Random hitchings

The next few days of my Irish adventure were spent distracting Shauna from an essay she was working on for college. Also spent exploring the town of Galway that I do enjoy very much. The whole place is gorg and the people are friendly and happy. We'd done a lot around the town and it's been fantastic so far. 

Shauna

Graffiti done right

 Galway bay

I got to meet Shauna's mother and father and sibilings and uncle and they're all just as incredible. I've been having a good time going to laughing yoga with Nigel and just generally having fun, but still needed to do some sightseeing away from the town. So yesterday (really the day before, but I woke up too late to take action that day) I decided to try and hitch to the cliffs of Moher, these grand cliffs that people come to see. They sound awesome to me! Well I hiked outta the town center to start me hitching and was just starting to work it when a girl walks up holding a sign for Sligo. I didn't know where that was but we got to chatting and became friends. I threw my plans out the window and me and her teamed up for the day. She's from Holland and I can't pronounce her name let alone spell it. She's my kind of person though, ye know? The kind that school sucks the soul from. So we're both off traveling and livin' life instead of wasting out days away building up debt. And it was a blast. I was headed North now very unexpectedly and we got rides no problem. Two rides and we were nearly to the top of Ireland in this quaint little surfing spot. 

Bundoran

Surfers

We had a grand time there. Bondoran is a sound place, real quaint and quiet this time of year. We had a little adventure there and it was a blast. Went out for pints that night and had that freeflowing connection people only get when traveling.

Girl from Holland

I slept in my tent on the beach that night 'cause we all know I'm a hobo at heart and she, being a lil' classier, stayed at a hostel.

Good times stealthing

And then I hitched back to Galway in the morn'! Took six rides and not long at all. Gary the Vegan Surfer, an older guy, Pat, Fergison, Noel, Michael, and then the last guy who's name I couldn't say. It was a blast, never waited more than 15 minutes and had a blast. Now I'm back in Galway 'bout to meet Shauna and some of her mates for some pints and it's just all grand :)

Be happy y'all! 

Beacon Bell

Welcome to Ireland

I'm goin' to start this post off by apologizing to any Irish people reading this because I'm sure I'll be tryin' to look cool and all usin' some Irish slang, but who even knows if I'm using any of it properly? Other than that, here goes a story about my first few days in Ireland...

Well, it's more than that I suppose. In some ways this is a story about Ireland and how amazing it is. But it's not just that. It's about traveling and it's about meeting people in grand ways that you'll never forget. It's about hitchhiking in a country you've never been to and never really given much thought to either. It's about drinking and friends and gorgeous Irish accents. And honestly, a lot of this post is about Shauna, the girl who has convinced me to consider Ireland amongst the most incredible of countries because of how incredible friendly she has been :)

My first real day in Ireland was spent sleeping in my tent. I got there in the morning, jetlagged to death, and decided on a nice nap in my tent. Turns out I spent the whole day sleeping. I had no game plan. I knew nothing of this country whatsoever. I didn't really know anyone here either. So my friend introduced me to someone here via Facebook and I got the solid advice to go to Galway (pronounced Gulway by the Irish who keep correcting me). I decided to not go into Dublin at all in that case. Which ended up being the best decision. Since it was already late from my full day sleeping I went and camped in a field on the outside of Dublin near where I'd need to hitch out in the morning. I tried desperately to sleep and managed a bit, but couldn't keep it going do to the jet lag and spent the night staring at the Irish stars wondering how no one back home'd come adventurin' with me. Then I wandered off to a McDonalds in the wee hours of the mornin' where I met an incredibly nice young lad named James. With his good wishes I was off around 5am to start hitchin' because I had nothing better to do yet. I didn't really expect to get a ride due to it being pitch black outside. But as my luck had it I got picked up by a Nigerian cab driver on his way home from work free of charge. Nice fellow as he was took me a good bit and dropped me off back into the dark. I didn't want to try my luck twice without the sun up so I pitched my tent on the side of the motorway there and passed out for a couple hours. 

