Latest / Adventure Sports Podcast / Ep. 1179: Renowned World Traveler Revisited - Gary Arndt

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Ep. 1179: Renowned World Traveler Revisited - Gary Arndt · Adventure Sports Podcast

0:07
[SPEAKER_00]: your listening to the Adventure Sports podcast.
0:10
[SPEAKER_00]: We talk with adventures from around the globe to give you the inspiration you need to get started in the outdoors or keep moving if you're already there.
0:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Adventure Sports Podcast.
0:23
[SPEAKER_02]: This is Caleb.
0:25
[SPEAKER_02]: In today's revisited episode, Mason interviews Gary Aren't.
0:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Gary is a well-known world traveler and photographer.
0:35
[SPEAKER_02]: He has the highly successful blog everything everywhere.com.
0:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And in this episode, Gary shares some of the lessons that he's learned from years of traveling.
0:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And what it's like to...
0:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Sell your house and live on the road and to be a professional photographer.
0:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I hope you enjoy the episode.
0:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Here's Mason.
0:58
[SPEAKER_03]: All right, folks.
0:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Welcome to the podcast.
1:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Gosh, we got an exciting episode.
1:02
[SPEAKER_03]: You heard a little bit about it in the intro of the show, but I want to welcome you to the show, Gary.
1:07
[SPEAKER_03]: How you doing?
1:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Good.
1:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for having me.
1:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we were talking about it a little bit before, but I always asked this first, where are you coming from today?
1:16
[SPEAKER_03]: And if that's not home, where is home for you?
1:19
[SPEAKER_01]: of right now I'm in Wisconsin and this is where I'm currently living about 30 minutes outside of green bay.
1:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh fantastic.
1:28
[SPEAKER_03]: You like to keep a little bit of a close eye on your football team.
1:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I'm part owner.
1:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I have that on my website and and people don't usually get it.
1:37
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're an American and you understand football, you you kind of probably know what I'm talking about, but if you're not.
1:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Because most, you know, and the fellow owners are millionaires except for the Green Bay Packers.
1:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, I bought a share stock back in 97 I think.
1:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And, uh,
1:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I'm an owner.
1:54
[SPEAKER_03]: That's too cool, man.
1:55
[SPEAKER_03]: What a great idea.
1:56
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I've often looked at that and saw it thought no wonder that that's how you build a loyal fan base for essentially eternity is allowing them to be under that.
2:04
[SPEAKER_03]: What a cool idea.
2:07
[SPEAKER_03]: You're obviously not known for being a part part owner of the Green Bay Packers, but you're really more known as a traveler, as a writer of blogger.
2:16
[SPEAKER_01]: uh... but i wanted to kind of go all the way back what did you grow up in west constant and if so what what did you grow up doing what was kind of your childhood like uh... yep grew up in Wisconsin never really traveled that much uh... you know occasionally summer car trips i remember once we went out to south Dakota that was about it a lot of camping i was in boyskouts i was an eagle scout kind of pretty normal i you know one of the things i famously tell people is that i never saw salt water until i was twenty one years old
2:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Is that just, you know, obviously the proximity to the ocean from Wisconsin's quite a bit farther than where I grew up in Florida.
2:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it just, you know, practicality and ever made it to the ocean for whatever reason?
2:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, you're in the middle of the country and to get to the ocean is, you know, quite a trip and I've told that to people in like islands in the Pacific and they just can't fathom it and then of course they've never seen snow.
3:10
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's just all part of, you know, where you
3:14
[SPEAKER_03]: did it blow you away?
3:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Was it underwhelming?
3:16
[SPEAKER_03]: How was that experience?
3:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I was, as my senior year in college, we were going to the National Debate Tournament, which was being held in Bellingham, Washington.
3:24
[SPEAKER_01]: We flew into Seattle.
3:26
[SPEAKER_01]: We were in a van.
3:26
[SPEAKER_01]: We were driving kind of on this road in your park, near Puget Sound.
3:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, stop the van, stop the van.
3:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was like, what?
3:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Like those emergency or something.
3:36
[SPEAKER_01]: I throw up in the door and I run outside.
3:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I tasted the water.
3:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Because I
3:43
[SPEAKER_01]: because I had never experienced salt water before.
3:46
[SPEAKER_01]: So I needed to check that out.
3:49
[SPEAKER_01]: But I've seen the same thing.
3:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember in college, I remember this girl.
3:52
[SPEAKER_01]: She was from Hawaii.
3:53
[SPEAKER_01]: She had never seen snow before.
3:54
[SPEAKER_01]: The first time it snowed, she went outside and just went nuts.
3:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And because she had never experienced it.
3:59
[SPEAKER_03]: That is too cool, man.
4:00
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it really is all about experience, all about perspective.
4:05
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, growing up in Wisconsin, being an eagle scout, just living your life, living living, you know, going on your little vacations here and there, can you just take us in a way that isn't just our newest for you to retell again, how you got to the first country you visit, or where did you start to be introduced into travel itself?
4:29
[SPEAKER_01]: So the first real introduction, I started a very early internet company back in the 90s, back like 1994, and I sold it in 1998, and I sold it to a global technology company, and they had offices all over the world.
4:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And I kind of con them into sending me to their offices to talk about the internet.
4:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they sent me on a three week whirlwind tour in January 1999, and I went to Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore, Frankfurt, Paris, Brussels, and London, literally circumnavigated the globe, and that was the first time I'd ever really been anywhere, and it was really eye-opening.
5:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And after that, I did a...
5:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure trip in my own.
5:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I went to Iceland just for the heck of it.
5:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Went back to school for a few years just because I wanted to and I went on a research project to Argentina and I came up with this idea having kind of tasted a little bit.
5:29
[SPEAKER_01]: I was at a point in my life where I didn't want to go get a PhD because I saw what they went through and I realized I like learning but I didn't like research.
5:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I had money saved up.
5:46
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no reason I couldn't do it.
5:48
[SPEAKER_01]: So 2005, I hatched this idea.
5:51
[SPEAKER_01]: It took me about 18 months to tie up all the loose ends.
5:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And in March 2007, I turned over the keys to my house.
5:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And I started traveling.
6:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And I told everyone I would travel for about a year.
6:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Personally, I thought it would be about two years.
6:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And it kind of ended up just never stopping.
6:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't have a home for nine years.
6:13
[SPEAKER_01]: and the last five years, I've had an apartment, but I would spend say a third to a half of the year traveling.
6:20
[SPEAKER_03]: What gave you the confidence to, like you just said, con your company that bought you to travel the world?
6:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Because that's, you know, I could see someone wanting to do that, but what gave you personally confidence to say, not only do I want to try to talk them into doing this, not because it's a hobby I already have, it's gonna be a totally new experience for me.
6:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Ah, so after I sold it, I was like this weird position on the org chart where they legally had to keep me employed, but I wasn't doing anything.
6:53
[SPEAKER_01]: There was like no one above me or below me in the org chart.
6:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So I would literally show up to work at 10, make sure everyone saw me say hello, surf the internet for a couple of hours, go to take a late launch and then never come back.
7:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were paying me like six figures to do this.
7:09
[SPEAKER_03]: How did you feel about that?
7:10
[SPEAKER_03]: That's never, you know, it's got to be a weird feeling.
7:14
[SPEAKER_01]: It was their idea.
7:15
[SPEAKER_03]: So they couldn't afford it.
7:18
[SPEAKER_03]: If they couldn't afford it, they wouldn't do it.
7:19
[SPEAKER_01]: So they obviously, they wanted me tied up in a non-competent that making me employed for this time.
7:26
[SPEAKER_01]: So I figure, you know, make use of me.
7:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's do this.
7:28
[SPEAKER_01]: You have all these offices all over.
7:30
[SPEAKER_01]: You bought this company.
7:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you send me out and try to talk it up?
7:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, because we're basically doing internet web application development, integrating databases with Web site, which today is nothing, it's everywhere, but back then it was still kind of novel.
7:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they agreed to it, it didn't, you know, wasn't a big deal to them.
7:52
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was kind of my first real travel experience.
7:57
[SPEAKER_03]: what was immediately some of the biggest misconceptions about travel that you had versus going into it.
8:04
[SPEAKER_03]: That you started learning once you started getting out there.
8:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Man, I don't know if I had any conceptions at all.
8:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I just kind of went into it with my eyes open.
8:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And I remember my first night, we landed in Tokyo and I was kind of jumping out like so I wasn't sleeping, but I was also just so fascinated with everything.
8:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I was watching these Japanese soap operas and game shows all night long and just like looking at everything in the room, you know, whether it was in Japanese or how just the little things are different because, you know, the first trip I took out of the United States like most people was to Canada and Canada pretty much everything is the same right, but there are little things that are different.
8:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And your eye goes to those things that are different.
8:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So there'll be French on a lot of the packaging for everything.
8:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Things are in kilometers, not miles.
8:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Stuff like that are different brands, whatever.
8:59
[SPEAKER_01]: In Japan, everything was different.
9:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I found my eye kept going to things that were the same.
9:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, you go, oh, they have 7-11s.
9:06
[SPEAKER_01]: You go into a 7-11.
9:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, they have laser potato chips, but it's seaweed flavored instead of, you know, sour cream and chive or something like that.
9:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've noticed this whenever I travel.
9:16
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, for several years, I was traveling.
9:19
[SPEAKER_01]: I would go to a country and I would purposely at least make one trip to a McDonald's just to write about the experience.
9:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Because McDonald's are pretty much the same everywhere, but there are little differences.
9:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And those little differences are usually cultural things about that country.
9:38
[SPEAKER_01]: It could be something on the menu or something else.
9:42
[SPEAKER_01]: How they see people or there's beer at McDonald's in some countries in Europe, stuff like that.
9:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Were you nervous about this?
9:51
[SPEAKER_03]: That's quite a bit to take on from someone who had seen the ocean, not that much prior, pretty much a senior in college.
10:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I was more nervous when I started traveling full-time in 2007.
10:05
[SPEAKER_01]: When I was on this trip, it was all pretty much I was meeting people everywhere, I was going, there were local offices that took care of my hotel reservations, all that stuff.
10:13
[SPEAKER_01]: So it wasn't a big deal.
10:15
[SPEAKER_01]: But when I went off of my own, the first place I basically started going west.
10:19
[SPEAKER_01]: So I started, in Minneapolis, where I was living at the time, drove the Dallas, took a train to LA, flew to Hawaii.
10:25
[SPEAKER_01]: While I was in Hawaii, I learned how to scuba dive, you know, I went to volcano's national park.
10:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the first international place I visited was Tahiti.
10:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And they speak French today.
10:37
[SPEAKER_01]: No problem.
10:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't speak French fluently, but I know if you words I can get by.
10:43
[SPEAKER_01]: But it was really intimidating at the time.
10:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I would take, they have these kind of, I guess you could call it a bus, but they're really cheap and the ways to get around the island.
10:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And I avoided taking it.
10:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And I took a cab instead, which you're going to pay a lot more money for, but I was just kind of intimidated by the experience.
11:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And gradually you just
11:03
[SPEAKER_01]: you get used to it.
11:04
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just a confidence you get when you're traveling.
11:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Now you could drop me into pretty much any country in the world.
11:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Even if I don't speak the language, I think I'd get by because there's just certain commonalities about traveling that are the same everywhere.
