TheCamelDriver

Not a lot to say here, my job is pretty much to point the Camel in some random direction, change the oil every now and then, and snap a few pictures along the way. Luckily I don’t speak German so I have the perfect excuse to ignore the beast’s frequent comments which must center around something like “Why the hell are we going over there now, can’t you stick to a route for more than an hour just this once?”

But from reading Blogging for Dummies, I learned the author should write some nice little introduction about him or herself, akin to a eulogy written for departing the physical world bound for the blogosphere (I think that’s what they call this place), after which one would forever describe themselves as 01100001 011100110110111101101100011010010111000001110011011010010111001101110100.

So here goes. Thankfully I grew up mentored by some really cool parents who chose traveling the world by sailboat over the more socially acceptable method of working-til-retirement at the golf course. Needless to say this wanderlust wore off on me. After studying engineering in Bozeman, Montana I moved to the big city. After nearly five years in Washington, DC, despite time with some wonderful people and working at an awesome aerospace engineering firm, I was cruising but my VMG was zero. I was going stir-crazy fast and needed a drastic course correction.

The weekend after buying the Camel on a whim in March of 2010 I made an overnight trip to the mountains of West Virginia. Camping in the beautiful solitude of mountains and a babbling brook it hit me. The motorcycle was my ticket out of here. The furthest place I could imagine still connected by road to my current situation was the southern reaches of South America, and the Camel could certainly take me there. Fast forward a year of saving, preparing, and a few short international trips to keep me sane I’m finally off. No permanent address. No paycheck. No plans.

The operative word above is “preparing”, not “planning”. The confines of planning invite the possibility of “changing plans”, which is always more difficult if you had a plan in the first place. Instead, the Camel is prepared for almost anything, 400mi of unserviced dirt trail, blown tires, river crossings, and engine rebuilds in the field. But the Camel is also prepared to sit in storage if some opportunity for non-two-wheeled adventure comes along.