Got up to a nice chilly day with the sun poking through the clouds and got to thumbin' it. First ride came from Phillip and he was quite nice, not going far though. Dropped me at a fantastic spot where Andi collected me. Andi was so nice, works for Intel, but again, it wasn't a long ride. He dropped me at a slow exit, but I waited it out where Marius stopped for me in his lorry. Super nice guy as well and gave me some biscuits to eat. He dropped me at a nobody exit and I didn't hesitate to walk down to the motorway instead of staying on the onramp. Didn't take but 15 minutes before Oliver picked me up in another lorry. A true old Irish man with a accent so thick you could spread it on bread. Another short ride before Byron, the last ride of the day, picked me up. What an incredible fellow. A New Zealander who married an Irish gal and he wasn't shy in the least. We launched directly into talk of travel and all the places we've been. What a cool guy, loved meeting him and he was kind enough to take me a good many kilometers out of his way to drop me in downtown Galway, my destination.

Really it hadn't taken long to get over to Galway from Dublin. Maybe four or five hours, but the funny thing was, with Ireland being such a small country and all, everyone who picked me up thought I was going ridiculously far because it was clear across the country. And I guess I did go East to West coast in that hitching, but it was really no big deal at all. Same thing with Galway too, it is an incredibly small town so I feel like nearly everything is walking distance from me. I had no plans once I got to Galway either. All I'd heard was that it's a cool place and I decided to check it out. I wandered around a bit, decided to maybe stay in a hostel to meet some traveling folk ye know? As luck turns out all the hostels were full up so that plan went out the window pretty quick. Camping is always plan B, but I have some other creative ways to find places to stay. My new and favourite way to do this is Tinder. If ye don't know what Tinder is, well it's not quite supposed to be used how I use it. To be honest it's a hookup app. But I use it for hitching and finding stays nowadays. Anyways, I posted up at this one hostel and made good friends with Maeve while bumming some internet and hitting the Galway Tinder scene. I got a few matches, but nothing really seemed that promising. I was about to give up and go do some wanderin' before finding a place to camp when Shauna and I started talking. I could tell right off the bat she was sound. Incredibly sound. She was just super nice and a little motherly not wanting me to stay in my tent and all. We arranged to meet up for a pint where I had my first Guinness in Ireland (it was actually really good). She introduced me to some of her friends and then took  me over to her brother's place where I got to meet the whole crew it seemed. Darragh, her brother, Marianna, Nigel, Mike, and Rob. And every single one of then was incredibly fun and welcoming as could be! So we all drank for most of the night before all of them went of to a gig. It was a great time and then they all came back and played guitar and sung songs until the waaaaay wee hours of the mornin' and it was incredible. Darragh let me stay at his for the night and we all slept in the next day, except for Shauna who had to go to college (sorry Shauna for all my distractedness). 

The rest of us and I spent the morning sleeping and then made out way to McDonalds for hangover food. It was fantastic, before we all slowly drifted down to the cathedral to see the parade that was on! 

Parade'n'such :)

More has happened as that was all three days ago and I'm still with Shauna now, but I don't have the effort required to type it out now. There was just something about the whole night that was incredibly free spirited ye know? I came to Ireland with no plans. Went to Galway on a whim. Managed to meet the incredible Shauna and have one of the better nights of my life. I was already convinced of how awesome Ireland was and I was stoked more than ever to be here. It was a great introduction to Irish partying, drinking, and culture I think haha. But more than all that it was just good fun. Shauna is such a chill and awesome girl. Glad I met her here in Ireland and she was kind enough to take me in so far. Anyways, I'll add pictures to this post later and I'll continue the rest of the story when I have some free time. All I can say is you should visit Ireland :)

Bí sásta,

Beacon Bell

When adventure calls, answer.

I realize that in most of my blogging I never really talk about how to travel. I just tell you what I do, but I leave out a lot of the nitty gritty details because I feel like most people aren't worried about it. And maybe they aren't, but I'm going to start giving more tips into this lifestyle. I've had some people asking my advice on traveling. So first let me say, traveling like this is a mindset and nothing more. It's not all about the deals, the cheapest sites, and the people you know. It's about the pure adventure of it all. But I guess it does help to know how to do stuff cheap! 

