Outdoor Travel Geek

  • the toast

    So I got married. Here’s the thank you speech/toast from my wedding… As some of you may know we have been in a global pandemic for the past couple of years. For many people this was a life changing event. It was life changing for me as well. Before the pandemic I worked for the…

  • post of panoramic photos

    I miss traveling. I especially miss wandering around the world with my camera. One thing that I would often do on my trips is take a panoramic photo of a spot that was especially memorable or scenic. Thankfully I posted most of these on either Facebook or Google photos with a pretty verbose description of…

  • fits and starts and screenshots

    It’s been a while since I’ve been on here. As you can see from the screenshot below my last post was in 2017, and it’s been a half dozen years since I’ve posted more than once a year. I’ve attempted to restart this blog several times in the past few years. There are actually a…

  • cycling across Korea day 8: Yangsan to Busan

    I woke up this morning and opened up the Naver Maps app to see how much riding I had left. It looks like just under 2 hours left until the finish. Busan is a pretty big city, and Yangsan is essentially a suburb of Busan, so pretty much the whole two hours of riding looked…

  • cycling across Korea day 7: Daegu to Yangsan

    It’s a good thing I stopped where I did yesterday, because the morning started out with a fairly big climb and it was nice to tackle it on fresh legs. I still needed to walk a fair amount, though in my defense it was because I found myself on my first patch of dirt road.…

  • cycling across Korea day 6: Gumi to Daegu

    Gumi is part of the industrial heartland of Korea. Riding into town yesterday and riding out of town today I passed a ton of factories where things like LCD panels and car batteries are manufactured. The skies here are kind of gray, and I’m not sure if it’s cloudy or smoggy. In any case I…

  • cycling across Korea day 5: Mungyeong to Gumi

    It rained pretty much all day yesterday so I decided to take a rest and relaxation day. Thankfully I was in a town famous for its hot springs, so I spent the better part of the day relaxing in the hot spring. Normally Korean hot springs are a bit awkward for this Americanized prude. I’m…

  • cycling across Korea day 4: Chungju to Mungyeong

    Today’s riding started on a road with sort of narrow shoulders. It’s hard to complain when the scenery looks like this though. Most of the riding today was on country roads. There weren’t a lot of cars though. Some sections were still icy even though it wasn’t actually that cold. There’s a couple of hills…

  • cycling across Korea day 3: Yeoju to Chungju

    Today I felt like I was really in the rural heart of Korea. I don’t think I saw another cyclist all day. I did see some tanks though. I think the bicycle path passes through a military training area. There are some big guns here, though thankfully none were aimed at me. Today’s riding had…

  • cycling across Korea day 2: Seoul to Yeoju

    I started the day super excited because I’d be leaving Seoul and venturing into more rural areas of Korea that I’ve never seen before. At the same time that brought some apprehension because I thought the cycling infrastructure would get worse as I left the urban areas. But I was pleasantly surprised by how good…

  • cycling across Korea day 1: Incheon & Seoul

    And so my journey across Korea begins. The start of the ride is in Incheon. If you search for ‘Ara West Sea Lock’ on Google Maps you can find it. There’s actually a little tourist kiosk there where you can buy a passport book. Along the route apparently there are little phone booths where you…

  • the pandemic pivot

    After nearly a dozen years working for the state of CA, I quit state service in September of 2019. My plan was to return to school and finish my bachelor’s degree. I had filed for readmission and was accepted back into school at UC Davis for winter quarter, but upon talking to an academic advisor…

  • glacier point snow backpacking

    My first snow backpacking trip to Yosemite was to Dewey Point almost exactly six years ago. Ever since that first trip I’ve been wanting to do the much longer trek to Glacier Point. This week I was finally cross the trip off my bucket list. The trip was sort of a last minute decision. The…

  • the agony

    The Agony ride is an annual charity bicycle ride and fundraising event for Christian Encounter Ministries, a home and school for troubled youth. My friend Zoya invited me to ride the Agony every year for the past few years, but I’ve always had an excuse to not ride. Last year I ran (ok more like…

  • dating data reporting

    I’ve been working in the Data Reporting Office of the California Department of Education for about a year now. The logical and analytical left brain part of me enjoys the challenge of writing SQL statements (SQL is a database programming language) to extract the data needed for reports. The end result of my work is…