Welcome to my site

So some of you may be wondering what the purpose of this site could be.  The answer is fairly simple; it is a place for me to store all of the information about my trip around the world.  It started off as a blog that I was keeping while I was traveling.  That worked pretty well for the first few months of the trip but as my travels continued, and Internet access became harder to come by,  I pretty much abandoned the project.

Four years have passed now and I have been getting pretty nostalgic about my “once in a lifetime” adventure.  So I decided to resurrect the project and make it into more of a documentary of my journeys. This site, and all of the content which it contains, are for my own enjoyment.  If you find it interesting, terrific, if not.. there are many other places to visit on the web.  No one is forcing you to be here.

At some point in my life I hope to have the opportunity to do more traveling.  If that ever happens, I’m sure that there will be a new chapter added to this site.  In the time being, please feel free to wander through the site.  I enjoy sharing my experiences with everyone.  If you are planning a similar journey, feel free to contact me via email if you have any questions about what went “right” and what went “wrong” during my travels.  I’d be happy to hear from you.

One last note; my only regret is that I didn’t do this trip earlier in my life.  I was 46 when I finally pulled up roots and headed off into the unknown.  My advise, for what it is worth, is “don’t wait until it is too late, traveling abroad is easy with modern technology and less expensive than most people think“.  Go now and enjoy all of the incredible things that are out there waiting for you!!

Yes, as many of you probably guessed, I got the nickname because of the movie “Captain Ron” staring Kurt Russell, Martin Short, and Mary Kay Place which was released in late 1992.  At the time I was living on “Elixir” my 34-foot sailboat which was docked at Peninsula Marina in Redwood City, California.  Redwood City is located on San Francisco Bay about half way between San Francisco and San Jose.  The movie involves the misadventures of a land lubber family from Chicago that inherits an old wreck of a sailboat. They decide to sail it from the island of “Saint Pomme de Terre” to Miami with the assistance of Captain Ron.  Apparently my friends found a great deal of humor in comparing me to the rather eccentric Captain Ron character portrayed by Russell.  In any case, the nickname has stuck and my friends continue the tradition of referring to me as “Captain Ron”.  A funny side note to this story is that I sold my house before leaving on my around-the-world trip so I once again find myself living on a boat.  This time it is a 32-foot Sea Ray powerboat which was on Lake Ouchitau in central Arkansas when I first returned from my trip and has since been moved to Lake Travis in Austin Texas (and I am still living aboard).  Its ironic that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Okay, so there I was in the summer of 1984 with the ink still wet on my freshly printed college diploma trying to figure out what to do next.  I had lived in the northeast (New York and Connecticut), the mid-west (although I could never understand why they call Ohio the “mid-west”), and the mid-south (now Oklahoma really is in the middle) and I really had no desire to return to any of those places.  So I packed up everything I owned into my 1968 Chevy Camero and headed off for “silicon valley”.

Going to the heart of the computer industry in the San Francisco Bay Area seemed like a really good idea since I was well armed with my brand spanking new degree.  What I didn’t realize at the time was that they designed and built computers in silicon valley but I was an application programmer.  It wasn’t until I was starving while living in a dump of an apartment in the middle of little Mexico that I realized what a big mistake I’d made.  Luckily, I finally found a good job that lead to a better job and on up the line.  Eventually I landed at TDS Healthcare developing patient management software.  Various positions with successive versions of the company (Systematics Healthcare, Alltel Healtcare, Alltel Information Services, Fidelity Information Services) kept me busy for the next 16 years.  In 1996 the company transferred me to thier corporate headquarters in Little Rock Arkansas where I continued working until being caught in a “right sizing” in 2004.

After a few months of job searching I decided that I really wasn’t interested in going back to work for a big company.  Setting my own hours, projects, and goals seemed like a much better option.  So in the summer of 2005 I founded Key Focus Media, LLC and began providing development and consulting services to small businesses.

In the fall of 1979 I was off to Oklahoma State University (OSU) for my first aborted attempt at a college education.  After only a single year at OSU, which admittedly focused more on parties than classes, I was invited by the University to return when I got serious about gaining an education.  This was the beginning of a 6-year college career that consisted of a year at OSU, two years of night school at Tulsa Junior College, and 3 more years at Wright State University (WSU) where I finally completed a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science in 1984.  The last three years of my college career were spent living with my dad and his wife Kathryn in Beavercreek Ohio which is just down the road from the WSU campus.