Intro
This site was designed to share my personal adventures and travels with others. By telling my stories, I hope to inspire people to get out and do something they’ve always wanted to do and to have the courage and determination to pursue and achieve ANY goal. I have no secret bank account that allows me to fund such trips – I merely work hard to save money and then spend it doing what makes me happy. Absolutely anyone can do the same things that I have done. Limits and boundaries are only fears created in the mind. And ok, if you can’t get away from the office then you can live somewhat vicariously through me!
Creating this site was one of the goals that I set out to achieve in 2001 before leaving for my trip. I started by taking an HTML class at a local community college and began building pages from there. I worked on older trips first (Kilimanjaro) to test the water and figure out what was going on. I then took an Adobe Photoshop class and started working on an overall design. I wanted to create a site that I could update from any internet cafe in any country in the world, and I did not want to have to load my own ftp software onto each computer I used to do it. For that reason I decided to design a dynamic web site using a database to store all of my journal entries and photos. I did this using active server pages (asp). I taught myself how to program in asp in merely 10 days just before leaving for my trip. That was no small feat – I didn’t sleep much in those 10 days! Since then, I’ve given the original design a major overhaul. The new site has been done using my own design in WordPress. I spent about 3 months total working on the new look, learning WordPress and installing all the various plug-ins as well as upgrading the old MS Access database to MySql. Creating this site has been a tremendous amount of work but it’s been awesome to get it all together and to know that I learned so much by doing it myself.
Perhaps the hardest part though is actually staying on top of the site while you are out and about because it can get quite hard when you are busy climbing mountains and doing other things and don’t exactly have easy access to a computer all the time. Keep this in mind when you don’t see an update for awhile folks!
I hope you enjoy reading through the site! If you have any suggestions or comments please send them to Momo, my trusty cat and Public Relations Manager. (Please be sure to include a specific subject in the heading of your email because we get loads of junkmail and we’ve missed quite a few emails from people who merely said ‘Hi’ or ‘hey’ or ‘NA’ in the subject. Momo does respond to every email he gets, so if you don’t receive a reply that means your message got lost in the abyss of spam.) Thanks for checking out the site!