Days not Homeless: 5 Years, 351 Days ...and loving every second of this alpine adventure!
Hopefully we were going to like La Fortuna more than we did last year where we spent one brief night before heading up to Los Chiles and Nicaragua. It was the same time of year, it was still a major touristy town and it still suffered from torrential downpours, but...
A very appropriate title for a special La Ruta del los Conquistadores 2013. This year La Ruta introduced a fatbike category and it was going to be all about the additional weight and four inch fat tires on the coast to coast mountain bike race. The fat bike provides...
After thirty six hours and barely enough time back in Florida to accomplish what was needed I was back to Fort Lauderdale airport for a flight to Costa Rica whilst Andrea remained behind to visit friends and family. The first ten days were spent just outside of San...
We left La Fortuna in Costa Rica on Monday morning and got an 8am bus to Florencia where we only had to wait around 15 minutes for the bus to Los Chiles. After walking through town we found Rio San Juan and paid an official looking guy 60 Colons each for a port fee...
La Palma to Sirena I’m sure we can’t put into words what a wonderful adventure this turned out to be in Corcovado, but we’ll try. Our second good decision, after deciding to go to Corcovado, was hiring Nito from Surcostours as our guide for 3 days. His knowledge of...
Surf Lesson Our friend Jamie was coming for a long weekend to stay with me whilst Wayne was doing the La Ruta bike race for 3 days, or so he thought. It was her idea to sign up for surf lessons and I’m glad we did. Jaco is extremely popular with surfers from beginner...
Pre Race Discovering La Ruta was pure coincidence. By chance I saw post from a guy on the Leadville 100 mountain bike news group asking if anyone doing Leadville had an available room for a Costa Rican Pro in exchange for accommodation at La Ruta. This peaked my...
The plan for the first couple months of our RTW adventure was for Andrea to remain working, this was her decision and nothing forced onto her by her semi-retired husband! That’s what also made Costa Rica our starting point, due to it being on a 2 hour time zone...
Saturday 20th October 2012 This was supposed to be the first day I get to ride day 1 of the “La Ruta de los Conquistadores” mountain bike race course, a 3 day event from Jaco on the Pacific coast to Limon on the Caribbean. I signed up for this crazy event after...
Thursday 18th October 2012, 10.45am Retirement is definitely not over-rated, at least not for me – Andrea may not agree with that yet! So we arrived in San Jose, Costa Rica on a classy Spirit Air flight from Fort Lauderdale and immediately paid too much for car...
With Ayutthaya being only an hour north of Bangkok it made sense to spend our last couple of nights there exploring the ancient temples. Once upon a time it was the capital of the Kingdom of Siam and very prosperous, until that is... the Burmese destroyed much of it....
Why did it take so long for us to make it to Thailand? What an amazing country, clearly with lots of places to explore - on this fifteen day trip we'd only have time for visiting Bangkok, Ayutthaya, and a couple of the many islands. Not sure of the reason but...
For me this was the highlight of an amazingly diverse country. The countless different tribes of the Omo Valley in the south of Ethiopia were unique, rich in culture, colourful, and often very extreme. Also very spoilt by the influx of tourism, of which we were...
A jeep adventure very similar to the Bolivian salt flats, only instead of being around 4000m in altitude this three day trip was often below sea level. The arid land we would explore was known as the Danakil Desert and covers almost 140,000 square kms of northeast...
Having been on the travel radar for some time, a good friend of mine from Everest in 2005 accompanied me on this adventure to Ethiopia, an amazing and culturally rich country. After a couple of days in Addis Ababa and completing Africa's largest 10km running race, the...
Did summiting Denali back in 2003 subconsciously set this somewhat crazy adventure into gear? I’ll never know but what I was hoping for is that this would be the end, the finale, the completion, the conclusion, whatever… of bagging the highest point in all 50 of the...
This trip went from being primarily about Seville, a city that we'd wanted to visit for some time, to Granada, Malaga, Cordoba, Cadiz, and even Gibraltar. We had no idea what we could knock off in a little over two weeks but decided that we would just keep on driving...
No idea why it had taken us so long to make it to Egypt but we're already raring to go back! This occasion was just a week long vacation to get us away from the cold of the Alps and for me to enjoy (if there is any enjoyment!) recovering from hip replacement surgery....
After what felt like an eternity it was a random email from a good friend in the US that prompted a plan of attack for the remaining 8 state highpoints. Unfortunately they were spread far and wide and included four that required some level of technique and multiple...
Encouraged by feedback from a friend that had recently completed this 'hilly' ride through the French Alps we thought, why not, that sounds right up our street. Officially starting on Lac Leman in Geneva we would cut it short slightly by cycling almost from our front...
It took us a long time to make it to Norway, but Oh was it worth it. The only plan we had before leaving on our long drive north from Chamonix was to meet friends in Senja for some ski touring. We just winged everything else and it worked a charm. The car was rammed...
With 2024 providing a brief glimpse into ski touring in Arctic Norway there was no way it wouldn't become a yearly ritual. Senja was fun but the Lyngen Alps to the north east of Tromso was destined to be an epic adventure. The crowd was pretty much the same; mostly...
Now that I had no desire to return to the US where I had spent far too many years where was I going to go whilst Andrea returned home? The most logical countries were Arabic speaking as they don't appeal to her! I had briefly looked at Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi...
Unable to take a rental car into Albania on a prior roadtrip through Europe we made it a mission to discover what would turn out to be a gem, and not one of those expensive gems! EasyJet supplied the direct flight from Geneva to Tirana, public transport was dirt...
Not quite what we had planned regarding a big Swedish adventure, our 3 week Kungsleden hike turning into a city break in Stockholm. Oh well, it was still fun, and we got to explore another scenic European city. With EasyJet flying the dirt cheap route directly from...
The thought of travelling for two days to visit family in New Zealand without adding on a South Pacific island trip was now only a thought! After spending a little over a week in Niue on our previous trip where would we go this time? Whilst my mum had already been to...
With a few hundred Euros in TAP Portugal credit and no real idea of where to go that didn't involve connections and long flights we decided to just head somewhere warm and that we'd never been to before. The Algarve sounded like that destination. Unfortunately the...
Approaching Greenland ice shelf from the air was humbling, the size of the glaciers tumbling into the sea, the iceberg’s with their turquoise underwater colours, the sheer expanse… and we were barely north of Greenland's narrowest point - there was a hell of a lot...
So here it is, time for another fairly long bike-packing adventure following the length of the mighty Rhine river. The other getaways I was toying with were either a north south traverse of Iceland on foot or a photography shoot in the Faroe Islands - for both it was...
Over eighty days of skiing under my belt, it was time for Andrea and I to head to warmer climates. We had spent some time in the French island of Corsica a couple of years ago and now it was time for the Italian island of Sardinia. We had zero plans; just the desire...
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