Trimbathcreative's Blog (Tom Trimbath)

Success! I’ve walked from corner-to-corner, coast-to-coast, across a country. It only took about three weeks, and it’s gratifying. I haven’t been in a car, bus, or plane since I started walking from Stranraer in the southeast. (Of course, I know of someone who didn’t use a car for a year. That’s a good story too.)

Walking a land, or bicycling it, is not a normal vacation. It makes sense to me, but on a percentage basis, it probably doesn’t show up on any top ten list. Very few people do such things. After my bicycle ride across America, I estimated that fewer than a thousand people a year do the same. To put that in perspective, Mt. Rainier is summited by thousands each year. More people climb a 14,410 foot volcano, than bicycle along.

Most vacations, and most adventures, have a different goal. Vacations are usually more about leisure, sitting still or spectating. Some, like ski trips, are more active, but few of them do more than end each day where they started. I like vacations. I want to take more of them. Adventures are usually more dramatic. Climbing mountains, challenging rapids, being chased by bulls, are intense experiences that heighten the hormones and produce great stories – as long as everyone comes home safe.

The greatest dangers I faced were avoiding traffic and finding lodging. There were some hormone spikes in there, but nothing like dropping into a crevase. There was actually a lot of sitting. The days were defined by the walking, but my joints negotiated me down to only about 4-6 hours of travel each day. The muscles were fine, but a 51 year old body has more issues than endurance and lactic acid. Each day was a unique discussion amongst various body parts, and no, you don’t want to know all of the details.

The appeal of such a stroll, is external and internal.

Externally, it is a fine way to get to know a land and its people. I wasn’t cocooned away from them, unless they were the ones in cars and such. The way the houses sit, the gardens grow, the fields are laid; the care or decay was apparent. Marvelous old buildings constantly tended were paired with ivy covered crumbling walls collecting litter. The faces, stoic as they walk along the sidewalk, open and lighten in the pub, or a few sentences into any request for help.

Internally, a self-propelled vacation can be peaceful. I only find there, what I brought along. If I wanted quiet, it tended to build on itself. If I brought worry, it ramped up and had to be contained. The constant low-level effort helped to calm me. The repitition gentled my motions and then my thoughts. If I was tiring early, I’d usually notice bad posture, or a mis-adjusted pack, or inefficient movement. Walk quiet and I became quiet. It was moving meditation for hours each day.

Of course, the tales to be told will be the ones most likely to have photos included, a bit of slapstick, or involve other people. The first one that comes to mind is about the tendency of dairy cattle to follow me as a herd if I sang as I walked by their pasture, an audience captured by barbed wire with nothing else to do.

The real consequence of any such trip is less direct. My subconscious osmotically filled, elements and influences will seep back out into insights and attitudes unnoticed. Travel can affect more than the days and weeks of the trip. This one will affect the rest of my life.

As for this blog, it’s time for it to return to other aspects of balancing life and money. The trip has some loose ends I’d like to capture so, I’ve decided to put together a web site with more details, partly for the curious, partly as a resource for other tourists. But first, a train ride to Glasgow, a plane ride to Seattle, the trip home, and then the overlooked details of everyday life: laundry, food shopping, and lots of emails.

(And thanks to the staff of Jury’s Inn in Aberdeen for letting me finish this blog on a quiet and lonely computer. It cost them nothing and got them a bit of advertising.)

Well, I’ve made it to Dundee. That bit of news has less to do with this blog than it has to do with assuring friends that I am fine. The blog is about my book, Dream. Invest. Live., and part of Live is social. Hi, folks. I’m fine.

We don’t live in isolation. Seclusion happens, and I am coming to realize that seclusion is easier in the States than in older, more crowded countries. I am glad for my community. They’ve been the most supportive group I’ve known in decades. America was founded on individual liberties, which makes separation and personal independence more attainable; yet, it was community that made that independence possible.

The other day one a hotel clerk asked me if I get lonely doing this; i.e. walking across Scotland alone. Here, community is much more apparent. The pub and the church are persistent presences in each town. Neither is glamorous, and both are obviously integral and persistent. I suspect the churches tend to be older than the pubs, but sometimes I wonder.

For me, alone time is good and necessary. Many people don’t understand why I do what I do, so taking a vacation along lonely roads and trails sometimes means not having to spend much of the day explaining myself.  It took me a long time to realize that such independence is uncommon.

My appreciation of my uncommon independence is also why I don’t expect anyone to mimic my lifestyle or investing strategy. I talk and write about them, not to explain myself, but to provide an example from which others can take lessons. (Okay, I guess I do like to explain myself, but I gave up expecting comprehension long ago.)