So how I made this happen is I got a Megabus (best buses out there) ticket for $20 from SA to DFW. Why? Because flying out of DFW is going to save an immense amount of money. Getting to a larger airport for cheap is almost always the best option. Sometimes there are funny deals some cities have going like SA and Seattle, but, normally, the larger the airport the cheaper it'll be to fly out of. And the same goes for flying into somewhere. I went up a day earlier than my flight because that's how the bus schedule coincided with my flight. I didn't want to spend the night in DFW airport so I was desperatly trying to remember who I knew in Dallas when I remembered my friend Brent! I'd met him when we were both serving at a Vipassana meditation sitting a year prior. He welcomed me enthusiastically, he was just excited to get to talk to someone about traveling. And this guy has been so many places. He has lived in Japan and almost everywhere in South America. He has an incredible knack for languages and has collected many an item from all over the world. Seriously, his room was amazing with all the things he had brought back from his travels. I kind of hope I can have a room that looks like that one day. And we had a great night with some incredible Indian food at one of the cooler resturaunts I've ever been to. It was awesome, and then he took me to the airport early in the morning to see me off.

Now I have never been on a flight where the plane is not the at the very last terminal and I'm not sat in the very back of the aircraft. But somehow, this flight, I got upgraded to first class for free!? Woo!! Who woulda thunk it? Well this means I get to drink free whisky and eat my free crappy airplane food while I watch the sun set outside and the stars slowly start to peek out.

And I can't help but remember a similar flight I took two years ago the first time I went to Europe. I once flew overnight from Seattle to Iceland (maybe I've written about this before) and I had the most incredible thing happen. I hadn't expected this at all, but I woke up in the middle of the night on that flight and casually glanced out the window only to be awstruck by the Northern Lights staring me down. It was so incredibly beautiful I couldn't believe it. I was listening to the Icelandic radio station at the time and it was just so perfect for the lights. With the bells and the chimes, it was cold music, but the Northern Lights are a cold thing. It was inspiring. It was more beautiful than I could imagine. The green wavering ribbons. They're so graceful and so quiet you know? It's scary almost, you could be going about your buisness one night in the North and if you don't happen to look up you'd have no idea that they were up there dancing away. 

So I finally go to Ireland and I only wanted one thing... to sleep. I knew I shouldn't of stayed up all night and that the jetlag would get me, so I decided to use today as my buffer day. I hoofed it out of the airport to the first wooded area I found, pitched my tent and passed out for 6 hours and it was awesome. I love camping in the cold!! Woke up around 4, walked back to the airport for some wifi and now I'm attempting to tinder a stay haha. And if that doesn't work out I'll just stage for my hitching tomorrow! If you care to find me look toward the Western sky!!! (for y'all I guess it'd be East though)

Anyways, I miss you all! Can't wait to see Ireland. I'll update you when cool things actually happen :)

My home

Arriving in Ireland! 

Be happy :),

Beacon 

Sneaking into Mexico (accidentally)

I went to Mexico the other day and has a very interesting experience. Ivonne and I are actually still baffled by what happened there. I think every conversation we've had since then has included the exclamation "I can't believe we got kicked out of Mexico!". Now I apologize now that there are no photos from Mexico, but I really thought we would be staying there longer and I had no time to take any. And so, without further ado, here is that story.

I had met Ivonne a week prior and she was that free spirited type of person. The kind who'll do some crazy things on just a whim. We were talking one Wednesday and she was telling me about her family in Monterrey, Mexico when I said we should just go to Mexico sometime and visit them. Well why not this weekend she asked. And in that way we decided to drive to Mexico. It's only a 5 hour drive from San Antonio to where her aunt lives. We were both super excited to be on our way. I picked her up Friday after she got out of school and we road tripped down to the border with me trying to learn Spanish on the way there.