11:21
[SPEAKER_03]: what's the bug that bites you now then for someone who would lay in a hotel room in Japan for the first time and you know I understand that that situation have been there not to Japan but that experience where every little thing's different from the utensils in the drawer to the drawers itself to the refrigerator to the way the the walls are painted it's like everything's so different that it draws you in it did you know it's interesting what draws you in now being so experienced
11:49
[SPEAKER_01]: The thing I got started doing early in my trip and that's kind of taken over is I've really made a focus of visiting historical sites and especially UNESCO World Heritage sites So I've been to over 400 UNESCO World Heritage sites around the world Which is, you know, there's over a thousand but very few people have been to that many Simply because most of them are not popular tourist attractions There are some that are very popular like the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids and stuff like that
12:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've also been visiting a lot of the National Park Service sites in the United States.
12:24
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, if it wasn't for the pandemic last year, I would have finalized visiting all of the national parks proper in the U.S.
12:35
[SPEAKER_03]: We had a guy I'm here a couple weeks ago, Andy McGee.
12:39
[SPEAKER_03]: He visited every National Park site in a calendar year, and that's all 423 now, all in a calendar year.
12:47
[SPEAKER_03]: In 2019, thankfully, didn't try it in 2020, but it was a very fascinating endeavor, fascinating conversation.
12:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Obviously, very quick going through them, but he had been a National Park geek his whole life, so he had been to many of these places before.
13:00
[SPEAKER_03]: I thought that was a pretty cool trip.
13:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I thought about doing it.
13:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been to about 220 of the 422 sites now.
13:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's just something I sort of do bit by bit.
13:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, you know, one of my last little trips was last year I was in Arizona.
13:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just took that time to go visit a whole bunch of stuff in Arizona because Arizona has a ton of sites.
13:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I drove down to Chicago, I think two years ago, and then rather than drive back immediately to manyapolis where I was living, I drove through St. Louis and so I visited the Lincoln site in Springfield, went to the St. Louis arch and then visited some sites in Iowa on the way back.
13:41
[SPEAKER_01]: So I do stuff like that all the time where I'll just kind of go out of my way to visit some sites.
13:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's draw it back to after that first trip, you know, Japan, Singapore, France, all that.
13:53
[SPEAKER_03]: What happened or what led to wanting to do it full time?
13:58
[SPEAKER_03]: And what were your goals then?
13:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Because, you know, it's great to say I just want to travel, but what was the reason why did you want to do this?
14:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I enjoyed travel.
14:07
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'd always had a massive national geographic collection.
14:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Mostly sitting in boxes right now, because I've never really unpacked them from 2007
14:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, but I'd never really traveled.
14:19
[SPEAKER_01]: So it was kind of one of those why not things.
14:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And then when I started, it was just, you know, the world's really big.
14:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And I, I remember before I started, I'd read books like a thousand places to see before you die.
14:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to go here.
14:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to go here.
14:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to go here and then when you get on the road, you discover so much more that you never even knew about.
14:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And I have a list of places I want to go now.
14:45
[SPEAKER_01]: after having traveled the world for 14 years, having been to 130 countries, there's probably more stuff I want to see now because I keep learning about more stuff.
14:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And for example, when someone goes to Italy for the first time, they go to Rome, maybe they go to Florence, maybe they go to Venice.
15:02
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that's kind of the typical go-to-roll.
15:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe it'd make a side trip to see the leading tower peas or whatever, because they know those things, right?
15:10
[SPEAKER_01]: They know the gondolas in Venice, Michelangelo's David, the Sistine Chapel, all that stuff are things in the popular consciousness.
15:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And we know those things.
15:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And we don't know much else.
15:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And we don't know what the walls of Luca, or the towers of San Jimniano, which are really cool, but very few people go to see them.
15:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Most Americans can't tell you the name of another city in France outside of Paris.
15:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Try this sometime, it's actually true.
15:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we go to the places that we know about and that's what leads to things like overtourism.
15:42
[SPEAKER_01]: There are certain national parks that get all the visitors, right?
15:45
[SPEAKER_01]: It's Yellowstone.
15:46
[SPEAKER_01]: It's Yosemite.
15:48
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the Grand Canyon in Canada.
15:50
[SPEAKER_01]: It's Banff.
15:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm here to tell you, and I tell this on every interview I do.
15:54
[SPEAKER_01]: The greatest national park in the world that I've been to is Nahanie National Park in the Northwest Territories in Canada.
16:01
[SPEAKER_01]: No one goes there.
16:02
[SPEAKER_01]: It gets 800 visitors a year.
16:07
[SPEAKER_01]: I can keep talking about it as much as I want, but it's never going to become popular because most Canadians don't even know about it, and if they do know about it, it's a hard place to get to, you know, it requires effort and work.
16:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it doesn't get any visitors, whereas you can just take a three hour trip out of San Francisco and get to Yosemite and some of those people do.
16:29
[SPEAKER_03]: For you, do you have any sort of theory or anything you've noticed around maybe layers of discoverability or layers of kind of localization of experiences or places to see?
16:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you have you experience anything like that?
16:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a matter of focusing on something or having an interest and then using that to guide your travels.
16:51
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the things I've been doing, I've been
16:58
[SPEAKER_01]: which is this really actually great service where they have all these lectures.
17:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've been watching this lecture from this guy as a professor about cathedrals.
17:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Learning all sorts of stuff, I didn't know, including doing overviews of places that I've been.
17:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's pointing out stuff that I completely didn't notice when I was there, kind of making me wanna go back.
17:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's lots of stuff like that, whether you're interested in the history of World War II
17:26
[SPEAKER_01]: or you have an interest in botany or animals or dinosaurs or whatever it might be.
17:33
[SPEAKER_01]: There's always going to be something that you can actually go see that will probably peak your interest and you can go and geek out over.
17:40
[SPEAKER_03]: something I told my wife recently was you can take any sort of square mile or square, you know, tin miles or whatever it is and that the amount of subcultures that are overlapping in that area is just enormous.
