Off To The Races

I’m writing to you from the first leg of a daunting international travel campaign.

By a succession of planes, trains, automobiles and hopefully eventually camel caravans, I’m traveling from San Diego, California to Baghdad, Iraq.

I’ve always qualified California as being my place of origin rather than the United States; it feels much more a native homeland to me than the gigantic, disjointed nation that gave me a passport to the world.

But California doesn’t issue passports yet, so on paper I’m a US citizen.

The United States passport guarantees access to 186 countries in 2022, and is perennially ranked among the most powerful passports in the world by global citizenship firms like Henley & Partners.

I’ve taken advantage of this unfettered access to global travel to a greater extent than most of my fellow nationals -

The majority of my adult life has been spent chasing an ephemeral and ineffable high across the seven seas and into remote corners of global civilization; I often feel more at home as a stranger in a bedouin camp or on a catamaran off the Crimean coast than I do in the suburbia in which I was raised.

People often ask why I’ve chosen to travel to a certain place.

“Why are you going to Baghdad?”

Bob Dylan once said

“You can be born in the wrong town with the wrong name and the wrong parents - ”

That’s why I travel; I’m searching for a people and a place that understand me.

Maybe eventually they can help me piece together an identity that I’m proud to call my own.

This trip will take us to the cradle of civilization, and onward to some of the most prolific and contested human settlements and historically significant parts of the planet.

The slated itinerary includes Iraq, Kurdistan, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and Egypt; there are numerous towns, cities, monuments, and wilderness areas we plan to visit within each of these places.

But moreover than visiting places, I’m interested in visiting people.

People are what contour and define my world.

And I have good friends in almost all of the places we are en route to - even if we haven’t met some of them yet.

It’s in this spirit that I feel a sense of inner confidence and permission to take on seemingly impossible travel experiences to politically charged and potentially chaotic places in the world.

So if you’re reading this, and have a friend in any of the aforementioned places, please connect us ( :