It's the end of the second decade in this century. But that not-so-profound insight did not occur to me until about a week ago. I was getting ready to write about the books I read this year, and realized I could also write about the books I read this decade, this century. I have been keeping a spreadsheet of books I read since 2001.
I started a spreadsheet about places I traveled to. First it was just the country and continent, then I added columns about where I rode, drove, flew, and took trains. Then I added more columns about when I was there, which decade, on business or just traveling.
The result is an exponential curve. When I enlisted in January of 1972, the flight to basic training was my first plane ride. Before that flight to San Antonio I had traveled no further west than Cleveland and no further south than Erie, Pa. One trip to Cleveland was in a train, the other trips were in cars.
By the end of the 1970s, I had lived in Texas, Colorado, Kentucky, Utah and Wiesbaden, West Germany. I also had made brief trips to France and Switzerland. The trip to France was in a Huey Helicopter with my legs hanging off the side for more than 100 miles.
By my 40th birthday, I had been to only five countries, including America, but I had been to more than half of the US states as well as several Canadian provinces.
Travel really began for me when I took a job at Millennium Inorganic Chemicals in April of 1998. By the time the new Century/Millennium began in 2000 I had been to ten more countries on four continents. In 2000 I went to four more countries including Brazil and Argentina, so I had been to five of the six inhabited continents and more than 20 countries.
More importantly, when I traveled, I took my bike. I had not only flown on five continents, I had ridden on five continents.
In the 2000s I visited a few more countries in Europe on business and went back to France, Germany, Belgium and the UK several times. The decade that began with business class flights to Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and Sao Paulo ended with flying into Camp Adder, Iraq, to Baghdad and Al Kut in a Blackhawk helicopter.
After Iraq, overseas travel for business or the Army ended for me. I was supposed to go to Afghanistan and Latvia with the Army, but both trips were cancelled. My wife and I went to Haiti in 2011 to look into adopting a teenage boy. It did not work out for a variety of reasons. But after visiting and living in 30 countries, the trip to Haiti was the first one that was not business or military.
I made a few more business trips in the US, but did not leave the country again until 2017. Just as the decade of the 1990s began with a one trip to Canada and ended with tripling the number of countries I traveled to in just a couple of years, the current decade began with me leaving Iraq and staying in North America for seven years ended with several trips in which I visited more than thirty countries including twenty I visited for the first time.
The first of these trips was in 2017. For several years I had planned to ride from Odessa, Ukraine, to Helsinki by way of St. Petersburg, Russia. The 1,300-mile trip would more or less follow the route my grandfather walked 100 years ago to escape the Tsar's Army and certain death.
But in 2016, America elected a loud, proud racist as President who gave the head of Breitbart News an office in the White House and had high-level staffers with ties to white supremacists groups. Instead of riding across Russia, I decided to ride to Holocaust sites and memorials to learn more about what happens when anti-Semitism is at its worst.
I rode from Belgrade, Serbia, to Lviv, Ukraine, stopping at Auschwitz and Birkenau along the nearly 1,000-mile route. Because I looped through the Balkan states, the site of so much suffering both during World War II and in the 1990s, I rode in a lot of countries.
Then in 2018 I went to a history conference in the UK. This year I was in at a conference in Bahrain and Cairo--by visiting Egypt I finally visited Africa--then was in ten more countries in October and November of this year.
The next Year/Decade will begin with a trip to Israel, Europe and Africa.
Of the 50 countries I have visited or lived in I have:
Ridden a bicycle in 35 on five continents--I still need to ride in Africa.
Flown to or within 32 countries on all six continents in planes and helicopters.
Driven in 24 countries on three continents--North America, Europe and Asia.
Ridden in trains in 16 countries on the same three continents I have driven in.
So far, no trains or automobiles in the southern hemisphere. If I go to Rwanda on the next trip and both drive and ride a bike it will be the first time for both in Africa and in the southern hemisphere.