17:55
[SPEAKER_03]: It's ridiculous.
17:56
[SPEAKER_03]: And so for each of those subcultures in each of those kind of areas of interest or hobbies, there could be, you know, mech is all around you for different things
18:06
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm sure as a world traveler, it's almost frustrating sometimes how much they're really is to see.
18:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, absolutely.
18:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, a lot of people will say, you know, I've been to Germany or I've been to China or something like that.
18:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Like China's big, really big.
18:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And I have this thing when I started.
18:25
[SPEAKER_01]: I went to a lot of tiny countries.
18:27
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was going to Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu.
18:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I was in Lichtenstein, all these tiny countries before I went to Russia or India.
18:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Because to simply say, oh, I've been to India.
18:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I went to the Taj Mahal.
18:40
[SPEAKER_01]: No, yeah, you technically bent to India.
18:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I get it.
18:44
[SPEAKER_01]: But you have men in India.
18:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it's big, right?
18:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's like, I meet people at the time.
18:50
[SPEAKER_01]: They say, oh, where are you frying from the United States?
18:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I've been in New York.
18:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, yeah, New York is the United States.
18:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I get it.
18:56
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's also not the United States.
18:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And so far as New York is really kind of its own thing.
19:01
[SPEAKER_01]: There's nothing else like New York in the United States and it's very different from say driving around the Midwest because the US is so big and there's so many different parts to it.
19:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a lot of countries like that.
19:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Even countries aren't necessarily as big as the US are still rather big and it takes time to really explore it.
19:20
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not just that I've been to a lot of places but I've driven all over South Africa, Australia, Germany,
19:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And even just, you know, getting a car and driving around like Fiji, uh, I've done a fair amount of driving in Japan, places like that.
19:37
[SPEAKER_01]: So just because you've been somewhere want doesn't mean you've done that.
19:41
[SPEAKER_01]: There's still always much more to see.
19:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And from someone from here or for someone from here, you can just see how preposterous that is by just how much of the U.S. are as to see how many different layers are so many different types of places.
19:57
[SPEAKER_03]: And we wouldn't necessarily know that about other parts of the country if you've never been, but you can just relay that knowledge you have in this place to anywhere in the world and realize,
20:07
[SPEAKER_03]: just a few hours in either direction can be feel like a totally different planet.
20:11
[SPEAKER_03]: What are your goals when you travel somewhere, either somewhere new, a country, or an area?
20:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you have a system in place or something that you try to achieve when you get there, whether it be from the perspective of culture or food or any sort of museums?
20:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Is there something that you try to make sure you hit and every place you go?
20:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll usually, if I haven't been there before, try to focus on world heritage sites.
20:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So my last international trip was one year ago, February 2020, I was in Portugal and I was there for a conference and after the conference I had like 10 days where I had nothing planned.
20:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'll do this a lot.
20:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll go speak at different conferences around the world because they'll fly you in and out.
20:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I'll just use that because they're buying the ticket to just go do something on my own.
21:01
[SPEAKER_01]: So I tend to, I didn't know what I was going to do.
21:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I literally the day it started
21:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't know what I was going to do.
21:07
[SPEAKER_01]: One option was I was going to go to the Canary Islands.
21:09
[SPEAKER_01]: One option was I was going to go to the A'saurus.
21:12
[SPEAKER_01]: The other option was I was going to rent a car, just drive around Portugal.
21:16
[SPEAKER_01]: So I ended up doing that.
21:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And I actually just took a taxi to Cintro, which was outside of Lisbon, hung out there for two days, and I rented a car.
21:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And then just kind of drove around visiting these sites.
21:29
[SPEAKER_01]: a lot of monasteries and convents that are world heritage sites.
21:35
[SPEAKER_01]: The university in Koyenbro, which is real fascinating old medieval university.
21:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Some Roman ruins, not many people think of in Portugal, but they're definitely there.
21:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And a whole bunch of other stuff, and I just kind of made it up every day as I went along.
21:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I just figured out how far can I drive.
21:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've done this so often where I've kind of got it down, where I know
21:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, if I wake up at this, okay, I'm two hours away from this site.
22:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I can arrive there at 8 or 9 a.m. right when it opens, it will take me one or two hours to probably see it, which is kind of average.
22:08
[SPEAKER_01]: If it's just like a building or something, uh, then maybe I'll get in the car and I can drive and visit a second site in the afternoon, spend some time there, drive and then I'll be in this city in that, you know, in the evening,
22:22
[SPEAKER_01]: which will put me set me up for the next day where I'm going to go visit XYZ.
22:27
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, it could be museums, historical sites, national parks, whatever is kind of interesting.
22:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And having been to that part of Portugal now, if I go there again, this is a whole bunch of stuff I'm probably going to go see again, because I didn't get the seal last time.
22:41
[SPEAKER_03]: How much are you interacting with people when you go and visit?
22:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it something that you're making a point to do?
22:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Or is it just really when it comes to logistics that that require interacting with folks?
22:52
[SPEAKER_01]: It depends, it depends primarily how long you're staying.
22:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Like in the example, I just gave in Portugal, it was primarily just a road trip.
22:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're in your car a lot and it's not a whole bunch of interaction, unless it's, you know, you're, they may have guide sometimes.
23:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I always recommend getting a guide when you stop some place, because they're going to know better than you.
23:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Like if, if you can get someone to actually explain to you what's at a historic site or a cathedral, it's going to be a far richer experience.
23:21
[SPEAKER_01]: not knowing what it means.
23:25
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's always a great thing to do.
23:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And also, when you, you know, if you stop to eat or something, despite the fact that I just mentioned that I used to write about going to McDonald's, I'll usually try to just stop somewhere that's kind of local and, you know, get whatever, you know, is on the menu.
23:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's become so much easier.
23:46
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, when I started
23:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And so finding those kind of places and finding places to stay and finding operating hours, it's almost like cheating it so easy.
