Rob, for those that don’t know, just broke a Guinness World Record skateboarding 12,000 km unsupported. His journey started in Switzerland and took him over Europe, the US and the width of China – beginning in Xinjiang and ending just over a week ago in Shanghai.

My interview with Rob drummed up some interesting comments from his well-travelled fan base on Lost Laowai, including an e-mail from Alastair Humphreys.

All of it has got me thinking about my own travels, however tame they are by comparison, and how much I’d love to do something like that again.

It’s funny in some ways. Many, I think, would look at a person living overseas and think they are in the middle of an adventure already, and for some they surely are. But after nearly four years here in China, I’ve settled into a groove, gotten married, bought a dog and eat pizza delivery – a bit far away from hiking the Amalfi coast, raving in Thailand, camping on an island with a bunch of monkeys, and checking out the Greek countryside from the precariously perched monasteries of Meteora.

Often when I start thinking about heading out and putting a few new pins in the map I start thinking of all the reasons that it’s difficult now and why I can’t or shouldn’t. I say to myself that life is different now – I’m older, I’m married, I’ve got a dog, and delivery pizza…

It pains me to think the words. To, at least in my mind’s ear, hear them said. It’s, almost verbatim, the speech I heard a hundred times from a hundred different people upon returning home after backpacking for 5 months. A speech that always started with “Wow, I envy you. I wish I could go do it.”

Well, I guess my response is as good for me now as it was for them then. You can. I can.

Additionally, this week marks another anniversary of sorts. It was November 11, 2003, that I left Canada and began travelling for five months living out of a backpack and on various kind souls couches, spare beds, backyards and floors.

The recognition that it’s been four years since that fateful day has led me to take a moment and consider exactly how I got where I am.

So, lets see how my memory does:

The Magazines

Somewhere in my first or second year of college I got it in my head that I wanted to travel to Thailand upon graduation. A lot of things got in the way of that, the least of which – I’m certain – being that once graduating college few people have money and I was no exception. However, the big stopper was that before I even had my diploma in hand and hat in air, I was working at a magazine publisher spending my days pointing out other’s mistakes as an assistant editor.

With what was quite an awesome gig for a recent grad – interviewing some of my favorite musicians, getting backstage at concerts, and making more money than I’d ever made – the Thailand plans were swept aside as something to be done in the rather undefinable “later”.

I worked at the magazines for a few years, and what was exciting and fun at first quickly became stale and painful. I was tired of writing the same things over and over again, just changing the names. Tired of meeting the same fake people, listing to the same “new” bands, playing with the same “new” music gear.

Somewhere in there echoes of former plans began to swell up again. I became a bit obsessed about wanting to leave it all and travel. However, as much as it doesn’t seem like it should be, your mid-twenties are a tough time to jump off the ladder you’ve been told you need to get your ass up and have, however reluctantly, begun to climb.

It took me the better part of a year to get up the nerve to quit, and I stayed on three months past that as a grace period.

UK, Europe and an Aussie

I’m not really sure why it was that I left in the second week of November 2003, but there it is. I had spent endless hours on LP’s Thorntree forums and lots of time connecting with various people via GlobalFreeloaders so that I felt at least somewhat prepared for what awaited me on the other side of the Atlantic.

Actually, looking at my apprehension now, it’s damn amusing to me just how nervous I was. I mean, it’s England. But for this small town boy who had only travelled around the safety of his own country and the mixed up place just south of it, the UK couldn’t be more foreign.

I travelled England and Scotland for November, ending up in Belfast at my cousin’s for most of December. Spent New Year’s in Dublin with friends and was on the Mainland (of a Western kind) and in Paris at the start of January. In the 30 days that followed I thoroughly used and abused a comped Eurorail pass my “journalist” credentials had gotten me. Paris, Venice, Rome, Amalfi Coast, Athens, Olympia, Barcelona and Florence were all (far too brief) stops.

Upon arriving back in London for a couple of days to await my flight to Thailand, I ended up returning to a Globalfreeloader’s home that I had befriended (and remain good friends with today). It was there that I met Cass. An amazing Tassie that had me at “noi”.

It’s strange thinking of those three days with her now and realize how short that time actually was. Certainly a lot shorter than the number of times in the following two months that I got drunk in Thailand and blabbered on about her. Or wrote songs about her.

Thai Smiles, An Intro to Asia

Whatever bits of my young heart I didn’t leave at Heathrow, Thailand stole. The country that started the journey, and I was finally there. Everything about the place appealed to me. The people, the culture, the food. Everything.

Now, with the perspective that comes with time having washed the memories a great deal, I approach the country with a slightly different feel, and it saddens me. The memories I made there, though dimmer now, still flicker in my mind and give off chemicals that remind me of those initial tastes.

From taking cooking classes and volunteering at an orphanage in the North, to full moon parties and camping on a lonely island in the south – there is very little of those two months that I don’t wish I could repeat again and again. Even the scar that marks my arm, from experimenting with motorbikes and inertia, is something I took from Thailand and still hold dear.

I’ve returned several times since, and each visit was great – but when it comes to all the travel I’ve done since and all the travel I’m likely to do in the future, it’s hard not to think that perhaps those two months were the high water mark.

A Return to CNN and on to BC

After returning from travelling I landed back on North American soil in the Boston airport. While waiting for my connecting flight to Buffalo I couldn’t escape CNN. I had spent five months avoiding the news that most people busy themselves with, and getting such a strong and forceful dose so quickly left me feeling ill.

For the next several months I lived in a bit of a limbo, happy to be home but unsure how to fit back in. Five months isn’t long in the scheme of things, but it’s enough to disconnect you from your life. It’s enough to give you opinions outside the scope of those that have never gone. And it’s enough for the presumed pretentiousness of that fact to distance you from those that were close only six months before.

And so, when given the option to move across the country and live at my Aunt’s in British Columbia, I jumped on it. Leaving, it appeared, was becoming a bit of a hallmark for me.

BC was a mixed bag, but stopped me from getting too cozy and complacent for staying in one place. I still had a nagging desire to get to Australia. Unfortunately I wasn’t saving much money in BC and so not a month after arriving I began planning my departure – to China.

Eight Months To Oz

After typing various random things into search engines, a planned developed whereby I would go to China and teach English as a Second Language for eight months, all the while saving like a fiend to eventually end up in Australia on a one year Holidaymaker visa.

Though my infatuation with the quirky Aussie had cemented itself into one of the closest (and at the same time furtherest) friendships I’ve ever been fortunate enough to have, I was still extremely eager to see what this big island where the water drains backwards and mammals lay eggs was all about.

The eight months in China passed pretty quickly, and everything was going to plan; got my health check, got my Aussie visa, saved enough cash, finalized my itinerary…

But then something unexpected happened. I couldn’t leave. While it’s easy to summarize these eight months in a sentence or two, it’s harder to explain all the things that were going on behind the scenes – particularly between myself and a quiet, semi-English-speaking receptionist at my school.

The one thing you have a lot of when you’re an English teacher in a small Chinese town is time. This was time I was more than happy to spend chatting with random people, and ecstatic to spend chatting with a bright and beautiful Chinese girl. Falling in love with her was an unexpected side-effect.

And one, in the end, I was quite willing to trade my best laid plans for.

Now, looking back on those initial feelings of what it was to leave my home and enter an unknown world of different cultures, languages and people, it amazes me to see how much that experience snowballed into what I now call “my life”. It also acts as a reminder of the excitement and anxiety my wife must feel about heading to Canada next month.

Seeing my own country as a foreigner is a trip I can’t wait to take.