The Friday Roundup - Ides of March Edition

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Happy Friday everyone!

I hope you’ve had a good week. Mine has been equal parts crazy and busy, but I’ve found a few more diamonds in the rough, and this is the part where I get to share them with all of you.

Before the first piece, a little backstory:

I have this weird dichotomous need to both go on adventures and never leave home. But while “home is best,” as

Hilary White

likes to say, sometimes I get a bit stir crazy.

I got the travel bug as a teenager growing up in a Podunk former farm town in Upstate New York. There were kids on my bus who had mustaches and mullets and wore trucker hats and worked at the volunteer fire department. They probably had John Deere belt buckles, too, but I failed to notice as I was admiring the doublewide trailers they went home to. I cannot overstate how boring and hopeless the town of Kirkwood feels. There was nothing to do. Not even a grocery store. It’s a good thing I was too much of a boy scout to try drugs and alcohol when I was a kid, because I might not have ever done anything else.

When I was 15, I got to take my first plane trip. I went to Denver for World Youth Day, and if the events I was there for turned out to be weird, and the people I went with were even weirder (I’ve written about this experience before), I got a taste of being out of the house, without my parents, in a place where something was happening.

There was no going back.

At 17, I got invited to go to Dallas to do a summer camp for rich kids from Mexico. I basically got an all-expenses paid trip to keep an eye on kids only a few years younger than me as we went to amusement parks and restaurants and Medieval Times and the mall and to NASA’s mission control in Houston, and it was amazing. While I was there, I met a guy who became my instant best friend, and since the priests who ran the place offered to let me stay, I decided to go back and do my senior year of high school in Texas.

From that point on, it was road trips and mission work and foreign excursions for the next few years. By the time I was 23, I’d been to almost the entire continental US, most of southern Canada, roughly half of Mexico, the Bahamas, and another dozen or so countries in Europe.

Traveling filled me with wonder. I loved seeing other cultures, trying their food, exploring the sites, doing my best not to stand out like an obnoxious tourist.

As I was about to graduate from college, I applied to teach English in Japan. I had become fascinated with Asia, but Japan in particular, and while I really wanted to go, I didn’t want to do it alone. I was girl crazy, found Asian women very attractive, and worried I’d get myself in trouble without a wingman who would help me stick to my commitments to be a good Catholic boy in a foreign land full of exotics temptations. I got offered the job, but my buddy who applied with me did not, and I made the last minute decision to go with him and some other friends to Phoenix and get an apartment together. That trip didn’t last long for me — only a few months — but while I was there, I met the young woman who would become my wife, and as luck would have it, she was Asian too.

You never know where your adventures will take you.

My wife and I both enjoy road trips. Our kids have seen more of the country than any kids I’ve ever met. We’ve been to the Redwoods and Mount Rushmore, San Diego and Assateague Island, Manhattan and Montana, Yellowstone and Yuma. We’ve walked in volcanic craters and hiked through old growth forests, eaten lobsters caught fresh from the Maine coast, gone whale watching and water sliding, off roading and on roading…and need to do a whole lot more.

But I’m older now, and travel takes more out of me than it used to.

Home is my default setting. It’s where all my stuff is. If I want a latte, I can make it on the cheap. If I want to smoke some meat, I can flip on the Traeger and even control it with my phone. If I want to play a game, or edit a video, or record some audio, or make a podcast, my desk is the absolute best place to do it. If I want to take a nap, my bed — with my pillow — is just down the hall.

Which brings me to the first piece this week: