18 months after leaving the workforce, I find myself in need of a new adventure: 2,200 miles of kayaking on the Mississippi River from the source in northern Minnesota to the shores of Bourbon Street in New Orleans. This adventure is mostly for me, offering thousands of hours of mental and physical strain, and quiet reflection; though throughout this journey I hope to meet new friends and make the world a little better place with each new encounter each day.

I hope to update this blog daily, even if just to provide an update of location. As a self-proclaimed “master of the selfie” I plan to share plenty of photos, and maybe some themes or representative songs for some days, hoping to keep this interesting enough for anyone wanting to follow along.

Thanks in advance to Dave “Sawyer” Schuette, Chad “Bixby” Bohlmann, Mark “Bobby” Lecy, and Steve “Merriweather” Mudd (the Hannibal Cannibal) who will be dedicating a collective 8 weeks of their lives to accompany my journey. I’m blessed to have you as friends, and I expect that sharing a drink called loneliness will be better than drinking alone.

And of course thanks to my lovely Christin for supporting this project, despite her questions of my sanity; as she knows from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, “the greatest possible stumbling blocks in the path of human happiness and improvements are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike nails, which men painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home! The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it.” I will look forward to your joyful “yoo-hoo” from the banks of Big Muddy as I make my way south!