Welcome to the adventure!

It is challenging to enter the “adventure blog” world without a dose of self-doubt and pessimism. On the one hand, I feel so excited to share my journey with others and have a personalized space to which I can refer friends, both new and old. On the other hand, there are hundreds, probably even thousands, of bloggers out there, also traveling the world, waxing poetic on the meaning of life, and eagerly collecting followers. So why add to the mass? How is this blog any different? What do I have to offer to this incredible community of writers, travelers, photographers, thinkers, and collectors? Well, we’re all about to find out. If nothing else, this blog will be a way for me to keep in touch with family and friends, share stories, advice and photos, and hopefully connect with and learn from other bloggers.

To be fair, this isn’t my first rodeo. I currently have 3 other blogs floating around in cyberspace. The one I kept on my employer’s website about biking across the country is definitely my most thorough, but it is over at nextadventure.net/community/blog and isn’t my own to keep adding to. I also have one at onedeliberatelife.wordpress.com from the few months I was unemployed a couple of years ago, when I wrote almost every day, and grappled hopelessly for a theme or common thread. And then there is the Blogspot blog I kept when I was teaching in the South side of Chicago…and it contains exactly zero blogs, because as it turns out, when teaching in the South side of Chicago, you have no free time for blogging, and no capacity to articulate your experience.

So here we go again. Only this time I have an adventure pending that I wouldn’t be able to keep quiet if I tried. The whole plan will unfold in the blogs to come, but suffice it to say that I have found a theme, a partner, and a URL, so watch out world.