through our willingness to not know. We don’t know what it is like to live in a small town in Greece, we don’t know how farmers spend their time, season after season. We don’t know what it took to go to college. Travel allows us to peek into the lives of a few people in a few places and begin to appreciate and understand who they are.
I believe we are more alike than different. Join me in finding common ground for kindness. Together we can shine a light on the beauty in our world.
Since I was a child, I have loved to paint. Over the last few years I have painted small canvases, medium-sized canvases as well as s few walls of various sizes. Once it occurred to me that I paint for the joy of creation, not to produce something to be judged, I started enjoying the journey of learning to paint.
With time on my hands during the pandemic, I started painting on rocks. Something about the scale and limitations of a rock is inspiring.
