On Friday night the WUCC held a
party for all of us at the Hawaiian Waters Adventure Park. We had the whole place to ourselves. They had a huge eating and staging area where they presented an au- thentic touristy “Luau” show complete with Hula Dancers. During the party I was approached
by a young man named Connor Maloney from Virginia. Connor had sent me a very nice email back in July about my trip and that it was a dream of his to do the same thing one day. He noticed from my website that I would be in Hawaii and he asked me if it would be OK if he came and talked to me while I was there. He had spotted me dur- ing the opening ceremonies but was a little shy about coming over to say hello. I’ve experienced that a few times so if you ever see me and want to come over to just say “Hi” feel free. Standing there talking to him about
the same things we were both interested in I couldn’t help but realize that at age 17 he was 20 years younger than me. I couldn’t imagine what my life would have been like had I done this trip while I was his age. I hope he does the same trip one day. I can’t wait to be the person at work logging on to someone else’s website and seeing where they’ve explored. Walking around that party was an amazing experience. I swear I knew play- ers from half the teams there. I saw friends there that I had played with in Wilmington, London, Edinburgh, Italy, Bangkok, Singa- pore, Sydney, Christchurch, and of course all over Canada. My friend Wes Rupel from Seattle was thinking of moving to Bangkok so he came over and asked me if I knew anybody from there. I said sure let me introduce you to my friend Michael Riley from “Caned But Able”. Then my friends Ed- gar and Sherry asked me if I knew anyone from New Zealand as they were moving there right after the tournament. I said sure
let me try and find Hayden from “Sweet As”. I am proud to say that along with “Chev- ron Action Flash” we closed the place at around 2:30 am. The Finals the next day were a real
treat but if you want to see the highlights watch my Hawaii movie. I spared no ex- pense for this movie, it is by far the longest one I made coming in at 17 minutes. The next Wednesday I flew over to
Los Angeles to visit a few friends. My friend Brad is a recording engineer there and among his many cred- its Brad and his friends had produced the Nelly Furtado record. The day I visited him he was working on a new US single release for Jarvis Church. It was so great to spend
the day in the studio again working on re- ally cool music. The next day I visited my friend John
at The Fox Scoring Stage. He was working on the music for the new Spielberg mini- series “Taken” which is about of all things alien abduction. John asked the composer if I could sit in on the session and with her consent I was able to enjoy a 44 piece orchestra for a while. Sitting in the studio I realized this was my 5th
orchestra I had
seen since I’d left. Not the most common attraction when one goes backpacking. It’s an eye opening exercise watching videos that you yourself have shot. You learn a lot about yourself. Watching my video of my visit to Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris I had a choice of more than 80 famous peo- ple to visit but I chose 3 musicians, Rossini, Chopin, and Jim Morrison. In almost every video I made I have shots of children play- ing, the meaning of which I think is fairly obvious to me as I am not a parent yet. Guys have biological clocks too, some of us just keep hitting the snooze button all the time. Looking back at the orchestras that I
saw, the music I used for my movies, the unbelievable torture of not being able to play guitar for 3 ½ months, and visiting my
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friends in the studio working on real music I realized my love of music had returned once I was able to disassociate it from so many negative feelings I had. That was one of my biggest fears before I left was that I would never feel the same way about music as I had in my 20’s but thankfully it slowly returned and since I’ve been back I’ve found that I can play guitar way better than I ever use to (including playing Ulti- mate) because of the new view on life that I was able to find.
My next and last stop was Toronto, Canada. I tried to make it back for Friday night so my friend Dan could pick me up at the airport on the way to my friend Paul’s cottage and I could surprise everyone. Un- fortunately we missed each other so I piled onto the downtown bus that took me to the Holiday Inn near my home and hiked the rest of the way back to my place. After knocking on my neighbor’s door to get my extra key I very unceremoniously unlocked the door and I was home. The place was so quiet. I put all my stuff down walked over to the couch and grabbed my favourite guitar off the wall and sat down and played for a while. It is a telling sign that you’ve been away for a very long time when you look at your TV remote and have no clue how it works. That felt so great. Had the trip been worth it? Yes. The
trip was the most amazing thing I’ve ever done. I’m finding out lately that some of my friends can’t understand why I was so afraid to do this. I am frequently con- fronted with comments like “you’re so lucky” and “I would kill to do what you did”. Well it had nothing to do with luck it had everything to do with being unhappy and wanting a change. I’ve learned to perceive negatives as positives for if I hadn’t been so unhappy I would never have done this trip. As far as being afraid I know I did not
invent the idea of traveling and I know there are millions of people out there who were born to travel but I’m not one of them. I had to overcome that as well if I wanted to see the parts of the world that had always interested me. Most of the fear though came from leaving absolutely everything I’d ever known behind. So the
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