About ‘Child of the Road’
Adventure travel started for me in the third grade when I was sent from my home In Western Illinois to northern Wisconsin and spent six weeks at a summer camp for boys. It was owned by my mother’s uncle, and the tuition was his gift. It was my introduction to Nature, self-reliance, and the skills necessary to live in the wilderness.
Throughout my childhood, my father provided a summer vacation trip and insisted we go to a different place and see something new every year. Accommodations were always a tent at a campground. By the time I was finished with grade school, I had been to the Continental Divide in the west, Cape Cod in the east, central Ontario in the north, and Key West in the south. During my childhood and adolescence I always grabbed travel opportunities when they came.
The Boy Scouts gave me opportunities to explore the wilderness and find both challenge and solace there.
After high school, hitchhiking became the vehicle for both destination travel, and weekend rambling.
At 20-years-old, the only thing I wanted to do was go around the world, and attempted to do it by hitchhiking. That didn’t work, but the dream didn’t die. At 26, I had secured a one year contract, that stretched into 4 years, working in the oilfields of Abu Dhabi. I fell in love with desert environments. By the time I was 30, I had completed my third lap around the planet, and visited most of the Middle Eastern and Asian countries.
At 33, the oil exploration industry had collapsed in a market glut, and I went to college and earned a degree in Journalism.
That led me to the greatest adventure of my life, which was owning a community newspaper north of Fort Worth, Texas.
The reward of adventure travel is found when you put yourself on the edge of life and stay there as long as you can. I have never known life on the edge like it can be when you’re fucking with local governments every chance you get, and Truth is your weapon. The adventure is in your head, but it is every bit as real and not much different than standing on a lonesome highway, in the dark, with your thumb stuck out into a rainstorm.
The newspaper business was unsustainable and for my midlife crisis, I bought a motorcycle and toured the western United States for 100 days.
That led to a couple of years of long-distance endurance motorcycle riding, in thousand mile rallies, sponsored by the Ironbutt Association. A very different kind of travel challenge.
At about that time, I realized the portfolio of stories I was accumulating was my accomplishment in life, and resolved to continue at every opportunity until I grew too old to do it, and then I would write the stories.
I’ve been on Christian missions to the Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. Consulted in the oil fields of Brazil and Indonesia. I’ve climbed the great pyramid in Giza, and several of Colorado’s 14’ers. I’ve driven a car to the Arctic Ocean in the winter and danced with Aurora Borealis. I’ve been confronted by none-to-friendly Wahhabi Bedouins in the Empty Quarter of the Arabian desert. I have paddled Alaska’sYukon River solo in a canoe, and wrote for many newspapers, in different markets around the United States.
I have stories to share from all of these adventures and more.
At 70-years-old. I travel as a retirement lifestyle. Indeed, I am writing this from a coffee farm in the upper Sacred Valley, of the Andes Mountains, in south central Ecuador.
The adventures just keep getting better, but we don’t know when our end will be coming, or how sudden it will arrive. It’s time for me to start sharing my stories.
I will be posting stories of current travel and the accumulation of my lifetime of adventure travel on this website and compiling the stories for print.
I have no political agenda to advance, and beyond personal testimony, no religious brand to sell.
Success will be if my stories entertain, are worth your time to read and you come back for more. Please subscribe.
“Take it as it comes,”
Gary G. Tomlin
December, 2024