Introduction to the Travel Argument

We haven’t set out, on this site, to make arguments as much as tell stories. But this argument has been in the background behind almost all of the stories I have that are worth telling. And I’m in the beginning stages of starting a consulting company to help able companies and institutions take advantage of the ways that travel can develop human capital - so it’ll likely be the backdrop for my future stories as I continue to get older. 

The argument starts in 2010, a couple weeks after I graduated from college (where I went with site writers, James and Jacob!). My brother, his college roommate, and I cycled from Point Pleasant Beach, NJ to Canon Beach, OR (and then up the coast to Seattle). We were raising money for wells in Uganda through the non-profit Food for the Hungry. Our dad is a pastor so we set up speaking and fundraising gigs at churches within his denomination between Pennsylvania and Illinois. We stayed with pastors or friends or family. In places we didn’t initially know someone, a friend or family member did. Some days, when the wind was too strong or we had miscalculated the difficulty of the miles, we experimented with asking for places to stay at churches or shelters or bars. It only happened a couple times, but they were fairly easy successes - and some of the best stories. 

The day we cycled out of Illinois the headwind was a consistent 40 mph. Our panniers (saddlebags), 4 total, stuck to each side of our front and back wheels, with a bungie cord strapping excess baggage to the top of our rear racks, were like sails in the wind, going backward. Our knees didn’t hold up well. We were supposed to do about 100 miles. We did 65 or 70 by 4 pm. The wind wasn’t letting up and we knew we wouldn’t reach our destination until well after dark, if at all. So for the first time we decided to quit early. We rolled into Dubuque, IA and started knocking on church doors. We had a few sponsors, namely Huntington University, so we looked legit - proper cycling kit. It wasn’t hard to explain our case - cycling across the country, raising money for charity, unable to reach our planned destination for the evening, needing a place to stay. The lady at the church sent us a few blocks down to a charity house that was serving a meal - anyone was invited. A solid start. We were always hungry. One of the ladies cooking the pasta heard what the smelly guys in the cycling uniforms were doing and offered us a spot in her river-front cabin. We couldn’t believe our luck. The kindness of strangers. We were so tired and grateful and exhilarated at the whole experience. We hadn’t done anything like it before. The morning came and we had such a hard time leaving such a beautiful, air-conditioned vacation home. It was just what we needed. We made our next several scheduled hosts without being blown off the road or into traffic - and starting at the Badlands National Park, we planned to camp in the national parks and forests until we hit the west coast. 

That’s when we really started meeting people. Partly, that was because the options for roads significantly decreased. There are only so many routes you can cycle east/west on in South Dakota. But partly it was because we didn’t really have a schedule to keep anymore. No more specific mileage to get to hosts’ homes. We studied maps and made detours when we found something interesting. 

One evening as the sun was setting we rode up on an Irishman we had been reading about in the small-town papers to whom we were also giving interviews. Leon McCarron. He was riding from NYC to Hong Kong - the start of an adventure career that, to date, has resulted in several awards and many books and films. He has as many stories as anyone that I know. He’s currently doing a fellowship at Yale (where I went to grad school). Now I’m jumping ahead. That evening, as the sun set in the distance, we just yelled his name and hoped he’d slow down. The first person we did that to turned out to be a terrified Amish woman on her way home from the grocery (with pannier bags on her bike). Oops. The second time it was Leon. We had already been reading about him for weeks. We trusted him implicitly. Our host that night said he could stay with us, and we stayed up late under the cool breeze of a ceiling fan perusing maps heading west. 

I learned about as much during that cross-country ride as I had in 4 years of college. That statement was easy to quantify to me because I’d often thought that I learned about as much during my study abroad at Oxford University as I did during the rest of my time at Huntington. Neither of them came that close to educating me about the world, about the US, like cycling across it and engaging folks in their own communities the way we did. 

The relationship with Leon and the rest of the human-powered adventure community formed much of the basis for my next decade. I started The Young Philanthropists (YP) the following year - a 501(c)3 with the mission to “make traveling the world an accessible way to educate everyone - for college and careers”. It was adventure travel - with a purpose. I took what I learned, what interested me most about the trip with my brother, and tried to distill it into a philosophy of travel for planning future trips. 

