Drive Around the World Expedition (For Parkinson's)

Janet Fullwood: Wanderlust Turns Writer Into A Career Vagabond
By Janet Fullwood -- Bee Travel Editor
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Sunday, November 23, 2003
Always wanted to bum around Asia for a year but thought you couldn't afford it?

Stop making excuses, counsels travel advocate Rolf Potts in a thoughtful new book about taking a break from the rat
race: "Vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money and begin to look at maps with the
narcotic tingle of possibility."

Anyone who thrills to the thought of venturing to new horizons can relate to that "narcotic tingle." But it's the rare
travel addict indeed who manages to keep hopping around the globe like an Energizer Bunny -- in a personally meaningful
way -- over an extended period of time.

Potts, 33, has been roaming the world for almost a decade, fueling a chronic itch to travel with a chronic itch to
write. His stories have appeared on http://www.salon.com , in Condé Nast Traveler magazine, on National Public Radio
and in numerous travel anthologies.

His second book, "Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term Travel" (Villard, $11.95), was published
earlier this year.

It is, he says, "a letter to myself as an 18-year-old, telling myself what I wished I'd known then."

What he knows now is that travel isn't just for the rich, or for office workers with two weeks a year to cut loose from
their cubicles. It's for anyone who believes that where there's a will, there's a way. It's about priorities,
simplicity, focus -- and the joys and lessons to be learned from hitting the road for months and years at a time.

Potts' advice about "earning to live, rather than living to earn" could be applied to many life goals, of course. In
"Vagabonding," he mixes meditations on travel with bits of philosophy and considerable doses of encouragement for those
who would like to get their show on the road but don't know how.

"Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, more-appropriate time of your life," he says.

The bottom-line advice: Work deliberately toward your travel goals -- but once out there, don't tie yourself to a
tightly structured agenda. Go slowly. Let things come.

For Potts, who perches in the Bay Area when not on the road, wanderlust hit hard and early. "I grew up in Wichita,
Kansas, and had sort of dreamed of traveling around America, but didn't know how to do it," he says.

Eventually, he went to college (double major in English and communications), saved some money working landscape jobs
and spent eight months traveling around the United States in a Volkswagen Vanagon. "That was nine years ago, and I've
never stopped traveling since."

Potts attempted early on to write a book about travel, but says it was "a complete failure."

Instead, he went to Korea and taught English, earning money for another "scratch-my-itch trip" that took him to Asia
for two years.

"All my best lessons have been learned by doing it, whether teaching students in Korea or on the road," he says.

Now comes a travel test that is sure to put Potts' go-slow philosophy to the test.

Earlier this month, laptop and digital camera in tow, he set off in a caravan of four Land Rovers on a trip that will
take him -- at breakneck speed, compared with his usual snail's pace -- to the tip of South America by late January.

As official reporter and Web site editor for the Drive Around the World Expedition ( http://www.drivearoundtheworld.com
), Potts is traveling with a three-person film crew and a team of five others that includes a Marine reservist with a
background in adventure racing, a former Peace Corps volunteer turned teacher and several Silicon Valley tech-heads.

Heading the team is Nick Baggarly, a Los Gatos-based software engineer and fellow of the Royal Geographic Society who
has led two previous overland expeditions.

The trip, scheduled to last nine months and cover 35,000 miles, is a fund-raiser for Parkinson's disease. It also aims
to promote the study of geography among U.S. students through an online education program.

Besides editing the official expedition site, Potts is chronicling the trip through a Web blog (
http://www.rolfpotts.com and http://www.vagablogging.net ).

While travel is a way of life for this experienced vagabond, traveling with a group, with vehicles and with a lot of
equipment, is something new.

"I'm definitely not a car geek," he proclaims, freely admitting that this trip runs counter to the ethic of privately
funded wandering he promotes in "Vagabonding."

"In my book, I say, 'Keep it private, keep it slow, pack light.' And then, on my very first trip after the book, here I
am on a very public itinerary, taking some very expensive equipment and traveling on a tight itinerary."

As a person who usually travels "very, very light," Potts was sweating the program a bit when we spoke by phone just
before the expedition was scheduled to cross the border into Mexico on Nov. 10.

"I have my little bag," he said, "but personally, I think everybody's overpacked. ... I'll just roll my eyes when the
mountain bike gets stolen and the guys get tired of hauling their surfboards in and out of hotels rooms every night."

The four vehicles in the expedition will travel in a convoy, Potts says, "and we'll have to get into the rhythm of the
daily routine."

The plan is to camp about half the time (tents are part of the equipment), stay in hotels the rest. Most of the journey
will be on paved roads, Potts says, "though the Land Rover rep in Costa Rica wants us to do the whole country on back
roads, so there will be some of that."

The schedule calls for reaching Tierra del Fuego by late January. After a six-week break, during which the vehicles
will be shipped to Australia (and Potts will write some articles for Slate.com), expedition members will reconvene. The
second leg of the trip involves traveling across the Australian Outback, forwarding the vehicles to Singapore and
driving through Southeast Asia, India, Nepal, China, Turkestan, Kazakhstan and Russia.

Only a committed couch potato could fail to sense the "narcotic tingle of possibility" in an itinerary like that.

"I'm already feeling it, you bet," Potts says, eager to hit the road.

About the Writer
---------------------------

The Bee's Janet Fullwood can be reached at [log in to unmask] or (916) 321-1148.

SOURCE: The Sacramento Bee, CA
http://www.sacbee.com/content/travel/story/7837520p-8778147c.html

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