Background on My 2012 Around-the-World Trip

Warning!

I’m an opinionated sonofabitch and I don’t plan on toning it down for this blog. Please bear in mind that the opinions expressed in these posts are mine alone.  Even though my current travels often involve my role as the voluntary SOIL Fund Ambassador for the International Erosion Control Association (IECA), this blog has been created as a personal forum and is NOT associated with IECA or its membership. 

12 July 2012, on the first leg of my trip (Denver, Colorado to Oakland, California): 

People have been asking if I am excited about my upcoming ATW trip.  I can’t say that I am.  I’ve been looking forward to it as an experience but child-like excitement?  Naaa.  I rarely get very excited about anything anymore (except maybe finding an unusual stamp that I need for my collection).  Maybe I’ve become jaded.  Maybe I’ve become cautious about getting too excited about anything after too many setbacks and disappointments over the years.  Not that life has been bad but maybe I’ve become too realistic.  Events seem to rarely turn out to be as fun as the anticipation of them.  Therefore, why get excited in advance of a trip, etc. only to become disappointed with the outcome?  That way if something good does happen, it is a pleasant surprise.

As I write this, I’ve been catching glimpses out the window (looking south).  Colorado from the air on a clear summer day is something to get excited about.   I'm watching the waning snow on the peaks and dark, deep Glenwood Canyon pass below me, and now Grand Mesa looms some ten miles to the south.

Judy asked me how I was feeling as she was driving me to the airport this morning. Well, I actually had a good night’s sleep so not bad physically (often I don’t sleep well the night before a big trip or other important, and potentially stressful, event).  I was also a little nervous. What if she got in a crash or the car broke down? It wouldn’t be a very good omen for the start of the trip, eh?

The Bookcliffs are now below me and I see Grand Junction in the distance. So many trails to hike and not enough years left for all of them.

How This Trip Came About:  I’ve done my share of traveling over the years and have spent a total of about four years outside the USA, the majority of the time working for $$$, volunteering, or studying French and Spanish.   However, since my forced semi-retirement in September 2009 (the environmental consulting firm I was working for went out of business but I soon picked up some part-time consulting work on my own), I had wanted to “fill in the gaps” getting to regions of the world I hadn’t experienced. In a way, I felt I had to do it to be true to my goal from early in life to be a world traveler. I also realized that I was now in my 60s and might not have that many years to be able to travel to exotic venues.

In February 2011, I was attending an International Erosion Control Association (IECA) conference in Orlando, Florida.  At the conference, I went to a meeting of the Ibero-American Chapter of IECA mainly because it was in Spanish and I’m always in need of a little Spanish practice. The main topic on the agenda was selecting a site for their 2012 regional conference. The choices were Antigua, Guatemala or Granada, Spain. I’d spent a month in Guatemala studying Spanish and doing volunteer soil mapping on a volcano in 2000.   I have never been to Spain and was hoping they would choose that venue. They did! Since they had just had their 2010 meeting in Panama, the overwhelming majority of the Ibero-American chapter opted for a European venue for the first time (previous meetings had all been in Central or South America). “This will be a great opportunity for me to go to Spain,” I told myself.  I noted the scheduled dates in early October 2012 in my mental calendar.

At the Orlando conference, I also talked to Doug Wimble, past president of IECA and an Australian.  I told Doug that I’d never been to the Far East or Australia and hoped I could attend a conference, short course, etc. in that part of the world in the near future.  Doug recommended that I check out the website for WASWAC (the World Association for Soil and Water Conservation), an organization based in China with members around the globe.   The WASWAC website lists upcoming environmental conservation conferences, courses, and other events in every corner of the earth.

Sometime in the fall of 2011 while looking at the latest WASWAC listings, I stumbled across a workshop on debris flows (a type of very destructive liquid landslide) scheduled for August 2012 in Chengdu, the capital of Szechwan Province, China. It was to include a field trip to the sites of debris flows in northern Szechwan which were triggered by the earthquake in southwestern China a couple years ago. The debris flows wiped out entire communities burying them in several meters of suffocating mud.  I’ve been a landslide junkie ever since I worked with a team studying their potential impacts to completion of Interstate Highway 93 through Franconia Notch, New Hampshire way back in 1975.   I’d wanted to visit China for years but was not attracted to the prospect of joining a commercial tour.  Here was a chance to see a small chunk of the country with professional (mostly Chinese) colleagues. To my pleasant surprise, the workshop and field trip would be in English – a definite plus since I don’t know word one of Mandarin or Cantonese and am not about to tackle one of those languages at this stage of life.

Not long after discovering the Chengdu workshop, I was cruising the IECA website’s list of upcoming events when I saw a new listing for an upcoming conference to be put on by the Australasian Chapter of IECA. The event would take place in July 2012 and would be held in Hamilton (south of Auckland), New Zealand.

So by late 2011, I looked at the scheduled dates of these three events and realized that I could reach them in succession by traveling east to west around the world:  New Zealand in July, China in August, and Spain in October.  There was also enough time between the New Zealand and China events for me to make a stop in Bali, Indonesia to visit my university classmate, Bruce Briscoe, who had moved there after a successful career in the San Francisco area as a computer geek.

However, there was that long interval between China in August and Spain in early October.  Sure, I could do the tourist thing but I’d probably get board after 6+ weeks.  Another visit to the WASWAC website in January 2012 scored the perfect fill-in. Turns out that WASWAC was having their bi-annual conference at a national park on the Serbian-Romanian border in September 2012. Thus, I could leave Denver in mid-July and keep traveling west hitting all four conferences, visiting Bruce in Bali, and hitting a number of other new places along the way. 

I then spent several months in early 2012 planning routes, booking plane and train tickets, scanning guidebook pages, and reserving hotel rooms on line.  Figuring out all the logistics became like a full-time job since I was my own travel agent.  I also had to acquire and assemble all the gear I would need for a three-month trip to both hemispheres and five continents. 

So here I am at last heading west in anticipation that everything will work out!