CURRENT MISSION

To use this site to grab more of life.

ABOUT ME

5ft7ins. medium build. Active: some swimming, cycling and walking. Introspective and extrovert.
Two children, man and woman, now grown up.

PHILOSOPHY

I am working on this.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I host I surf I ride my motorcycle, read, sing.......

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I entered couchsurfing with a lot of excitement and a little trepidation. I wondered if I would really take to the people I met when all I knew about them was a profile written for public consumption. Did others really share the enthusiasm I have always had for meeting new people from different cultures and other places? Or would the site be populated by strange personalities balancing a very public, deliberately constructed profile, with a private world view that I would find difficult to understand or accommodate?

Now May 10 2005, ten days into a motorcycle trip across Europe, I have stayed on 5 ´couches´and my experience of couchsurfing is what I hoped it would be and has not tipped over into the ´dark´side.

In Amsterdam, Potsdam, Dresden, Prague and now Bad Endorf near Munich, I have been made welcome, treated like visiting royalty and listened to - older(all?) people really like to talk! I have been stimulated and informed with information about places and history and cultures, and have been introduced to philosophies I might not otherwise have looked into. But none of the above really conveys what has been most touching: the hosts I met CARED about me and wanted to make sure that they did all they could to make my stay an enjoyable one.

For this I am very grateful, but it also inspires me to believe that curiosity and openness to others are more universal than I have sometimes feared. In the Book of Change, Confucius wrote: “Good people accept others with openness.” I have met only good people through couchsurfing.

Interests

I like getting to know about other places/people and especially like showing visitors round Derry, Donegal and Ireland . Recent(last 5 years) holidays have been motorbike based - in France, Italy, Spain, England, Scotland and South Africa. More recently, 2007, I travelled to the US and Canada. I bought a motorcycle in Florida and have used it to travel in Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia before biking to Quebec and leaving the bike for the winter in Toronto.

• fish
• books
• singing
• walking
• traveling
• magic
• music
• cycling
• fishing
• swimming
• history

Music, Movies, and Books

I play and sing Irish folk music and am a fan of sixties music like Simon and Garfunkel and others of that era.

Read a lot of crime/whodunit fiction and some non-fiction(travel, biography etc.)

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Ate fish and chips in a car with friends on a quayside in a storm in Donegal to magic music by Dire Straits.

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