23:59
[SPEAKER_03]: If someone would have told you a year, a year and a half ago, hey, you're not going to be able to travel for a year and maybe longer.
24:06
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, what would what would you have thought?
24:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I would have assumed that I'd broke my leg or something had happened to me personally.
24:13
[SPEAKER_01]: The idea that the travel industry would have just vanished.
24:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Have you taken up by the rapture, which is basically what happened, you know, from the beginning of March to the end of March of 2020 just disappeared and at first in March, I thought, well, first of all, I probably had COVID when I came back from that trip from Portugal, I the flu really bad for a week and in hindsight, I probably had COVID, but there weren't a lot of tests available back then.
24:39
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, every, the talk back then was still about China, right?
24:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It was primarily hitting China, restricting travel to China.
24:45
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what it was about.
24:46
[SPEAKER_01]: So in hindsight, I probably think I had it.
24:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I never had a check.
24:51
[SPEAKER_01]: But I had some, some contacts I had in China.
24:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was saying, oh, well, maybe we could do something.
24:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought this would last through, you know, April.
24:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So May probably start traveling again.
25:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that was Ron.
25:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I thought, well, you know, okay, I'm going to run some tours, I was thinking maybe doing something, we'll do something domestic just to be safe.
25:10
[SPEAKER_01]: So in October, November, me, I could do something with national parks in the Southwest.
25:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Nope, that didn't happen.
25:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And now I've just sort of given up trying to plan or predict anything because I have no clue what's going to happen.
25:24
[SPEAKER_03]: How are you enjoying your time in Wisconsin?
25:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I moved here in August.
25:30
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of a double whammy.
25:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I lived in Minneapolis, and I lived a block off Lake Street where all the riots happened.
25:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And so my neighborhood just got devastated.
25:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And in August, I, you know, one of the reasons I lived where I lived, it was a really nice area.
25:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I was everything was in walking distance, stores, theater, shop, restaurants, everything.
25:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And then all of a sudden nothing was in walking distance anymore because everything was, was shut it up.
25:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It was still that way, so one day I went and rented a U hall and I put all my stuff in it and I left and I've been in Wisconsin, which is where my family is ever since, but the big change for me is that, you know, basically the business I was in was in the travel industry in that disappeared and so I made a pretty big pivot back in July, I I launched a new podcast and
26:26
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a travel podcast per se because the thing that I never cared about with travel was talking about flights and hotels and Freak and flyer programs and all that stuff and that gets most of the attention if you read like a travel section of a newspaper what interested me like I've been telling you for the last you know several minutes is the why You know the history and the background of these places so I did a podcast that's just that
26:53
[SPEAKER_01]: that's just interesting stories of people places and things.
26:57
[SPEAKER_01]: It still has one foot in the world of travel in that I can still talk about these places that I visited, but it's not exclusively travel, which doesn't limit it quite as much.
27:07
[SPEAKER_03]: everything everywhere daily history podcasts is what it's called.
27:11
[SPEAKER_03]: And you know I listen to I listen to one episode that the most recent to from today base units of measurement.
27:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'll just say it went in 10 minutes.
27:19
[SPEAKER_03]: It went into much more detail than I expected it was going to.
27:23
[SPEAKER_03]: To the point where I'm like this is a lesson.
27:26
[SPEAKER_03]: This is like a legitimate look into where the base units of measurement came from.
27:32
[SPEAKER_03]: where is this just what you enjoy looking up and putting together to for other people to to basically ingest is, or is it just something you have, you know, floating around in your brain?
27:42
[SPEAKER_03]: How much of this is already in your brain versus what you got to look up?
27:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Quite a bit.
27:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I already know.
27:49
[SPEAKER_01]: For example, that episode, I knew most of it.
27:51
[SPEAKER_01]: So it was easy to write.
27:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Once I came up with the idea for it, I was able to.
27:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of my longest episodes are the easiest to write.
27:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of the shortest are the hardest to write, if I have to do a lot of research.
28:01
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, it's designed to be highly eclectic.
28:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It's designed to be, because so much of what we're fed on the internet is determined by an algorithm.
28:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And you've probably experienced this if you go to YouTube, and you just watch like one video,
28:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Then it starts showing you all sorts of the same stuff and you may not necessarily want to keep seeing that you just wanted to see that one thing, but the algorithms keep.
28:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's how we get these bubbles where everyone only hears and communicate with people who think the same, believe the same and everything else.
28:33
[SPEAKER_01]: So the idea of the podcast was to learn something new every day about things you might not have even known that you didn't know.
28:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And it could be something like science, or it could be something with history.
28:48
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the episodes I just did was on the Roman punishment of decimation.
28:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And decimation, or something saying something was decimated, is, you know, a common phrase that exists in English, but had a very specific meaning in ancient Rome, where if a unit
29:11
[SPEAKER_01]: would be killed by the other nine, and you might have to be to death like your best friend that you fought with for years.
29:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I did, you know, I then I've also done one on Andre the Giant.
29:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I know.
29:25
[SPEAKER_01]: It's probably the greatest drinker in human history.
29:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I don't know how anyone could possibly consume more alcohol than Andre the Giant did.
29:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, if you guys, I'm sure if you're that size, it helps a little bit seven seven feet.
29:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, yes, and, you know, what 500 pounds or something.
29:44
[SPEAKER_01]: The other wrestlers he would drink with would count like the number of drinks he had.
29:49
[SPEAKER_01]: and there were several people who testified that he consumed over a hundred cans of beer in one sitting.
29:55
[SPEAKER_03]: I've heard that.
29:57
[SPEAKER_03]: I've heard that.
29:57
[SPEAKER_03]: That's, uh, it's my boy.
30:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, that's why, you know, it's a legend, legend of Andre the Giant.
30:03
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll be happy to listen to that one.
