TransAm Tour 2006

"It's not the destination that matters, it's the journey."
 

• Introduction
• Logistics
• Planning
• Trip journal
• About people
• About me
• Contact
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This may already be too much information, but if you really want to learn more, here goes ...

I was born in Brookside Hospital in Richmond, California.  The first house that I lived was in a neighborhood of Richmond now known by the ominous name of "Iron Triangle" --- with good reason.  (Don't go there at night, and best not during the day either.)  Aunt Alice and Uncle Arthur lived about a block away, and my grandparents were about four blocks away.  It seems odd nowadays, but as late as the 1950s, even in an urban area like Richmond, my grandparents had a barn, a chicken coop, a rabbit hutch, an aviary, two goats, and a big garden where they grew (most memorably) strawberries.  There was also a big avocado tree that bore fruit, but that was before guacamole had been invented so it was considered purely ornamental.

Ten years, a divorce, and one remarriage later (not my own), I was living in the San Joaquin Valley.  At first we lived on a ranch in a miniscule town by the name of Hardwick (near Hanford), where I attended an elementary school in a two-room schoolhouse (honest).  A few years later, I finished elementary school, junior high, and high school in Tulare, California.  As the tee shirt states, Tulare is not the end of the world, but you can see it from there.  Tulare is so imminently unimportant that it is not even the county seat of Tulare County.  It's a good place to grow up, and then get the hell out of there.

After high school, I began my peripatetic years.  I first attended the University of California, Berkeley, with a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, France.  After I graduated from UCB, I enrolled at Middlebury College in Vermont because (1) I wanted to be smarter, (2) I wanted to go back to France, and (3) I didn't want to go to Vietnam.  I achieved goal #2 by spending the summer in Middlebury and the school year in Paris, France.  I had partial success at goal #3 in as much as I served three years in the Army, but in Germany rather than Vietnam.  The Army sent me first to language school in Monterey, California, and then stationed me in Heidelberg, Germany, for the next two and a half years. 

My peripatetic years came to an end when I got out of the Army, and had to deal with adult reality.  I had trained to be a French teacher, but for the first time in entire history of the state of California, there was a surplus of teachers and no one wasn't even hiring substitute teachers.  I reluctantly accepted an entry level job in banking where I earned barely enough to cover my San Francisco rent, a little food and a Muni pass.

Eventually, I taught myself how to program computers, and used that knowledge to talk someone into hiring me in an entry level programming position.  I had two different programming jobs, each one lasting about two years, before I got the job I have now at the Federal Reserve Bank.  For the past twenty-five years, I've liked my job, my employer, and my colleagues so well that I have never been seriously interested in changing jobs.  For the past few years, I've been working on the best project of my career, writing software in the Java language for a system that is deployed on the Internet.

And now, although I may be old, I'm bicycling across the USA.   Things could be worse.