Around the world in...13 years!

Wow, lots to get caught up on, so let's get started. The weekend started on Friday with a talk by Jason Lewis and Stevie Smith - Lewis is the first person to have traveled around the world only using human powered transportation. This means bikes, rollerblades, walking, kayaking, and, best of all, a paddleboat type contraption that got him across the oceans. Smith was his companion on the expedition for the first half, then he bailed, and Lewis was on his own. Here's the amazing part - it took him 13 years! He left in 1994 and got back to London in early October.



Needless to say, this was a pretty amazing accomplishment - the willpower needed to move at walking pace across the Pacific Ocean day after day is enormous. But overall, I really wasn't that inspired. This guy spent the prime of his life traveling around the world, often alone. He went out as an idealistic college grad looking for adventure and returned a rootless middle-aged man. Yeah, he accomplished something pretty cool, but at a pretty significant cost. Also, he and Smith had absolutely no training in what they set out to do. They made a big point of this in a self-deprecating way, noting "if we can do this with no training, think what you can do". That's great, but there's something to be said for expertise; it might not have taken 13 years if they had known what they were doing to some extent.

That said, it was a refreshingly human journey, and they were surprisingly open about their own problems. Smith and Lewis had their personal differences, and it got to the point that they crossed the US separately. Lewis suffered from depression in the Pacific and invented characters in his head to keep himself company. So I was left not really knowing what to think. Amazing stories, great physical feat, but when this is what your life is all about, I'm not sure it's all that compelling.