Following my trip to Thailand in 1990, international travel stopped again for me for several years. It’s not like I stayed in one place very long, but I didn’t leave the borders of the lower 48. Well, that’s not entirely true, I guess. I did make my first trip to Canada – specifically Montreal, which definitely feels foreign.

After graduating from college in 1991, I wasn’t ready to begin a serious career so I moved to Charleston, SC and lied my way into a restaurant job on the Isle of Palms before upgrading to another waiter position on Kiawah Island the year of the Ryder Cup. When that summer ended and it was time to find a new high season, I moved to Avon, CO to live the ski bum life in Beaver Creek for a couple of years. Finding myself pretty much broke at the end of my second ski season, I retreated home to Nashville where I paid off debts before heading to Seattle the following fall for three years of grad school.

With a Masters degree in hand and doctoral classes completed and exams passed, I landed a fantastic job with Philips Electronics in Palo Alto, CA 1997, which included to my surprise and delight lots of both domestic and international travel. Being able to travel on an expense account has lots of advantages. The only real downside is that a lot of times you don’t see much more than the airport, hotel, office building where your meetings are scheduled, and whatever you can either peep from the taxis between those points or find in the evening when the meetings are done.

I loved it.

Between 1997 and 2005, work took me to The Netherlands (maybe 6 times?), England (twice?), Germany, France, Monaco, Switzerland, Sweden, Israel (twice), Japan, Taiwan, and Canada. A few years later I went to Brazil and India on the company dime. Domestically, I criss-crossed the U.S not just at the turn of the century but really all the way until 2019, except for a couple years when I took a bit of a sabbatical. During one stretch in 2010-11, I went from my home in Colorado to NYC every week except one for 8 months.

Those trips had a couple of effects on me. First, they whetted my appetite for more and cemented international travel as THE thing I wanted to spend my money and vacation time on. Second, they got me accustomed to seeing places quickly, feeling like I got a lot out of simply taking places in visually and not digging deep into the history or culture of a place, well, except for the food. I always wanted to eat like a local. I got into a mindset of wanting to check off as many countries as possible, collecting passport stamps as I went.

There are obvious financial advantages to having jobs that keep you on the road and in the air. For instance, they tend to pay pretty well. They are also a way to rack up frequent flier miles and hotel points to be used for personal travel. As a result during the period from 2000-2022, I visited Canada (multiple times), Mexico (multiple times), France, Monaco, Italy (twice), Spain, Portugal, Greece, The Netherlands, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Russia, Turkey, Iceland (twice – once under duress by an off-schedule airline), Morocco, Tanzania, Costa Rica, Peru, Switzerland, Cuba, Norway, Czech Republic, Austria, Croatia, Montenegro, Korea, Egypt, and the Dominican Republic. And I know that Puerto Rico doesn’t count as leaving the U.S., but I made it there, too.

Fast travel was the name of that game. And a few of the places I’ve been were really nothing more than checking boxes. Have I been to Norway? Yes. Have I seen more than you can see in 6 hours in Oslo? No.

My next phase of travel is all about slow travel. As of today, I’m less than 4 weeks from starting a 6-week exploration of Medellin, Colombia.

And I can hardly f’ning wait.

But first, apparently I have to change homeowner’s insurance policies because my current provider (Safeco) doesn’t allow you to list your place on AirBnB. Dangit! More on that once I get it sorted.