30:05
[SPEAKER_03]: And what I love is they're just a few minutes, like everything from five, literally five minutes to 10 minutes to, you know, just a hair over 11, 12 minutes.
30:14
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm not going to lie,
30:18
[SPEAKER_03]: This is definitely going to be on my new rotation, but I think I'm really going to enjoy this, just because you've got a great voice entry.
30:24
[SPEAKER_03]: You've been told that a million times, but can really, you know, just listen to your stories and listen to the things you've learned around the world, and it's just this pursuit of your, what interests you and what
30:38
[SPEAKER_03]: What you just find fascinating is probably what's led to this entire life in general.
30:44
[SPEAKER_03]: So this is just another expression of that, just like your images are, your pictures are.
30:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, when it gets back to traveling again, and so I'm not even planning dates for this yet, one of the things I'm going to start offering my listeners is tours, but they're going to be different tours.
31:02
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've run tours in the past kind of as a travel photographer,
31:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And we've done stuff in Africa, national parks in the US, Italy, Australia, stuff like that.
31:16
[SPEAKER_01]: But what I want to do is do a tour where, okay, we're going to go to Rome.
31:21
[SPEAKER_01]: We're just going to have one hotel room, rockin' to run around.
31:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're going to see all the stuff nobody sees.
31:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Nero's Palace, no one goes to visit that.
31:31
[SPEAKER_01]: It's there.
31:32
[SPEAKER_01]: It's underground.
31:33
[SPEAKER_01]: They found the original artwork and it's all been amazingly preserved.
31:36
[SPEAKER_01]: The place where Julius Caesar was killed is currently underneath a restaurant.
31:41
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have to go there and ask the owner and he'll take you downstairs and he'll show you.
31:46
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the ruins of Pompey's theater.
31:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's all sorts of stuff like that that I've been able to see.
31:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of which is outside of just outside of Rome.
31:54
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's a lot of places like that where there's amazing things that, you know, if you're going to go to Rome and you're there for two or three days, what are you going to see?
32:01
[SPEAKER_01]: You're going to go to Trudy fountain.
32:02
[SPEAKER_01]: You're going to go to the form of the Colosseum.
32:03
[SPEAKER_01]: You're going to go to the Vatican.
32:05
[SPEAKER_01]: and that's what everybody does.
32:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's nothing wrong with those things, but there's so much more.
32:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like that in a lot of different places.
32:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think there's a lot to be said for doing travel more in-depth.
32:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And hopefully one of the things that comes out of this pandemic is people that are willing to go to different places.
32:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Because I think over tourism really was a problem.
32:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And the problem I always felt wasn't that there's too much tourism, but there's too many, too many people going to the same place at the same time.
32:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And there are so many amazing places out there that they just don't know about.
32:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And if they knew about it, they would go to those places.
32:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
32:44
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sure you've experienced this.
32:45
[SPEAKER_03]: A place you are really looking forward to that the experience being dampened or tampered because of the amount of people.
32:53
[SPEAKER_03]: You're not really able to enjoy it.
32:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Versus going somewhere, you might not even been thinking about and hardly anyone's there.
32:59
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's just such an incredible experience that you weren't expecting.
33:03
[SPEAKER_01]: But let me give you a good example.
33:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Barcelona gets tons of tourists.
33:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Barcelona does not need any more tourists.
33:11
[SPEAKER_01]: One hour north of Barcelona, not even.
33:13
[SPEAKER_01]: In Catalonia still, is the city of Corona.
33:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I actually spent three months in Corona once.
33:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And they filmed Game of Thrones there.
33:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Their old quarter is fantastic.
33:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Their cathedral is amazing.
33:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Tons of rich traditions, you're not far from the coast.
33:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And nobody goes to Corona.
33:32
[SPEAKER_01]: yet because everybody know about Barcelona.
33:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what they know.
33:36
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a high-speed train that goes from Barcelona to Toronto.
33:38
[SPEAKER_01]: It's easy to do.
33:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And just north of Toronto is Figarras.
33:42
[SPEAKER_01]: They got the Dolly Museum.
33:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And because I spent three months in this place, I got to go into the Pyrenees and explore a lot of the smaller communities that I didn't know about beforehand.
33:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And I saw all this really cool stuff.
33:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is especially true.
33:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I think in places like Europe or Asia that are quite
34:02
[SPEAKER_01]: The United States, or even most of what we have in North America, or even South America.
34:08
[SPEAKER_01]: The ancient things we have tend to be like Native American type things.
34:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And outside of maybe the Southwest where you have some Anastasi culture, places like Mesa Verity, Choco Canyon, like in the Midwest and the East, there's not really that much.
34:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And even our history isn't really that deep.
34:28
[SPEAKER_01]: But when you go to Europe, there's stuff.
34:31
[SPEAKER_01]: everywhere.
34:32
[SPEAKER_01]: You can go into a random church in a village and see paintings that are centuries old that have just been there.
34:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's just, it's just their church.
34:42
[SPEAKER_01]: That's all it is.
34:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's going to be an experience like you're, you know, you wouldn't have anywhere else because yeah, it's not a grand cathedral.
34:49
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's also not 10,000 people there at the same time.
34:54
[SPEAKER_01]: You are like you would if you went to the Sagrada Familia.
34:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
34:58
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I would love to ask, what are some of the biggest misconceptions about your lifestyle about what you've done from folks from the outside that you've heard over the years?
35:10
[SPEAKER_01]: People think travel is glamorous and there is this current crop of like Instagram influencers who are trying to perpetuate this myth by showing themselves always eating fancy foods
35:25
[SPEAKER_01]: drinking champagne, wearing evening gowns everywhere, and I love travel, you know, I've walked the walk, but it's not glamorous.
35:37
[SPEAKER_01]: It seldom is.
35:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been in some really crappy rooms because I don't, I don't stay in luxury hotels or anything.
35:46
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, maybe I'll stay in like a guest house to star hotel type thing or I'll even stay in a hostel, but I'll get my own room.
35:53
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's
35:55
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of the level where I'll stay at and that's not glamorous.
35:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not eating out at fine dining all the time.
36:04
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, a standard meal for me if I'm running around Europe will be to go to a cup of Obstand.
36:09
[SPEAKER_01]: That's, you know, fine with me.
36:13
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the big thing.
36:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And the other misconception is that it's dangerous.
36:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And the reason is is because the further we get away from
36:23
[SPEAKER_01]: the less knowledge we have of it, so when something happens in a different country, and let's say you have a friend who's there, you may say, oh, are you all right?
36:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And I remember after the bombing at the Boston Marathon, I actually sent a note to someone who always was worried about me traveling, who lived in California, and I said, oh, I heard there was a bombing in America, are you all right?
36:49
[SPEAKER_01]: for someone who lives in the United States, that's ridiculous, right?
36:52
[SPEAKER_01]: That was in Boston, Boston is far away from California.
36:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
36:55
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's the same approach we take to other countries, trees.
37:00
[SPEAKER_01]: We paint it with, there are, there have been problems with drug cartels in Mexico.
37:04
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a fact.
37:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Almost all of that is in the north.
37:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Not in like Cancun or the Eucotan Peninsula.
37:11
[SPEAKER_01]: The crime right down there is very low.
37:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I saw once it was equivalent of like Finland.
37:17
[SPEAKER_01]: But when we hear something about Mexico, we paint the whole country with the same brush, but the regions are very different.
37:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Or something gets put in the news, you know, because we only hear bad things, you know, the news is never about good things.
37:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And then it's never supplanted by anything else.
37:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that bad thing lingers in our consciousness.
37:37
[SPEAKER_01]: So when I bring up Columbia to most people,
37:40
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Pablo Escobar and drug cartels are the things that they think about, and really that hasn't been a problem there in almost 30 years.
37:48
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a generation removed.
37:51
[SPEAKER_01]: That's, you know, Miami-Vice type 80 stuff.
37:54
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's been very little to replace that in popular consciousness.
37:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And other places, they just get tainted with the whole area.
38:02
[SPEAKER_01]: So like, Oman and Jordan are great places to visit.
38:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Great places.
38:08
[SPEAKER_01]: They've never had problems with civil wars or terrorism or anything like that outside of a maybe a few small cases, just no more than the US.
38:18
[SPEAKER_01]: But when something happens in the Middle East, they get tainted with that broad brush.
38:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe the worst case I've heard when there was an Ebola outbreak several years ago and Sierra Leone, people were canceling trips to South Africa.
38:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Sierra Leone is closer to London than it is to South Africa, right?
38:38
[SPEAKER_01]: You should be Catholic trips to Europe if that's your level of concern.
38:42
[SPEAKER_01]: But because it's in, quote, unquote, Africa, which, by the way, is really big and tell you flown across all of Africa.
38:51
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like taking a flight across the Pacific, except it's all land.
38:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we paint things with this broad brush because we're not familiar with it.
39:03
[SPEAKER_01]: literally in the middle of massive, and when I say in the middle, I mean on one side of the street, we're hundreds of cops and riot gear, and on the other side of the street, we're thousands of protesters, and I'm in the middle with a fancy camera.
39:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Unless you're in the middle of a lot of this stuff, it's not a thing.
39:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Bangkok, 2010, which is where the thing I just described just happened,
39:27
[SPEAKER_01]: There were the big protests going on and I remember these notable travel figures in the US saying now is not the time to go to Thailand and everything was happening in a couple square block radius in Bangkok that's all that's where the protests were happening and it would be the equivalent of seeing what happened in like January and Washington DC when the capital got attacked and then saying oh well yet I'm not going to Yellowstone this year.
39:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, it sounds absurd, if you're an American, but it's exactly the same logic we use in other countries.
39:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Unbelievable.
39:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Well speaking of that, you know, what other, what are maybe some misconceptions going the other way in the good way?
40:05
[SPEAKER_03]: What are some of the things you maybe enjoy that people don't realize is an enjoyable aspect of travel?
40:12
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, just being able to talk to people, for, you know, for a lot of people I meet, they've never been to the United States.
40:18
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not
40:20
[SPEAKER_01]: they may have never even met an American before.
40:24
[SPEAKER_01]: So to them, I'm America, right?
40:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I may be there, especially if you're going kind of out of their way.
40:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm the only representative of this country they've ever seen.
40:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And what they know, they know from movies and television and stuff like that.
40:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've met people who truly do believe that we have gun fights every day and car chases and then you know Brad Pitt.
40:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, or, you know, I have met people who they go on and around the world trip and they land in Los Angeles and then they go to Hollywood thinking that they're gonna see celebrities.
40:57
[SPEAKER_01]: That does not happen.
40:59
[SPEAKER_03]: what an interesting world we live in.
41:01
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, for folks that that, you know, like you said, a lot of the folks you meet will never go to the US and a lot of folks, listening to this most folks are probably never going to have the extent of travel experience that you have.
41:14
[SPEAKER_03]: I know we've had a lot of guests that have visited every country in the world, for instance, a lot of UNESCO World Heritage sites, all the national parks,
41:21
[SPEAKER_03]: What advice do you have for folks that that might desire to do something like this, but really don't know where to start?
41:29
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of us do have families, do have mortgages, do have those things?
41:34
[SPEAKER_03]: What do you say to those people?
41:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Not every point in everyone's life is going to be a good time to travel.
41:42
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's that's the fact.
41:45
[SPEAKER_01]: But it doesn't mean that there's no point in your life that you can't travel.
41:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the, the problems people have is they think travel is expensive because when you go on vacation, it's not like, oh, your bank says, well, you are gone for two weeks, so you don't have to pay or mortgage for those two weeks because you aren't using your house, it doesn't work that way, but if you actually travel long term and let's say you have a point in your life where you're going to be taking a break, maybe it's between jobs, maybe your kids leave the house, go to college, maybe you're going to move whatever it is.
42:19
[SPEAKER_01]: You might be able to say, okay, rather than move right away, let's wait three or four months.
42:26
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll put our stuff in storage, we'll go travel, and then we'll come back.
42:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And during that period, you're not paying for utilities, rent, mortgage, insurance, food, you know, all the stuff that you have to pay for to live, which can be quite a bit when you add all that up.
42:45
[SPEAKER_01]: When I was traveling, I didn't have to pay any of that.
42:49
[SPEAKER_01]: That goes a long way.
42:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And the other way you can really save money traveling is to just go to places that are not expensive.
42:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you go to Southeast Asia, Central America, different places like that, you're going to save a lot of money as opposed to if you want to go visit Switzerland.
43:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Switzerland and Norway and Iceland are great places.
43:08
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not an economist, but they are expensive.
43:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And the cost for food and transportation and lodging is going to be a lot.
43:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, as if you were to go to say Costa Rica or, you know, even Nicaragua is probably the most affordable place in kind of our hemisphere right now, uh, and doesn't get a lot of tourists.
43:28
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, it's, there's a point in your life.
43:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I think everyone should try to make it a point at some point in their life.
43:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe it's after high school or college, or like I said before retirement or whatever, to travel for three months straight.
43:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's doable for most people.
43:44
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, if there's a group of people that that realize what actually is possible and get influenced by people just doing things a lot differently and saying, not not being shocked by saying, hey, you can honestly travel for three or four months pretty easily.
43:57
[SPEAKER_03]: You can figure it out.
43:59
[SPEAKER_03]: It's our listeners.
44:00
[SPEAKER_03]: We get enough people doing things completely counterculturally that they're used to it and they know that it's possible and they can figure it out.
44:08
[SPEAKER_03]: This is too cool.
44:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Can I ask you this, you know, when the world starts opening back up, what is one place that you're really looking forward to visiting?
44:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe a place to revisit or somewhere you've never been?
44:19
[SPEAKER_01]: I have no answer to that.
44:20
[SPEAKER_01]: I've gotten that question quite a bit and I'm purposely not answering it because I don't want to start getting my hopes up as to when I can start traveling again because I got burned in the last year.
44:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And right now to be completely honest,
44:36
[SPEAKER_01]: My focus is it's kind of just doing this podcast because it's an everyday thing, I'll travel again.
44:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I know that, but I'm not, I have a lot of friends who have been traveling already and I'm in some groups with some very extreme travelers who kind of never stopped.
44:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know how wise that that really is certainly not going to suggest people do that, but I've traveled a lot in the last decade and a half.
45:06
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm pretty okay right now, just staying in one place for a while.
45:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I'm getting some stuff done.
45:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Not only have I launched this new thing and I want to make it successful, but I've also started, you know, I've been learning Latin the last several months.
45:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Just because I've always kind of been fascinated by it and so I've bought books and I'm doing stuff and I spend about, you know, an hour every day, doing that and I probably wouldn't have had the time to do that before.
45:35
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, this is kind of what I'm doing right now, and when I start traveling in, you know, maybe I'll do it differently.
45:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't foresee myself, you know, traveling for years on end any more.
45:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I've kind of done that.
45:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And I probably did it too long to be quite honest.
45:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I got really burned out at the end.
45:52
[SPEAKER_01]: But, yeah, I'll, I'll travel again.
45:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm pretty satisfied just doing what I'm doing for right now.
45:57
[SPEAKER_03]: 200 episodes into your podcast is a cool to see it grow around the world.
46:01
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sure it's being played in a lot of the places you've been.
46:04
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm sure that's kind of exciting, kind of fun to think about.
46:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's it's growing and you know, I have large audiences on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, 100,000, you know, followers and everything.
46:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Podcasting is very different because it really does
46:26
[SPEAKER_01]: a time commitment.
46:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you look at most successful podcasts.
46:29
[SPEAKER_01]: They've been around for a while.
46:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I have another podcast that I do called this week in travel.
46:34
[SPEAKER_01]: We've been doing for 12 years.
46:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, great.
46:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
46:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we're we're kind of redoing it because it's it's been hard to do this year because we've had nothing to talk about, but there's no algorithm that you can gain, right?
46:47
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no podcast company that controls all podcasting that can put you on a
46:55
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's really done through word of mouth and, you know, the experience you had, like, wow, this is really cool.
47:01
[SPEAKER_01]: I get those dribbling in all the time and it just kind of has to grow organically.
47:06
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's just how it works.
47:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And there are some things you can do to kind of to push it along, but you just kind of have to put in the time.
47:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's kind of what I'm doing right now.
47:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Gary, it's just a huge honor to have you on the show.
47:20
[SPEAKER_03]: You're a legend in this world.
47:21
[SPEAKER_03]: And I just appreciate taking a little bit of time to talk to us.
47:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, thanks for having me.
47:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Always enjoy doing it.
47:30
[SPEAKER_03]: First of all, thank you so much for listening.
47:32
[SPEAKER_03]: It means the world to us that you choose a lesson of this show.
47:35
[SPEAKER_03]: If you'd like to help us further, you can leave a review on iTunes, share us with your friends, your family, goes a long way to grow in the show.
47:42
[SPEAKER_03]: You can also support us financially through patreon.com slash adventure sports podcast.
47:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Link is in the show notes.
47:50
[SPEAKER_03]: And also, if you have an idea of who could be a good guest for the show, we're always looking for people to tell their story about the outdoors or adventure.
47:58
[SPEAKER_03]: So if you know someone, please reach out, email us at infoedadventuresportspodcast.com and until then, get out there and have some fun.