Now I’m not saying that I’ve been destitute for the last two and a half years, I’m just saying that I haven’t had a physical location to call home. I’ve basically been on the go ever since my bike trip started and haven’t slowed down since. While riding, I slept in a different place every night and usually in a tent. After my bike ride, I hiked a portion of the Appalachian Trail. Again, those nights were spent in a tent.

For the next six months, I actually slept in a bed, but not my own, as I bounced between Illinois, California, Boston, and Connecticut. When I started working as a Wilderness Instructor in northern Minnesota, my life became even more nomadic as my work schedule was 3 weeks on and 3 weeks off. When I worked, I slept in a tent (yes, even on -20F January nights although some nights were spent in snow shelters). The weeks I didn’t work, I was traveled around the country visiting friends and family. And now that I’m back working in the high-tech industry, I’m still nomadic as I’ve stayed in hotels for two and a half months straight in three countries and seven cities. Over the last two and a half years, I’ve either slept in a tent or a hotel for about 500 nights!!!

When you move around that much, not only do you have to get used to sleeping in a different location every night, but you have to get used to narrowing down your belongings to whatever you can easily carry. When I rode my bike, the only possessions I had were what would fit in my trailer. When I hiked the Appalachian Trail, I brought only what I could carry in my backpack. When I traveled around the country, I only brought what would fit in my duffle bag, and when I was working in the woods, again I brought only what could fit in my backpack. Now that I’m living the life of a consultant, I only have what I can fit in my suitcase. Needless to say, my lifestyle is not conducive to the frivolous accumulation of knickknacks and collectibles.

Okay, now that I’ve explained my life over the last two and a half years, I’m going to go on a seemingly unrelated tangent. Have you ever seen the movie Caddyshack with Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Ted Knight, and Rodney Dangerfield? If you haven’t, then please stop reading this and go rent it. How can you have made it this far in life without ever seeing Caddyshack!?!?

Alright, now that it is just us, distinguished film connoisseurs, I will continue. My favorite character in this film is Bill Murray’s Carl Spackler, because in some ways, I think we are alike. Wait, before you jump to any conclusions, let me explain. There are some scenes in which I feel we share similar traits. For example, there is one scene in which Carl is caddying for the Bishop on the Bishop’s “greatest round of his life.” The Bishop is playing golf in a torrential downpour and violent thunderstorm. After nine holes when the rain is coming down so hard Carl and the Bishop can hardly see, and the wind is blowing so strong they can’t even stand upright, the Bishop asks Carl if he thinks they should keep playing. Carl pauses, looks at the Bishop, surveys the golf course, studies the sky and then says “I’d keep playing. I don’t think the heavy stuff is coming for a while.” You see, Carl is an optimist and so am I.

So what does this have to do with anything? Well, despite my nomadic history and my non-traditional career and lifestyle, I do have dreams of settling down in a little mountain town to run my own little coffee shop someday. Do I think it will ever happen? Well I have as good of a chance of it as the Bishop had of breaking the Bushwood course record during a thunderstorm.

And because of this optimism, despite all logic and rationale, I have collected things over the last two and a half years. I have gathered things and carried them with me, causing great strain and pain (it’s not that easy to lug 80 pounds of stuff on a bike over countless mountain passes), all in the hopes that one day I’ll have a place to put them. I’ve bought bikes, computers, antique snow shoes, antique skis, furniture, and several other random objects that are impossible to do anything with besides put in storage in my grandmother’s attic.

I can trace this irrational behavior back to my high school days when I took a trip to Egypt. For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to fill two one gallon ziplock bags with sand from the Sahara Desert and bring them back home in my carry-on bag. I did this and somehow managed to carry a little bit of the Sahara home with me. When I got home, I bought a glass lamp and filled it with the sand. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Sahara, but if you have, then you know the desert does not have beautifully fine and clean sand. In fact, it’s very much the opposite. It’s grainy, dirty, and worst of all, heavy! But I do have a lamp filled with sand now. Actually, my parents have it sitting in a tucked away corner of their condo. It’s not a particularly pretty lamp and the damn thing is too heavy to move anywhere.

But as a true optimist, I refuse to say anything was a bad idea, rather I think it will be better next time I do it. How else can I justify the fact that I repeatedly sign up for marathons and Ironmans. I always think next time it won’t be so painful.

And so, I now come to the point of my story. While in Taiwan, I have done a lot of sightseeing and a lot of walking around in various markets. While I usually pass up most of the trinkets and gimcracks (I just discovered this word, it means “a showy object of little use or value”), I am easily entranced by pretty trinkets and shiny gimcracks, especially if they are sold by a pretty, shiny salesgirl.

