True Adventure Rarely Knocks on Your Front Door.

I am pretty excited.  My newest book, The Geezer’s Guide to Adventure, hits Amazon this coming week…in fact, it may already be out there as an ebook and hardback.  So, my mind is all over the subject of adventure…and that means I feel the need to blog.

Fair to say, I have always been adventurous.  However, it was not until an epiphany that I really got after some of my life long adventure goals.  That epiphany came through a photo I found in Shark Diver Magazine.  A friend of mine, Joshua Lambus, took a photo of a cookie cutter shark for that magazine.  A photo of a cookie cutter shark in the wild is a rare thing and Joshua was quite proud of the photo.  As he was flipping through the new issue of Shark Diver Magazine to show me the photo, I spotted a page with a photo taken from an airplane.  It appeared to be hundreds of whale sharks with a few boats in their midst.  I stopped Joshua on that page.

I had always been fascinated with whale sharks.  However, that fascination was more along the lines of a quest I would never go on…I had no idea how to actually see a whale shark.  Turns out, after reading the article, all I had to do to see them…to be in the water with whale sharks…was to go to where the whale sharks live.  That place was in the Gulf of Mexico near Isla Contoy, Mexico.  It looked do-able.  I found that there was a trip planned to encounter those huge whale sharks during the first week of the next July.  My wife and I signed up for the trip.  We saw and swam with the whale sharks…hundreds of them.  That trip changed my life.

In my new book I write about starting slow and building into adventure.  However you start, you will one day find your own epiphany…and find that you really can do the things you never thought might be possible for you to do.

At age 77, my wife (Linda, age 75) and I are preparing for our most adventuresome year ever.  We have been building to this for decades, we did not just decide to confront our fears overnight and then jump into significant adventures unprepared.  As I describe in the book, we have readied ourselves for these trips.

What are our fears?  One of them is of being in the cold.  We lived in Chicago and other cold climates for some 24 years…we know what cold looks like.  However, we were not OUT in the cold that much…we stayed indoors as much as possible.  Having been raised in Southern California, we were not…are not…cold weather people.  In fact, we have now lived in Hawaii for nearly two decades…so we did not even own cold weather gear.

It turns out that some of the most interesting things we want to see and photograph are found in cold country in the dead of winter.  So…we did a test trip to Yellowstone last winter with borrowed gear…where it got to minus 36 and never really got above minus 20.  We found we did not have all the gear we needed to be comfortable in that kind of cold.  We came home, wore out our credit card and we are now ready to proceed.  The photo attached to this blog is of our photo business partner, C.J. Kale, Linda and I in our new cold weather expedition jackets (we have the pants and all the other layers, hats, gloves, boots, socks to go with the jacket)…taken in our backyard.  We are ready for extreme cold weather and are about to go find it.

In just a few months we will return to Yellowstone in winter.  This time we will be ready for the cold.  We are then off to Lofoton, Norway, well inside the Arctic Circle…for fantastic winter photography.  From Norway, we travel to Arctic Sweden to stay at the Ice Hotel and photograph that frozen area.  That gets me to fear number two…altitude.

I had asthma as a kid and it impaired my lungs.  I have never done well at altitude, especially from 9000 feet up.  However, I have always wanted to see the Atacama and Uyuni Deserts in Chile and Bolivia.  Much of that trip is at high altitude, some of it is up to 14,000 feet.  The area is very remote and a trip there will not be like staying at the Four Seasons…it would take most people well out of their comfort zones…and especially me.  So, I have prepared to take that adventure…at my advanced age.

I have surrounded myself with great guides who know the area well.  I know the leader personally.  I trust him and his team.  I am preparing myself physically for the trip.  I have prescribed medicine that will help me deal with the altitude.  I have arranged for insurance and a service that can pull me out of anywhere should I run into life threatening trouble.  I am ready and can not wait to go.

In fact, I added additional adventure to the South America trip…side trips to Lake Titicaca and Machuu Picchu, both are also at significant altitude.

To be real…these adventures are pretty advanced, expensive and time consuming.  My book focuses on adventures for everyone, not just those who can afford the exotic.  The book is about over coming our fears and the inertia of just letting life continue as is…and thus leaving life long dreams to be just that…dreams…not reality.  And a preview of the book…we all have fears…everyone of us.  You do not have to be brave to make your dreams come true.  You just need to decide to make your dreams come true.  Once you have made that decision, my new book will be a great assist to you as you begin your new life of adventure.

And if your new adventures one day take you to Africa, make sure you read the section of my new book on how to do a real safari, on a budget, without spending weeks away from home and in good comfort.  Why do I mention Africa?  Because I have been just about everywhere and Linda and I feel that our trips to Tanzania and Kenya have been the best adventures of our lives.  They can be your best adventure, as well.

 

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