I was born in Bangkok, Thailand, and lived in Thailand for a total of 8 years, Vietnam for 5 years, and Malaysia for 2 years before returning to the States for college. I met Linda in college. Linda was from New Castle, Pennsylvania. We were married after college and moved to Thailand for 2 1/2 years, Germany for 7 years and Belgium for 11 years, where our three children, Tamara, Rosanna, and Will were born. We returned to the States and spent ten years on road trips visiting all 50 states looking for a place to retire. We are now retired in Colorado, which gives us even more time to travel. However, Linda is tired of traveling, but our three children are hooked on travel for life.

I started blogging on travelblog in 2009, entering trips beginning in 2007. However, my intention has always been to document our years of travel. Most bloggers write about their trips away from home. Our homes have usually been where people travel to. So the idea eventually percolated to rename our blog "Home and Away."

The blog is not intended to be an autobiography, although having spent our entire lives traveling, it may appear to be that way. However, as this is a travel blog the entries concentrate mostly on the travel aspects of our lives. The descriptions of our homes necessarily provide the setting, with an abbreviated description of what brought us to that place and some of the significant events, many of which intersected with history, that might be of general interest to readers.

On December 31, 2011 I completed all blog entries covering the period from 1949 to 2011, including travel to 63 countries. Discovering that I set a goal of traveling to 100 countries. So in 2012 rather than flying directly to Sydney, we cruised from Honolulu to American Samoa (64), Samoa (65), Fiji, Vanuatu (66), French Caledonia (67), to Australia, and took a flight to New Zealand (68) with several weeks of touring.

Then from 21 March to 16 April 2013, I flew to Beijing, China. I traveled with my son by train to Lanzhou, where we took a side trip to Xiahe (Labrang where my parents we married in 1949). Then we followed the Silk Road to Dunhuang, Jiayuguan, Turpan, and Urumqi in China; flying from there via Almaty, Kazahkstan (69) to finish the Silk Road in Uzbekistan (70). We saw the sights in Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara. We then flew from Tashkent to Riga, Latvia (71) and took buses to Vilnius, Lithuania (72), and Tallinn, Estonia (73). We took a ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki, Finland (74). Will flew to Rome and I flew home via a stopover in London.

Future trips include:

2014 I want to cruise from Rio de Janero, Brazil (75) to Montevideo, Uruguay (76), to Buenos Aires, Argentina (77), to the Falkland Islands (78), to Usuaia and the Chilean Fjords, to Valparaiso, Chile (79). Then I want to fly to La Paz Bolivia (80) and overland to Lake Titicaca, Cuzco, and Machu Pichu, Peru (81), but Linda may think this trip is too long so we will have to split it in two.

2015 Linda and I will tour southern Poland (82), where her fraternal grandmother was from, Sovakia, where the maternal grandparents were from, Hungary, and the Balkans including Romania (83), Serbia (84), Bulgaria (85), Macedonia (86), Albania (87), Kosovo (88), Montenegro (89), Bosnia-Herzegovina (90), Croatia (91), and Slovenia (92).

2016 Overland from Panama (93) to Costa Rica (94), Nicaragua (95), Honduras (96), and Belize (97), to Mexico.

2017 Cruise to a bunch of Caribbean Island nations and in the process achieve my goal of 100 countries.

So while travelbloggers shouldn't set such trivial goals, but just travel for the sake of travel, for learning about other peoples and cultures, and for self awareness, I have basically done all of that. I am intimately familiar with a wide range of cultures, speak four languages, and I know myself. I now look forward to visiting more places as a consequence of having set a goal. Most places will be short visits. But I did that when I first explored Europe after high school in 1968...visiting over a dozen countries in 21 days with the Eurailpass. But short visits often lead to long visits, and we eventually lived 18 years in Europe.

To start at the beginning in 1949 just go to The Beginning.

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