The main things were: a curriculum (something resembling a formal education), community engagement and service (the point being to get people to hang out and share their lives; it’s always easier to do that when you’re being somewhat useful, and/or eating and drinking together), raising money for charities (you get way more if you’re giving it away and being good stewards of capital/resources), Human-power (you’re much more vulnerable/approachable/engage-able if you’re powering yourselves around; that almost always works out for the better), Community (traveling with others is safer and way more fun), Adventure (in all shapes and forms: wilderness, social, philosophical, urban, etc; go do something interesting and say “yes” to almost everything), and Leave No Trace (be clean, clean up after yourselves and others, be excellent house-guests, pursue social virtue so that others enjoy hosting you and having you around). 

The next big adventure was in 2013. It took me a couple years to figure out how to start a non-profit, sort the marketing/recruiting, and then plan a 6-month long route. I called it the Young and Wild Expedition. It was another unsupported (meaning we didn’t use a chase car) cycling trip from the Little Talbot Islands (just off the coast of Jacksonville, FL), zig-zagging across the south to San Diego, and up the coast to Seattle (a fine spot to finish any cross-continental journey). If the Guiness Book of World Records were more than a PR firm, we would’ve broken the world record for the largest group cycling the longest distance without any support vehicles. But they wanted something like $8,000 a day to verify a record that was in a slightly different category. I forget exactly, but they didn’t make a distinction between supported/unsupported cycling. We didn’t take them up on it. We studied a curriculum in 5 subjects that I worked with my former college professors to come up with. We did service projects and community engagement activities several times a week. We partnered with an NGO, whose founders were family friends, in Honduras, and we gave small amounts of money when we were able to the various charities we worked with along the route. 

One of the main goals was to gain as much life experience in the roughly 6 months of the trip as possible. Shortly after I felt like everyone was trained, competent and up to speed with the whole trip (about a month in), I scrapped the rest of my plans for the trip and engaged everyone with figuring out where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do. It was a risky move. And it would’ve been chaos if the trip wouldn’t have been planned from the beginning. But it ended up involving people more than if we had all just followed the schedule. I wanted folks to be able to break away from the group and go see something or someone slightly off the original route if they wanted. The major issue was that no one but me had any adventure cycling experience. So things like changing tires and defensive riding on the roads and planning a route (only a handful of us had smartphones in 2013!) weren’t things that most of us were comfortable with at first. The same was true with planning community engagement events or service projects. The same was true for soliciting sponsorships. I had planned a lot of this to tie in with the curriculum. I was (and still am to a large degree) one of the worst at soliciting sponsorships - a free meal, a hotel room, bike gear, anything, really. It was paired with our readings from Aristotle’s On Rhetoric. I’m not sure that anyone actually read much of it (even I didn’t read a lot of it until grad school the following year). But the point was that we were trying to tie the curriculum and the service projects and the community engagements together as this overall experience that helped us and the communities we rode through. A wholistic enterprise, if largely in theory. 

The stories from that trip are some of my wildest. And I intend to tell many of them in the coming months and years on this site. The time in Hollygrove, New Orleans when we went out and met a drug dealer who paid for all of our drinks in $5 and $10 dollar bills because he couldn’t launder them any other way; having my head brushed by a cougar’s front leg in the middle of the night because I  stupidly left out our dinner beside my tent in New Mexico; relapses and romances and hitch-hiking; freezing cold for days on end, forgetting to keep enough food with us before going into the wilderness area; getting lost in the middle of the night in the completely black back-country; camping in an area that was surrounded by duck-callers in the middle of the night in Alabama; the coon-asses, and the families that lived on certain roads that were so known for violence the cops would stop us and help us navigate around so they didn’t shoot at us with their shot-guns. 

The following year I started at Yale - studying Ethics and Business. Ethics so I could teach intro to Ethics courses on the adventures. And business so I could figure out how to run The YP, then expanding to do 2 cross-continental trips. I led one from London to Istanbul, again adventure-cycling style without a support vehicle. And the other, led by a couple of folks from the Young and Wild Expedition, across the northern US from Point Pleasant Beach, NJ (again) to San Francisco and then down to LA. The following year we took off and planned to scale an adventure across the US in hopes of:

A.) making enough money to continue to run adventures and

B.) make a real move toward making traveling an accessible way to educate people.

