The country is abuzz about tonight’s Mega Millions lottery drawing with an estimated jackpot of $640 million. People from all walks of life are daydreaming about what they would do if they won. While browsing an Internet forum today, I came across a wide variety of ideas, ranging from practical:

I’d pay my debts!

To unselfish:

I’d pay my friends’ and family members’ debts!

To creative:

I’d buy the space shuttle and make it street legal!

To funny:

I’d buy a billion Twinkies!

But more than any of these, I became fixated on a common response:

I’d travel the world!

Do you really need half a billion dollars to travel the world? No, but you already knew that. After all, let’s say you spent $2000 on your last weekly vacation. If you continued that exact style of travel for a year, you’d need $104,000. Not chump change, but a far cry from half a billion.

So how much do you really need? What if I told you that I traveled for years at a time, including to exotic and expensive destinations such as Antarctica and the Galapagos Islands, all for an average of $1000 per month, including airfare? Sound impossible? Well it’s not.

You don’t need to be rich to travel the world!

I created this website for two main reasons: to document my own travels, and to show you how to realize your dream of world travel, even if you don’t win the lottery. Check back for more advice in the coming months and years of where to go and how to do it.

For the record, the picture at the top of this post is of my actual Mega Millions ticket. Winning would be nice, but even if I lose, I have a backup plan to see the world. And it won’t cost me half a billion bucks.

Two weekends ago when it hit 55 degrees for the first time this year, I went with the local mountaineering club to nearby Devil’s Lake for some rock climbing. For most of us, it was our first outdoor climbing of the year. The lake was still frozen, the trees still bare, and the air wasn’t quite warm enough for us to shed our parkas. On top of that, it was extremely windy, so we had to be extra careful getting set up. The hardest part of my day was traversing a ledge without getting blown off. But it was still a great day of climbing, and many more are sure to come this year.

Speaking of which, when it got into the 80′s a week later, I had to hit “The Lake” again. The ice had completely thawed, and suddenly sunburn became our biggest hazard. Other than placing anchors, which I guess will always sketch me out.

I hope you got a chance to get outside and enjoy the weather on the last weekend of winter!

Photos From March 10
Photos From March 17

Click here to see my photos from Duluth.

The final day of my trip had arrived. After a long night without much sleep, I couldn’t keep my eyes open on the hour-long bus ride to the airport in Cancun. Nothing of any significance happened on my two flights home. People complained about having to wait an hour to check in and their flight getting delayed by an hour, but I was used to that kind of stuff. In fact, the airport seemed extremely efficient to me. I was amazed at how far one could travel in one day. After years of getting stopped every ten minutes for random speed bumps, police checkpoints, pitchfork-brandishing protesters, flat tires, tuk tuks, and the occasional alpaca crossing, I was able to travel nearly 2000 miles in a mere four hours in the air, a distance I hadn’t covered in at least the last four months.

I was freezing when I landed in Milwaukee, but I’ll adjust eventually. There wasn’t nearly as much culture shock coming back this time around. I think being in Playa del Carmen, where Wal Mart’s and McDonald’s abound, for the last three days helped make the transition smoother. I’m actually really glad to be back home.

So this is the end of my trip. Now comes the most difficult part. I have to get a new driver’s license, get my car running again, catch up with people I haven’t seen in years, try to get my old website back up, sort through 11,000 pictures for printing, put together a resume, search for a job, try to put back on a few pounds after dropping below the 150 mark for the first time since I was like twelve years old, and probably do a bunch of stuff I haven’t even thought of yet. I’m sure I’ll write some follow-up entries eventually, but for now this blog is closed.

Today I entered Mexico for the first time in ten years. The bus went from the Belizean border up the Caribbean coast to Playa del Carmen, one of those all-inclusive American resort towns. Seventy-five percent of people on the beach were pasty and fat. They looked like in the last year they had spent fifteen minutes exercising, thirty minutes in the sun, and the rest of the time in an office eating junk food. Fifteen percent were so red it looked like someone poured a can of paint on them because they went from a terrible winter with no sun to sitting outside all day in the tropics without the inconvenience of sunscreen. The other ten percent were the color of bratwursts with a matching skin consistency, like they had spent three hours per day in the tanning booth for the last three months to prepare for their trip. That’s not to say that I’m the prime example of a perfectly-bronzed beachgoer either.

The weird thing about Playa del Carmen was that despite all the decadence and tourists who think sitting on a beach for five days constitutes getting to know a new culture, the place started growing on me. The weather was perfect, the sand was fine and white, and there was nothing expected of me because nobody else was doing anything, either. My biggest accomplishment at the end of my trip was going to the clinic for another blood test to confirm that I was finally dengue-free. I also played a lot of cards with my fellow hostel-goers and realized that while I am going to miss this carefree lifestyle, it’s okay that it’s about to come to an end.

