Hello, my name is Stephen Lindsay.
About the Blog:
The purpose of this blog is to share my adventures, experiences and pictures with anyone interested, and ideally not forcing it upon them with social media channels. The inspiration is John Steinbeck and his novel Travels With Charley. Steinbeck was always my favorite author. I read his classics in high school, starting with the Grapes of Wrath. I enjoyed Of Mice and Men and East of Eden, but when I read Travels With Charley it felt like I had found my book, my bible, and how I wanted to live my life.
““When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage...I fear this disease incurable. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we not take a trip; a trip takes us.” ”
In Travels With Charley, Steinbeck drives across the country with his dog, Charley. He starts in Deer Isle, Maine. I have spent every summer in Brooksville, Maine, across the Reach from Deer Isle. So that is where I’m going to start. He spent two nights. I’m going to spend two months. And like Steinbeck’s travels in his truck Rocinante, I’ll be travelling in our boat, the Emilie Belle, starting with the coast of Maine and going from there. The coast of Maine is what I love.
I see this as the beginning of a longer journey, literal and figurative. One that, like Steinbeck’s, starts in Deer Isle and then heads West. The question is when I head West, and when I head South. And what am I looking for? The main issue is I don’t yet own Charley. But I will. While there is never the right time or place to get a dog, there will be, and I’ll know when it is. For now, he is with me in spirit, and I have a feeling I will find him along the way.
All of the thoughts and photos on this blog are my own. I will be writing weekly about the most recent adventures, but also hopefully going back to the photos and worldwide experiences I’ve had in the past to share those amongst the blogposts.
I have a feeling I’m going to love what I do, and I hope you do too.
About Me:
I have always wanted to be a travel writer. I did not always know I wanted to be a travel writer, but ever since I visited Italy in 1990 when I was 15, I have been travelling and exploring and have not been able to stop. I contracted the travel bug and it is incurable. After that trip to Florence and Rome, I spent the summer of 1992 in Barcelona. How lucky was I to be a teenager and experiencing two historic cities /countries at some of their most historic moments; the World Cup in Italy (Italia 90) and the Olympics in Barcelona (Barcelona ’92). I’ll hopefully write more about each as I document my travels, trips and tips. For my next stint overseas, I studied abroad my Junior year of college in Sevilla, Spain, and then moved back to Barcelona for the year upon graduation. I then moved back to Europe and lived and worked in London for nearly three years, working in 7 European countries. Then moved to Australia, where I lived and worked (and travelled) for another three based out of Sydney.
I have always called myself a corporate traveler, mainly because I didn’t realize that I could live and work outside of the corporate world. Ever since I made the decision to come back from Spain in 2000 (a decision I will always question), I have been tied to the corporate world. I joined Fidelity Investments in 2001 because I thought I needed a ‘real job’. I went to Georgetown for my MBA, and then immediately joined American Express where I applied the MBA skills I’d learned, and worked within the most corporate of cultures for nearly a decade. I don’t regret any of it. I have valuable educational and professional experience, and am now able to make a conscious choice about what I want to do, and how to approach the life equation; money, power, industry, geography, people, etc. But it is very interesting that through all of that, travel, geography, and adventure have been my passion. And I made money and career changes to facilitate that. I ‘kept my day job.’ Now I want this to become my day job. I’m just not sure how.