Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Lily's hair got shorter and shorter during the year; she started by donating her pony tail in Minnesota! In Melbourne in January her hair got a lot shorter. Also, check out those freckles! The hair on my head has been getting scarcer for at least 20 years. Every haircut I've gotten in the last fifteen has been shorter than the one before it. For the last ten years I've been giving myself buzz cuts in the mirror, trusting Elise to tell me when I've missed a spot. Every few years the guard on the clippers has gotten smaller. During this time, I've missed barbershops and their casual banter. Elise once gave me a gift certificate to a place where I got a buzz, a beer, plus a hand and face massage but no chatter. I went to a place in our neighborhood and paid $30 for a buzz and a can of hipster beer but I was definitely too old and square to earn a conversation. Besides, even if I took a trim every two weeks (I prefer weekly), that would be an expensive habit....

March 24th arrived twice for us, first in Hong Kong, while we waited to board our 1am departure for San Francisco and then again in San Francisco, because we landed 3 hours before we departed, or 10pm on March 23rd. After spending the night at an airport hotel, we flew from SFO to PDX at 11:35am on 3/24. The only notable part of this flight was that we upgraded to First Class because it was approximately the same price as flying coach and paying for all the luggage we needed to check. The main perk was expedited everything: check-in, baggage handling, security, but not boarding. Not boarding because there were fewer than 50 people on our flight. The gate attendant called it, "Alaska Airlines Private Charter Number 427." He offered to board the flight according to quality of smile. Half the passengers were airline personnel being moved around. One pilot noted that he wasn't flying his usual route to Hawaii because they had cut back to a single wide-body, once a week, w...

3/23: 10am in Malaysia, 3/22: 7pm in Portland We pulled away a few minutes before 10 and drove to a gas station. Under the RMO, the pumps were operating but the store was closed. Fortunately, I was able to buy a toll tag (a debit card, really) and load it with the amount we were told we’d need for the drive (equivalent to about $15 plus some extra to spare). We got on the highway and drove to a rest area just past the first toll plaza. We waited there for our companions to catch up, coordinating by facebook messenger as a modern day CB radio! For the next three hours or so, we followed them on a nearly-empty super highway with a painfully slow 110kph speed limit. Every five minutes or so a Mercendes saloon would come roaring by going at least 150kph. I mused that it was undercover police since it seemed to be a parade of the same make and model, always tinted windows, etc. KL Rush Hour, COVID-style An interesting feature of the Malaysian freeway: motorbike rain shelters. Ev...

Seen through any lens, this place is beautiful (photo by Sam Westover) Part 1: The Backstory This is a story about a man named Josh. Some of you know him but didn't know that he has a passion for travel. Some of you know him and his passion for travel but not his extensive and well-placed family of travel professionals. Now all of you can know that we are in a Costa Rican paradise because of his assistance. Let's start this story in the middle, of course. It's late 2018 and my colleague Megan and her husband Josh have come over to tell us about Argentina. Megan has told me that Josh is from Buenos Aires and (insert long digression here) his family has an apartment that there might be available for visiting friends. Megan, almost exclusively, knew about our plan but hasn't told her husband because he also works in our field and appreciates that I'm in a delicate situation. At first, on the premise of a hypothetical future trip to BA, Josh is telling us ab...