CURRENT MISSION

See the world from the seat of my bicycle.

ABOUT ME

Hi, I'm Alex! I'm a young man with a open heart and mind currently hurling myself into the void searching for adventure and good times. My mode of transport is bicycle, my destination is everywhere.

In a nutshell I was born in 1987 in Boston, Massachusetts. When I was three my dad packed us up and we moved outside of Portland Oregon to grow up with mom, my identical twin, and older brother. Childhood consisted mostly of exploring the local natural beauty with friends, doodling/goofing around in class, and staring out into space. After high school was all done I was off to art school in Minneapolis. While I had some great times and developed a love for cycling, structured institutions of the sort were never my strong suit. So I ended up working for a couple years at a local co-op instead and generally having fun. I then returned home where I was only briefly before I started to get an itch. At quite a bit of a crossroads in life with childhood jarringly over, no clear direction forwards, and a distinct lack of adventure in my life I concluded that in this time of indecisiveness the wrong thing to do would be to lay stagnant in one place. So after a year of saving up I launched out into the world on my trusty bicycle (May 2011). The plan being to explore and experience as much as I can at my own pace until I'm satisfied. I spent that winter in New York refilling my piggybank and headed off down the Atlantic coast towards Austin, TX. Anyways, life ended up happening and I found myself sucked into an amazing place called Hostel in the Forest (www.foresthostel.com) for eleven months in Georgia. So now I'm on the road again (May 2013) trying to see how long I can make this trip last. At this point the goal is a circumnavigation of the United States with room open at the end to perhaps even circle the globe!

PHILOSOPHY

+Be humble for you are made of earth.
Be noble for you are made of stars.
~Serbian proverb
+Life is like riding a bicycle - in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving.
~Albert Einstein
+At the moment you are most in awe of all there is about life that you don't understand, you are closer to understanding it all than at any other time.
~Jane Wagner
+Upon those travelers who make their way without maps or guides, there breaks a wave of exhilaration with each unexpected change of plans. This exhilaration is not a whore who can be bought with money nor a neighborhood beauty who may be wooed. She is a wild and sea-eyed undine, the darling daughter of adventure, the sister of risk, and it is for her rare and always ephemeral embrace, the temporary pressure she exerts on the membrane of ecstasy, that many men leave home.
+Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously.
~Tom Robbins
+...Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much... the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.
~Douglas Adams
+“The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.”
~Aleister Crowley
Biking is about rhythm and flow. It's the wind in you face and the challenge of hammering up along hill. It's the reward at the top and the thrill of a high-speed descent. Biking lets you come alive in both body and spirit. After awhile the bike disappears beneath you and you feel as if you're suspended in midair.
~Gary Klein

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Novice surfer, advocate, and eventual host.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I'm pretty new to the exciting world of CouchSurfing. So far I've had some great experiences with folks while biking down the east coast and hope to surf a lot more on my was back west across the country.

Interests

Right now the main thing that holds my attention is trying to explore a piece of our beautiful world. Traditionally my interests have been creative mostly and I like to doodle when I can. You could say I'm trying to refill my creative well at the moment. In my free time I like to read a book or two and appreciate the beauty inherent in the fabric of reality. I kinda fell into the natural grocery world out of high school and have been riding that fairly consistently since. I do mostly deli/cooking and have developed an interest in good food as a consequence. So at the moment I'm kinda in between pursuing a cartoon, natural cuisine, or forestry/conservation career. Wandering around in the time being though has proved to be as good a career choice as any. Give me an IPA, fish n' chips, and a good view and I'm the happiest guy in the world.

• fish
• arts
• books
• beauty
• dining
• cooking
• exercise
• cycling
• fishing
• cartography
• forestry
• mountains

Music, Movies, and Books

+Movies: Brazil, Pulp Fiction, Stop Making Sense, Old Boy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Totoro, Crumb, The Triplets of Belleville
+Music: Otis Redding, The Talking Heads, Animal Collective, The Kinks, Grizzly Bear, Devo, The Temptations, Spritualized, The Staple Singers, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Derrik Harriot
+Books: Calvin and Hobbs, Kurt Vonnegut, Jim Woodring, Tom Robbins, R. Crumb., Robert Anton Wilson,

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Well recent ones might be riding my bicycle over the Rocky Mountains, watching the sunrise on a Brooklyn rooftop the day after reaching the Atlantic Ocean, and Chatting with an astronaut on the side of the road in my dream car (red convertible Karmann Ghia).

Teach, Learn, Share

I can doodle, ride a bike, chop vegetables, and toss a pizza like a wiz.

Countries I’ve Visited

Canada, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

United States

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