I ran into a fine gent, tie and all, when my walk to Glencarses temporarily coincided with his lunchtime walk away from work. He was part of a team, probably the head, possibly a CEO (buy Macallan Whisky). A work team is community, and even with some element of control over the situation, he found the benefit of time alone. I was glad for the company. I think he was glad for a conversation that was completely different.

Scotland has wonderful community, especially if you are established into the pub’s crowd or the church’s parish. The people are very tolerant of tourists, and definitely warm to each other.

America works. Scottish culture works. The diversity in the world is proof that many cultures work,  but they don’t work for everyone. It is up to the individual to find the culture that works for them. And I feel sorry for those that are in situations that they can’t escape or change. Lifestyle has more flexibility.

I am fairly frugal, but not as frugal as some. I like my investment strategy, which some consider risky and others consider conservative. I like my approach to life, that of a chicken advneturer (my adventurous friends consider me a chicken, those more likely to stay at home consider me an adventurer.)

I am heartened to meet others who’ve asked the questions and found their own answers. It is one of the reasons I enjoy travel. Yes, the scenery is nice. But I remember more the couple who built an awesome B&B because they wanted to. I remember the cyclist who was headed to Capetown (South Africa I believe). I appreciate those who have marvelous gardens or are smiling as they play with their children.

There are lots of answers out there. They aren’t all found by travel, but they are easier to find through exploration. And after it all, it is good to have community to return to.

For me, that’s next week. I have several more days of walking. I’ve made it coast-to-coast, so now I may just saunter more than walk. As here’s to hoping that I find that perfect pub, beside a great B&B, close to a library, and a view, and an easy route home.

One day’s walk carried me through examples of every lifestyle from rural, through suburban, into inner city and downtown. What was distinct and united by government and culture is now more entwined. Or at least, the urban world reaches into the rural, and the global pervades the local.

Last night was spent in a fine town with a long name (which I may misspell) Kirkuntilloch. It is the self-proclaimed canal capital, a major hub of the canal system that cut through Scotland’s waist, a watery shortcut from Edinburgh to Glasgow that saved many ships from having to survive the wild open ocean around this island. The canals only exist for recreation now. Highways, railways, and the need for larger ships made the canal obsolete in the mid-60s.

Highways, made out of steel, asphalt or electrons, have also changed the place and the way people live. Especially in a country with excellent rail service, there is no need to live in the city for a city job. That’s very evident in the States, but a downtown trail station makes it even more apparent. Stepping off the train in the midst of the high-rises is far more convenient than driving and parking. Contrary to US train traffic, I have yet to see a freight train. Throughout each day I see regular passenger trains. Despite that regularity and convenience though, the roads are busy and the city housing is packed.

The electronic highways are having a broader impact. Sitting in the canal capital, I listened to hours of American pop music while I ate my Guinness and steak and Guinness pie. Can’t have too much Guinness (though I’m a lightweight). But I had too much American music. That was probably because they were playing the greatest hits of the seventies and I’d prefer something more eclectic and danceable. (They did have a dance floor, but I was there on the wrong night.) American music, news, comedy pervade, as do American brands. With my head down in a book, this could be just another state. Even much of the food is familiar. (Though the pakora haggis was a new one for me. And, no, I didn’t order it.)

The familiarity makes travel easier. The foreign culture is more distant, and I suspect that the distance is in time. The fact that we are becoming a global culture is not news. While much of the pervasion is of American culture into the rest of the world, the internet is allowing back flow and cross flow. Guinness is Irish, yet it is popular in the States. The whiskies I’ve seen behind the bars here are also available in my local liquor store. Haggis pakora or Pakora haggis may not be a common example of cultural cross flow, but even being able to describe it in this blog is an example of how arcane occurences can be at least marginally witnessed around the world. How many YouTube posts have been viewed without any understanding of where the videographer worked from?

The canal builders probably expected their work to be productive longer. Their efforts were re-purposed. Cultures aren’t crafted, but each generation defines theirs and expects it to persevere. We may think we know the internet’s limits and have some expectation of the strength of branding and culture, but I suspect that culture is being redefined along electronic lines.

People moved into the suburbs, but they continue to cluster. The internet is going to allow cultural assimilation, but it will be generations before it is complete.

There will still be a Scotland, and we’ll all be able to know more about it too.

Does this seem rambling? It does to me, but that’s because, as I type this on the American creation that is the internet, the teenagers beside me are streaming screaming music. I don’t know where it comes from. Maybe they don’ t either. But, oy, it is distracting.

Maybe I should spend some time in a Carnegie Library in the States (started by a Scot) where life is quieter, and I think, better funded. Go figure. I need a Guinness.