Now we got to the border in Laredo and we didn't really know where to go. We were just following signs to Monterrey really. We passed over a bridge, which I was pretty sure was the Rio Grande, drove through some checkpoint like stations, and were lost in some town that I was pretty sure was Mexico, but we didn't know. We didn't know because literally no one stopped us at any of the checkpoint things. No one stopped us to ask us for ID's, passports, visas, or anything. We just drove through everything without talking to a single person and then bam, we were in Mexico (though we still weren't sure). Because why would we not get checked for a passport or anything??? So we were really confused, but kept going just following signs to Monterrey. We had to stop at a gas station and ask for directions once (we were going the right way though). So on we go on our merry little way. We get to the "highway" and keep going on that. By this time we have been driving in Mexico for about an hour, and we get pulled over. We don't really know what's up because we hadn't done anything wrong (that we knew of). Thank goodness Ivonne speaks Spanish way better than I do because apparently we were in trouble. Apparently we had come into Mexico illegally, though not intentionally. The feds had stopped us and we didn't have any of the things we needed that we probably should have gotten at the border. We believe somehow we accidentally skipped at a checkpoint or something and that's how we got in, but, again, we are not sure. The officers were saying that we had committed a felony and yada yada yada. They said they were supposed to take the car and take me to jail. And Ivonne was just pleading with them to let us go back and do whatever we needed to do or saying we'd just go back to America. This goes on for a little while because we are so confused and so they take her out of the car and talk to her (because she actually speaks Spanish). Apparently they were asking her all sorts of things like what we do for a living and how we are funding this trip. Ya' know? Those sort of pointed questions like they want something. And then they ask for $200 to let us go. Yes, they were asking for a bribe. And they said they would give us the code word for the next cop who stopped us. Just to tell them Officer Ochenta stopped us and we would be free to go. Unfortunately we only had $42 though and 300 pesos. Well we were kind of screwed then. A while later they are finally convinced we have no money and tell us to just go back to America. We GTFOed haha. We were so gone. So so so gone.

We were worried about not getting back into America, but we made it back in. And we made it past the first checkpoint in America, telling neither that we'd just snuck into Mexico accidentally. Interesting times in Mexico for sure. I'm gonna try not to drive there next time! But it was so much fun. Good experiences all around! No harm no foul after all.

I'm headed to Ireland in two days, I'll update again sometime over there.

Be happy,

Beacon :)

Upon those travelers who make their way without maps or guides

"Upon those travelers who make their way without maps or guides, there breaks a wave of exhilaration with each unexpected change of plans. This exhilaration is not a whore who can be bought with money nor a neighborhood beauty who may be wooed. She (to persist in personifying the sensation as female) is a wild and sea-eyed undine, the darling daughter of adventure, the sister of risk, and it is for her rare and always ephemeral embrace, the temporary pressure she exerts on the membrane of ecstasy, that many men leave home" - Tom Robbins

I know it's been a while since I've written, but I thought I'd catch you all up on what has happened and what is, more importantly, about to start happening.

After the fishing season Amber, Max, and I had to bring the Deer Harbor II down through Canada and back to Bellingham, WA. At this point in the season everyone is just itching to be done and get back, but, unfortunately, we are at the whim of the weather. This trip could easily take weeks, but somehow we manage to make it perfectly in four days. We had 0 weather delays which was all I could ask for at this time in the season. Down through Canada we got to see a few killer whales pods too! I was worried I wouldn't see any this season, but they came through for me and there was no disappointment. We came upon one pod with like 30 in it at one point and stopped to watch them playing around. They'd come over close to the boat to check it out or splash about with all this other whale friends. Here's a few (including a baby and a massive bull) who came a little closer to the boat to see what's up!

It was all pretty sweet and we finally made it to Bellingham to have one last awesome crew night together before I headed to Seattle via Amtrak the next day. I didn't linger in Seattle as I had bought a dirt cheap plane ticket back to San Antonio, Texas to surprise my family. Seriously though, you gotta try skyscanner. It's this super awesome app that finds these super cheap tickets. I bought the ticket from Seattle to San Antonio the day before and it was only $150. I couldn't pass that up! And so before I knew it I was on a plane down South! Interestingly enough I was sat next to Rick Steves on the flight. I had no idea who this guy was, but turns out he has my dream job! He has a television show about traveling Europe! I would do anything to get paid to travel. Dang, that job is legit. But anyways, huge coincidence eh? I, the traveling bum, am sat next to the famous traveler. Sometimes you gotta love fate. After swapping a few stories he gave me his card and, seeming a little interested in my traveling, he was off! Until next time Rick Steves, maybe I'll see you in Europe.


Long story short, I made it home. It was fun for a few days and I did all my housekeeping things (going to the doctor, visiting with my dog, getting tattooed) before I started getting bored again. Now this is dangerous ground, trust me. I just came back from Alaska with a fat check and nothing to do. On another note it's always weird going from poor to rich (relatively). So now for what is in store: Me and Stumbles (you may remember her) planned a trip to Peru in January for her birthday, I'm going to Mexico today with someone I just met last week, and I bought a plane ticket to Ireland for next week... All of this happened unexpectedly within a few days. I love the randomness of it all and I cannot wait to get back into the game! Real blog posts are soon to come, this is more of an update on my boring home life :)

Be happy,

Beacon