No perfectly lit drone shots. No sponsored resort stays. No Instagram feed where every photo looks like it was taken by someone with a ring light and a trust fund. Just a 54-year-old guy from the suburbs of Pittsburgh who spent way too many years not seeing the world, then made up for it in the most stubbornly determined way possible.
Twenty countries. Twenty-nine states. A cancer diagnosis that rearranged my priorities overnight. And a credit card balance my wife absolutely does not find funny. I think it’s hilarious. She disagrees. We’ve been together long enough that we’ve learned to live with our differences.
I grew up not traveling. My entire “international” childhood experience was a trip to Niagara Falls. (Canada counts, right?) My early 20s were spent doing something very adult — having twin boys at age 20, dropping out of college, and grinding through the bar and restaurant business for a decade because someone had to pay for all those diapers.
Jamaica in my mid-20s was my second foreign country. That was it for a while.
Then came the early 2000s mortgage business, which, if you were there, you know exactly what that decade felt like. Money moved, and my new wife and I started taking real vacations. We got married in Hawaii in 2005 — two weeks, three islands, twin boys along for the ride. That trip rewired something in my brain. Still the best trip of my life, and I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.
The mortgage business eventually collapsed (you know, for reasons). I pivoted: rental properties, then medical courier work for a decade, then an Amazon business that did over $2 million in sales and taught me the hard lesson that revenue is not the same thing as profit.
February 2023. Neuroendocrine cancer. Small intestine and liver. Several feet of intestine removed, an ostomy bag, and over a year of cancer treatments. I shut down my Amazon business. I started selling rental properties one by one to stay afloat.
It was a lot. And it clarified things enormously.
I visited seven European countries and the Bahamas with that ostomy bag. I was not waiting around. After the reversal surgery and six very humbling months of my intestines relearning how to function (the “throne” was my best friend in ways I will not fully describe on a travel website), I was on a plane to southern Germany. Cancer stable, monthly injection, quarterly PET scan, and a personal promise to see as much of this world as my body and my bank account will allow — mostly in that order, though sometimes the bank account loses the argument. My wife says the credit card situation does not please her. I remind her that’s what the life insurance is for. We’re working on it.
Not the roughing-it kind. I need a bed. I need indoor plumbing. I need to know where the restaurants are within a five-mile radius before I land. I am not ashamed of any of this.
What I AM is obsessive about planning. Every trip is mapped out by the hour, backup plans included. I know the mileage and difficulty of every hiking trail before I set foot on it. I know where the bathrooms are everywhere I go (less urgent now than during the ostomy years, but the habit sticks). My travel-agent faux brother-in-law once told me I plan more obsessively than he does professionally. I choose to take that as a compliment.
I watch dozens of YouTube videos per destination. I read every article I can find. I talk to people who’ve actually been there. My goal is never to be surprised — and to squeeze every possible hour out of wherever I am.
First Step to Adventure is my decade-long pipe dream finally off the ground. A travel site built by an average guy with more travel insight than the average person and more stories than I expected to have by 54. You’ll find personal trip stories (including the one where I got stranded in the UAE for an extra two weeks because Trump bombed Iran — that one is coming, I promise), destination guides thoroughly researched even for places I haven’t personally been, and resources covering travel gear, travel rewards, and how to travel smarter without necessarily spending more.
I’m not here to tell you what to do. I’m here to share what I know, what I’ve learned, and what I wish I’d known earlier. If something here helps you have a better trip, that’s the whole game.
Welcome. Grab a seat.
Don’t worry — I know where the bathrooms are.