The photo album for this entry is here.

It took all day and a series of buses to reach northern Belize near the border with Mexico, an amazing accomplishment considering how tiny Belize is. Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish were being spoken far more than English, and I knew I had arrived at one of those border towns that acts as a cultural vortex, where nobody and everybody seems to fit in at the same time. Once again, not much was happening around town. My three days in Belize were interesting, but this is one of the slowest-moving places I have ever seen.

Now that I know I will be heading home soon, several people have begun to warn me of the impending culture shock that will result from having been away for so long. But frankly, I’m a bit skeptical. For example:

Yesterday I crossed from Guatemala into Belize in the back seats of a couple different chicken buses. I ended up in a small town on the Caribbean coast called Dangriga. I walked around the dusty streets for a few minutes and came across an old black man with beady eyes, no more than a few molars left in his gob, nothing covering his feet, and a skinny frame that had been the result of years of spending all of his spare money on alcohol instead of food. He introduced himself as Abraham Lincoln and invited me to sit next to him on the curb. We talked about life in Dangriga for a few minutes and he attempted to introduce me to his best friend, a bottle that appeared to contain turpentine, but I declined. Instead, I offered to buy Abe a beer, but he logically informed me that I’d be throwing my money away because beer went down like water in a guy like him. Abe and I ended up sitting on the curb for a few hours, and soon I was well acquainted with the riffraff of Dangriga and all of the local gossip that came with the territory of someone with way too much time on his hands.

Today I hitched a ride in the back of a pickup truck with three dreadlocked rastas to an even sleepier place called Hopkins. Along the way, one guy’s Yankees cap got caught in the wind and blew off his head and onto the highway. I promptly joined the other two in belittling him for not protecting his headgear better and shouted “Not far, not far!” as he made the truck driver drop him off and slowly lurched his way back to the hat while we left him in our dust. Once in Hopkins, I walked up to the house of a leathery American woman whose disorganized garage of a bar put the idea in my head that maybe oceanside poverty wasn’t so bad after all. We shared a fresh-squeezed grapefruit just and she blamed the $400-per-night resort next door for using all of the town’s water and made no apologies for running the occasional hose across the property line to take a bit of it back. The only other thing happening in Hopkins was an African drum school, but their jam session wouldn’t commence until tonight and I didn’t feel like sitting around all day waiting for it. Once I had gotten my fix of Hopkins, I hitched back to Dangriga and spent the rest of the day listening to smooth reggae beats in the streets and trying to avoid the 110 degree sun.

Sure, some people seem to think that I’ll experience culture shock when I go home, but I don’t think so. After all, how different could my life here be from a typical day in the upper Midwest of the US?

The photo album for this entry is here.

I’m getting sick of paying for a bus ticket at 5 AM only to have the bus show up at 6. But instead of leaving right away, of course we go and talk to the driver’s friend for ten minutes. Then when I yell at the driver, he acts like it’s my fault because I’m not patient enough. After all, the day is long. Still, I think I had a right to be mad. The place we were going was the Tikal ruins, and lately the temperature has been climbing over 100 F (without the heat index) at 10 AM, not to return back to double digits again until well after dark. So not only am I sick of this intense heat, I’m even more sick of people wasting my few precious hours per day when it’s not too bad. 5 till 8 AM is the only time of day where there’s even a remote possibility of walking around without sweating.

Like Copan, the Tikal ruins were built by the Maya people thousands of years ago and were inhabited until about 800 AD, when they were promptly abandoned. Unlike Copan, Tikal had a lot more pyramids, it was more spread out, and it was right in the middle of the jungle. The fact that you could actually climb most of the pyramids made it a very fun and sweaty place to visit. There weren’t even very many tourists visiting the ruins. I guess most of them stuck to the far-more-popular Chitzen Itza in Mexico. But I was certainly impressed by this incredible ancient city.

The photo album for this entry is here.

I went to the clinic this morning and did blood tests for both malaria and dengue. It turns out that I have dengue and not malaria. That was a good thing because dengue passes through your system and doesn’t stay long-term whereas malaria might. Unfortunately, that means that I didn’t need to take the malaria treatment, but there shouldn’t be any long-term complications from that either. I went to a doctor who told me I should be fine in a few days, but there was no medicine to give me.

I gave going home another long thought, and decided that it was time. What else did I have left to prove? I wasn’t enjoying myself as much anymore and was simply putting off the inevitable. I used to feel like I might as well be dead to this world, but now I realize that’s not true. I’m the one who has abandoned everyone else, not the other way around. I bought a one-way ticket back to Milwaukee from Cancun on the 19^th of April, exactly one and a half years since I was last in the US. That would give me just enough time to pass through Belize for a few days and head up the coast to Cancun. It will be good to be back.