About me, about my blog, personal, not personal? This is where I tell you about myself and my blog, in 500 words or less, and you get to decide if I am interesting enough to follow. 

   I don’t know how interesting we are, most of the time Day and I are pretty boring. We work, come home and watch a little tv before bed, and do it again the next day. Our weekends probably look a whole lot like yours, chores and projects around the house, time with friends and family. Don’t misunderstand me, I am not complaining or unhappy, Day and I have pretty nice lives. We both have descent jobs, a really nice house to come home to, our bills are paid, and we have some money in the bank for emergencies and retirement, and some squirreled away for travel. Day and I both have wonderful families and a small handful of good friends. I am grateful for all we have and all we get to do. 

   If that’s not enough, I really like my wife. We have been together since 1998, after meeting at UMass Amherst, in a scuba class. We dated, moved in together, began traveling together, bought a home together, and then we got married. The year we got married, we tore our house down…

moved into a crappy apartment, which had a cockroach infestation, and began building our new home together. 

   Nineteen years we’ve been married, and still going. I’d be lying if I said it’s all been bliss, marriage is hard work, harder than I had imagined. And I, was not prepared. For me, writing is a chance for self reflection, and as I look back at the person I was, I have no idea how Day and I made it through those first few years. 

   I am an alcoholic, a trait my father was kind enough to pass down to me. I am happy to say, a recovering alcoholic. I haven’t drank in many years, that’s not to say I am not screwed up, I have tons of issues. My father was an alcoholic. My parents divorced because of it, he was estranged from his family, including myself and my three siblings, because of it, and later died at 54 because of it. As you can imagine, all of that can screw up a person and a family pretty good. As I am writing this paragraph, I am chuckling to myself. Explore. Dream. Discover. Travel, the title of my blog, is from a Mark Twain qoute I like, but a more appropriate title might be: The Traveling Train Wreck. 

   I started drinking when I was 13 or 14, began working construction before I finished high school and was a train wreck by 18. Six or seven years later, I quit drinking, which sucked! I didn’t find Alcoholics Anonymous, I didn’t find religion or God, believe it it or not, I found Amway. Yes, I became an Amway distributor and it saved my life (if you wanna know more, subscribe to my blog and ask). Needless to say, I didn’t make millions being an Amway distributor, but I did learn about myself, I grew as a person and it gave me the tools and the courage to take the next step. Living, is moving forward. Moving forward is simply, taking the next step, one step forward, over and over again. For some, that can be scarier than the other option, and for awhile, it was for me. If nothing else though, I am resilient, a trait that was passed down to me by my mother, and I kept moving forward. 

   So I took another step forward, and went to STCC, a community college and then, UMass. Those four years were my best years. I grew, I matured, I learned about myself, people and relationships. I was becoming a recovering alcoholic, and then I met Day. Our relationship was less than stellar in the beginning, but my charm won her over. And so we began, what is now our nineteen or twenty year relationship. Not so easy with a newly recovering alcoholic.

   I was just figuring out my crap, just beginning to figure out me. I certainly had no idea how to be a partner in a relationship let alone a husband. A boy’s father is his role model, and mine, was less than stellar to say the least. I fumbled through it, I made mistakes, I was throwing darts at the wall, I had no idea what being a good partner meant. The only thing I was good at, was working. I have always had a job, have always worked hard and I became really good at pouring concrete foundations. I have worked for the same company for over thirty years now, and in those years, I provided for Day and myself. I thought that if Day had a nice home, nice things, the bills were paid, and we could take nice vacations, I was being a good husband, unlike my father. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I was a good provider, but lacking the skills to be a good partner. 

   You fight, you make up, you learn, you grow, repeat. Living is moving forward, moving forward is simply, taking the next step, one step forward, over and over again, and never giving up. Day and I, never gave up on ourselves, or one another. What does all of this crap have to do with a travel Blog? 

   Day and I like to travel, so we traveled. In these past nineteen years, I have become a better person, we have become a better couple. Why? Read these words by Pico Iyer: 

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”

 

   This blog, is a journal about our travels, with destination ideas, tips, links and pictures. It’s also stories, thoughts and ideas written by this Traveling Train Wreck, as I figure all this shit out. And it’s the writing and story telling that is cathartic for me. You cannot travel, and not become a better person, if you open your mind and your heart. I travel and write about my travels, in hopes of becoming a better person. I travel and write, to lose the person I have become, in hopes of finding the person I was meant to be. 

This is me, 
Welcome to: 
Explore. Dream. Discover. Travel. 
Luv ya, 
Curly