Citizen of the World
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Among the most powerful experiences of my childhood were family vacations. My father was an avid traveler and we took family vacations every summer. We would camp in tents and later in travel trailers, and visit the great American National Parks. We drove all over the US, Canada, and Mexico, and this formed my lifelong fascination with seeing the world. My father believed that nothing stimulated the mind better than travel and he made an effort to expose us to people and places that were different from home. This inspired my interest in geography, wildlife, and natural environments. They helped me learn to read maps, to be comfortable in unfamiliar places, and to roll with the unexpected. Those are the things that create the most vivid memories.
With the support and encouragement of family, I followed my fascination with the natural world to an undergraduate degree in Zoology, a masters in Vertebrate Paleontology, and a doctorate in Anatomy. That latter one might seem a little off the track, but my dissertation research was on echolocation in bats. I did postdoctoral fellowships in Scotland (where I met Ian Wallis) and Sweden, and taught in three universities in the US before retiring in the Spring of 2024. Now I can get down to important things!
Until now, my bicycle touring has been limited to short trips of a few days, so this first extended tour is an ambitious undertaking. Scotland, Sweden, and Denmark are great places for bike touring, and I have enjoyed some of the Rails to Trails bike paths in the US. But Vietnam and Laos are well known for their biodiversity. Species unknown to western science are still being described from this region, and simply traveling through these habitats is the excitement of a lifetime.
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