Ultimate-Trip.com
1 player, 7 months, 14 countries, Ultimate tournaments, and a lifetime of memories
BY JOHN ‘WHEELS’ HURLBUT
I took 7 months off of work and travelled around the world
playing Ultimate Frisbee tournaments. As I went I updated my website with QuickTime movies and posts to keep in contact with friends and to make new ones. The trip was amazing. I wrote this letter to myself so as the years go by I can read this and remember what I’ve learned.
Sunday November 4th , 2001. I woke
up and went downstairs to feed my two cats Tim and Susie. On my way I caught a glimpse of my new desk and computer monitor I had bought. A gift to myself, purchased with extra money I had earned writing a website for a friend. It occurred to me that something didn’t feel right. The night before I had been out
with my very good friend Paula and her 2 young daughters. We had had a great time at dinner and then we all went and saw “Monsters Inc” at the theater. The “something wrong” feeling was that I just wasn’t happy. Even after buying a few new things and spending a great night with Paula and her kids. The date, November 4th
was
auspicious as well. I realized that it was the
30th
anniversary of the recording studio I
had been working at as a sound engineer for 14 years. Manta Sound, the “Abbey Road” of Canada my friend had aptly called it.
I had worked with some of my heroes in music. Canadian artists like Rush, Rik Emmet from Triumph, Cowboy Junkies, Our Lady Peace, jazz legend Oscar Peter- son, and international artists like James Taylor, Journey, Bush, Def Leppard, and even Edge and Bono from U2. Recently the interesting sessions had gotten few and far
34
between as had my opportunities there. I thought, “Why am I working at a place that makes me unhappy to buy things I don’t care about?” Something had to change. It was at that very moment that I de-
cided I had to do something drastic. The original thought was to quit my job, sell my place and my car and go traveling the world playing Ultimate for 2 years. The more reasonable plan was to take a leave of absence for 7 or 8 months, lease my car, and have a friend rent my place while I was away. I had never had these thoughts be- fore and they scared me. Our present studios were not long for
this world. We had to move buildings and we were going to lose our beautiful Studio 2 that could hold 80 piece orchestras. My company was going to have to build some studios at our new facilities so what a per- fect time to take a leave of absence. I ar-
rived the next morning at work to witness a steam shovel tearing up our parking lot. A sign, I thought, that maybe I should do this. Now I had to figure out how I was
going to make this work. First off how the hell am I going to afford this? To make a long story short I refinanced my mortgage, took out a bunch of money and because my mortgage rate went from 6.6% to 2.75% I was still paying the same amount every month. Math is amazing some times. Next I sat down with all my friends who I knew had spent time traveling and asked them every question I could. My friend DC even had a detailed list of everything I should take right down to the smallest detail. I learned about travel doctors, Round-The- World plane tickets, Mountain Equipment Co-op, travel visas, hostels, and anything else you can think of. If you’re looking for travel insurance make sure they cover Ul- timate, most explicitly state they will not cover our favourite sport. At age 35 I had finally realized that I
was what one would call a creative person. That’s not a good or a bad thing it just is what it is. A lot of people often try to con- vince others they are creative so they can be viewed as special or different. I think that’s a bunch of crap. Creative types just have a need to express themselves in some way and if they aren’t able to do that they feel unsatisfied. Because I was doing fewer and fewer interesting things at work that need wasn’t being satisfied so I started to go through long periods of depres- sion which drove me to look for creative outlets outside of work such as playing Ultimate and freestyle frisbee, working on our league website (
www.tuc.org), making screen savers, playing guitar, skateboard- ing, or whatever. Finally figuring out that I needed to be creative all the time made my life a lot easier. With that in mind I had to figure out
how I would stay creative while I was traveling. Some might say that traveling in of itself would be enough but I knew it wouldn’t be for me. For some reason I came up with a
very ambitious (or stupid) idea. Shoot lots of video during my travels, edit it on some
Ultimate Canada Magazine —
www.canadianultimate.com
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