Knowing I have this penchant to justify most of my purchases, I can honestly now say I have no idea why I made my latest purchase. While I was in Tainan, I bought a dead fish. It’s not just any dead fish, it’s an old dead fish. Probably a million years old. Actually, it’s a fossil. I came across this stand run by an elderly couple filled with all kinds of rocks and fossils. Historically, I have not had a huge interest in fossils and rocks. I did take a course in college where we studied plate tectonics and volcanoes, but it wasn’t because I was hugely interested in the topic, I just needed to fulfill my science requirement. Anyway, there was something intriguing about this collection of million year old fossils.

So, after looking around, I decided I was most fascinated by a two foot, ten pound dead fish. I thought to myself that it would look great on the table next to my Sahara Desert sand lamp. So, I bought it, not really thinking about the logistics of carrying it “home.”

After I decided to buy it, the elderly couple was extremely excited. I can’t imagine that they sell a lot of dead fish on a daily basis, so I think they thought I was a very important customer. Immediately, the couple disappeared into the back of the store and started bringing out various other fossil specimens. They couldn’t speak English and I can’t speak Mandarin, so our negotiations were pretty much limited to pointing and head nods. They kept bringing out bigger and bigger dead animals and I kept shaking my head. They then brought me into the back where they had what seemed like hundreds of fossils. Every fossil they pointed at, I said “that’s very pretty,” (what else are you supposed to say about decayed, fossilized lizards? Not that they understood me anyway) and shook my head no.

Not wanting to give up on me so easily, the old man brought out a deck of cards. Now these were no ordinary cards, no these cards had pictures of fossils on each card. The King of Clubs was a dead scorpion, the Queen of hearts was a dead horse shoe crab, and the Ace of Spades was something that looked like a Pterodactyl. Every few cards he would point at the picture and then point at a fossil. I was impressed that they were similar, but was not convinced to buy another fossil. After finally realizing that I wasn’t going to buy anything else, the old man then insisted on giving me the cards. It was a gift. He then took my dead fish and wrapped it up in newspaper, just as if I went to the local fish market.

This weekend, I left Taiwan and headed to Japan. I’ll be here for the month of October and then will come back to the United States for a few weeks in November. Having now the added burden of trying to lug a 10 pound dead fish around the world, I had to figure out how to pack it. It was too big to put in my carry-on backpack, so really my only option was to pack it in my suitcase. The fish isn’t so big as it is heavy, so it actually fit with all my other shiny, pretty gimcracks that I’ve bought over here. My suitcase was pretty loaded and heavy already, so I could only imagine what the bellhops were going to think of me now.

Anyway, I made it to the airport with only a few strained, death threat stares from the various bellhops and taxi drivers that helped transport my suitcase. When I got to the counter to check-in, I was told my suitcase was too heavy to be allowed to fly to Japan. The friendly lady behind the counter told me I could either take something out and put it in my carry-on or just leave it for them to hold onto until I got back. I decided to try and fit things into my carry-on. Let me assure you this was no easy task as my backpack was already bursting at the seams, but I did manage to fit it all. I successfully lowered the weight of my suitcase to legal limits, but was still charged a “heavy bag fee.”

When I finally go to my hotel in Kakegawa, Japan after two flights, a taxi ride, a bus ride, and a train ride, I began to unpack my suitcase. When I got to my dead fish, I was concerned. My dead fish didn’t have the same stiffness that it had when I packed it in Taiwan. It looked a little limp. When I picked it up, my fears were confirmed. My dead fish had broken in three. This poor fish had lasted over a million years of geological torture, presumably enduring wind, rain, ice, floods, and incalculable erosion and survived. That sweet old couple entrusted me with a piece of the earth’s history, and over the course of a few hours, I managed to break it in three. Fortunately, the breaks were clean and the rock didn’t get pulverized, but my prized dead fish was now three.

Being the stubborn optimist that I am, I have not given up on my fish. No, I am currently hard at work figuring out what to do with it now. My first thought was to buy a big tube of super glue, but even without having a geological or chemical background, I quickly deduced that this was not a viable solution. So, I am now trying to use a skill that I mastered in my childhood, how to cover up my booboo. Perhaps I can get a bigger glass lamp and half bury my fish with my Sahara sand and create some sort of prehistoric beach scene. I don’t know. While this is a minor setback, it will not stop me from making impractical travel acquisitions. My next one’s got to be better, right? Even if it’s not, it’ll probably just sit in storage for ever anyway.