Japanese New Year’s Mochi Celebration Have you ever celebrated the New Year with a Mochi Festival? Today was my first time. No, I am not in Japan, but on Bainbridge Island just across Puget Sound from of Seattle Washington. It’s a bright, cold winter’s day at Island Wood, an environmental education center, and the community is celebrating the coming New Year with the Japanese custom of making and eating mochi. . So what is mochi and how do you make it? After washing sweet rice, you soak it overnight. You then steam the rice in wooden boxes over an open [View Full Entry]

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Hunger is a necessary experience of travel (and life, I suppose), and when on a budget, there is very little fear of hunger. It is commonplace in a strange land, on a strange form of transportation that might last for days, and often it is satisfied only sparingly when on that well-known budget. But, the local markets do provide wonderfully, as with the vendors along the streets and the friendly strangers who invite you in to quench your thirst, and hopefully (cross your fingers), feed you. Yet there is never a guarantee, and to eat is a necessity. So whip out [View Full Entry]

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...continued Cahors would be the last time I would ever see The Way. As I sat, as I wandered through the small picturesque town situated on a bend upon the Lot River—as I felt my body and listened deeper to a purpose gone unknown—I came to understand much about Le Chemin de Saint Jacques de Compostelle. The Way presented itself with all I had dreamt of: it was rough, it was a challenge, and it was isolation and segregation from the external world beyond me. The Way of Saint James was immense, and its’ scope of power and realization fulfilled my [View Full Entry]

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Bainbridge Island was Mom’s, John’s, and my first stop, before we went to the family reunion in British Columbia. We were there for two nights (7/26-7/28.) Uncle David, Aunt Susan, and Kaia went all out for us… it was an amazing weekend. On Friday, we flew from Minneapolis to Seattle (as we flew in, we saw the Space Needle, so that was fun), and John got to take his first ferry ride ever. When we got to Bainbridge Island, we met up with Uncle David and Kaia and had a really great lunch at a restaurant. Then we walked around a [View Full Entry]

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Due to Travelblog's system failure, ten articles were lost and will be re-published. Sorry for the filling of your mailbox... but... drink your urine: Praise be to the body and its' glory! A chilly winter day called us out: two friends coming together on another adventure. Yes, we laughed. We laughed wondering what the hell we were doing at five in the morning driving for the coast. With surfboards packed and wetsuits folded, we picked up our Nalgene bottles of hot tea and drank; warming our bloodstreams, busying our kidneys, filling our bladders. Soon we would need to empty them—our bladders [View Full Entry]

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Due to TravelBlog's memory failure and crash, this article had to be re-published. Sorry for any inconvenience. The End & The Beginning Lying on his back, yet he didn’t know it. He didn’t know he was that turtle, tipped over on his own shell, by his own shell. His mother looked down at him, not knowing what to do, what to say, except the family proverb: “Perry, you don’t have a pot to piss in.” With a bad back, handfuls of Advil, disgruntled relationships, heavy debts, and not a hand on the twig to snap the curse of his current predicament, [View Full Entry]

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Due to Travelblog.org's memory failure, this article had to be re-published. I rose from my evening’s indulgence. Pushing pause, I passed through the dark room, glowing with a crystal glare, and entered the kitchen. Flicking on the lights, white recessed cans struck their yellow casts onto shadows with a soft incandescence, like a candle on a corner bookshelf. I reached the pantry, opened its wooden doors and pulled down two contents. One was a can of Equal Exchange Organic Hot Cocoa. The other was a plastic bag of Western Family Marshmallows—jumbo. Outside, a layer of clouds blocked the night sky. A [View Full Entry]

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"If there's a fork in the road, take it." Nine years old and probably, if not certainly, this was one of the strangest, most peculiar phrases I heard. A fork in the road? And what about a spoon? Dirty napkins? Why not, as the man said…pick it up! The quote was read to me out of a book written by Pat Riley (one of the top ten NBA coaches of all-time according to NBA.com) entitled The Winner Within. He was older. I was nine. And at nine years old, I hadn't the slightest, simplest clue as for the significance behind the [View Full Entry]

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Travel, and the immersion into its inner experience, begets more and more—and more—travel. It’s not an addiction. Nor is it a habit of escapism. It is a transformation of lifestyles. True travel is a place of opening your self to the processes of inner journeying. It is a lying down of the arms of ordinary life and undertaking a new style wholly involving oneself and the world abroad. Absolute travel is a return to recognition of who you are, where you came from and where you’re going within the mass of global evolution. Number One…Or Number Two? You’re at home. Priorities, [View Full Entry]

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Only one week left until I leave! The excited/nervous/overwhelmed sensation is definitely setting in... (The above statement is absolutely true, but I also wanted to check to make sure this blog thing actually works - so don't worry, future entries will be MUCH more interesting :) [View Full Entry]

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