We knew we couldn’t scale cycling adventures. The general population is never going to want to bicycle across a continent. So we had to incorporate vehicles - make it physically accessible. We planned to build out buses with beds and kitchens and showers. We planned to bring hundred-person tents and adventure equipment. We set up community engagement events and sizable service projects. We got a few college professors on board to teach their summer courses in person and remotely. I got a course on the books at Huntington University (again, our Alma Mater). 

It failed. We didn’t sell many tickets. I led the folks that stayed on an unsupported bike trip around New England and Eastern Canada. I was pretty sure it would be the last adventure trip I would lead. It hardly paid anything and I was tired of leading trips. I knew I had to get a real job. The dream was over. 

Or - the dream was just beginning. I took a job delivering RV’s (a college friend of ours’ dad delivered them and recommended it). And that turned out to pay way better (and be way more comfortable) than leading expeditions.  It was also a low-commitment job to have before I started another grad degree in Workplace Learning the following fall. 

So I’ve spent the last 8 years traveling, like a normal person, full time. I’ve learned a lot about how normal, middle class, people travel. They use engines and electricity and plumbing. So do I. They expect comfort and convenience and not to have to move themselves thousands of miles around a continent under their own power. This sounds funny, but I’m serious. I’m way better at planning ski trips and jaunts around Europe for my friends and family now than I was when I had only cycled around continents. That’s been important in my philosophical journey for arguing that travel ought to be made accessible. Mostly because if travel is to be made accessible, I’m now convinced, it must be institutionalized. 

Right now, travel is an individual endeavor. Companies do take company trips, yes, but only on specific occasions. It’s not a part of the fabric. It’s groups of individuals taking individual trips for specific, individual purposes. It’s fairly rare.

Travel Platforms make the most sense for three categories of Institutions: Remote-potential employers (think: tech companies, companies with a majority remote-workforce, etc), Colleges and Universities, and social groups with a strong desire to build human capital, culture/camaraderie, innovation, or investigation (churches, activist organizations, etc). 

How do you institutionalize travel? You build travel platforms. A travel platform is a platform that allows those on it to live, work, and play in a sufficient standard of living that enhances those things. A travel platform is made up of two parts: the buildings/vehicles - RV’s, buses, planes, boats, etc - and the programming. The buildings/vehicles should be anything that allows folks to live and work and play at a necessary standard of living. Employees at tech companies, for example, are likely going to need nicer accommodations than college students. They still need to be able to work long days. They need space to think, comfortable beds to get good sleep, and all the creature comforts of home. 

That’s just the physical. The stressors of travel ought not to figure into these platforms because, at scale, businesses can’t be disrupted by hiccups on a travel platform. So you might have drivers and everyone in their own RV. They should bring their families. It’s whatever is required of the physical to maintain a seamless platform for the sake of the programming. The programming is the whole point of the platforms. If the vehicles are the how, the programming is the why. Or, it’s the what - what is being done, besides the day-to-day work that would otherwise take place in the office. Is the point to build a stronger corporate culture? Adventures and team building activities in exotic, interesting, or otherwise untraveled locales might do the trick. 

Is it to pursue some particular innovation from some particular team?An engineering team might use the platform to study marine wildlife to gain inspiration for the frictionless surface they’re working on. (Or literally any other obscure reason that I’m not well versed in). 

Is it to generally build up a broad based human-capital? Employees or students should get tens of thousands of miles worth of knowledge and experiences of several of the populated continents during their 3-5 year tenure at the institution. 

It’s useful to think of these platforms as internal, not-for-profit travel companies. It’s important to see this not just as travel for business or pleasure - but an important hybrid that has potential to revolutionize the way we build corporations, human capital, and cultures. For the first time in history, we have the collective resources to use the entire globe as the backdrop for initiating the experiences and information - in tandem - to shape the ways we develop ourselves, our companies, and our society. Obviously there’s a lot more to this argument. But I’m going to leave it here, for now.