Should I buy into this? Is that story too good to be true? If this part is bad, is the rest bad too? Pin those questions on any topic from finance to philosophy and entire books, doctoral theses, and political movements can be generated. Answers, however, are harder to find.

I hear lots of questions about life choices and investment decisions. The search for clarity is common and constant. Everyone wants at least some level of security, or at least a lot less doubt. Guessing the future has never been a very successful occupation. A few succeed. Random chance predicts that someone will manage to guess right, just as someone will manage to guess wrong. Being right all the time is nearly impossible, but then being wrong all the time has the same odds. We ask questions to improve the odds, but we can only get to certainty emotionally. Logic only gets there in abstraction. In the real world, logic eventually runs out of data and into patches of chaos.

A friendly conversation the other night reminded me of one technique I use when faced with uncertainty. It has become such an integral part of my life that I frequently forget how much it occupies my time. I look for answers. The way I do it is different than simply asking more questions. I like to get my eyes off the computer, my fingers away from the keyboard, and set myself out into the world so my senses can do their thing.

That’s why I like to invest in local companies. I can visit them. Data in financial statements or summarized research reports are useful and necessary. Numbers rule business. But numbers are not a business. The business may be an artifice of our civilization, but its people, buildings, and stores are real. Ideally, both stories should tell the same tale. The numbers and the operations should look good. The people (employees, customers, management, suppliers) should be treated well and are hopefully happy. The community should be glad that they are there. Many aspects of a business can be asked about in conference calls, but the only answers provided are words. If feasible, I visit. I visit the company. I go to its meetings. I shop in its stores, if it has any. I simply meet the people, listen to their stories, and watch how they interact with the business. Dig back through these posts and you’ll find a few stockholders meetings that I’ve attended. I learn things there that could never be revealed in a conference call.

Soon I’ll be traveling to and through Scotland. It’s a vacation, and it’s also an opportunity to see how they live. Any culture with distinctive features like kilts, whiskey, and an accent (from others’ points of view), can be too easily stereotyped. I’ll be walking across the island. There’s no tour group. It will be just me, my pack, my credit card, and a hope that I can find a place to eat and stay every night. Just like my bicycle ride across America, slowly moving through the country puts me in contact with the people, their lives, and their land. The loneliness of eastern Utah, and the feat of pioneers crossing it, was much more strongly felt while I battled headwinds and hoped that colliding storms collided elsewhere. It was an experience that took a day. On a bus, it would have been possible to nap through the entire experience, and still not get enough sleep. A day on the bicycle covered as much distance as a car does in an hour. It probably took them weeks, if they survived.

Getting to know a person is no different. We hear stories about celebrities, and even though we know that the tabloid tales are less than accurate, we draw conclusions and judgments about their lives. But, because we rarely get to meet them, maybe it doesn’t matter. Except that, for some, it is too easy to use that same approach to people within our communities. Gossip replaces the tabloids. Casual encounters, possibly on really bad days, become the basis of a guess about someone.

Businesses, cultures, people all can be reduced to two dimensional abstractions, flattened images that are efficiently stored, but that lack the depth that truly exists.

Simply showing up is not enough either. It takes time to acquire a deep understanding by absorption through experience. Imagine trying to understand someone by asking them to play act their life while you sit there as a spectator. It would take longer than they’ve been alive. Even parents, who get to watch someone grow, eventually develop uncertainties about what is really going on in that other person’s head.

That’s why at some point we have to rely on trust, intuition, and a bit of luck to get us through. There will always be unknowns. Every logical decision will involve some doubt, though emotions may scoff at logic and overrule it to act as if certain. The trick is to find what is enough. I don’t need to know what’s going on in teenage movie star’s head. I want to know a bit more about investments, and will read, ask and experience enough to reduce the risk. And when it comes to cultures, and people I meet, I try to open up to much more. Face to face, lots of time, lots of listening, and when I want to hear more, lots of questions.

There comes a time for experiments. Welcome to one of mine. I like it when there are several good reasons behind making a change. This blog is about to go through a transition. If all goes well, you won’t notice the difference unless you’re a cyber geek (though you may have to update your RSS feed). The blog is moving to a new home over on WordPress (trimbathcreative.wordpress.com). Hopefully, just like moving to a new house, everything will get unboxed unbroken and life will return to normal.

I’m taking a vacation. Some would say that I’ve been on vacation since I retired twelve years ago. They’re right from a paycheck point of view. They are also right from the liberation point of view. When I retired, I liberated myself from corporate obligations and could live according to my internal motivations. But I’ve noticed that me, like many of the other early retirees I know, am self-motivated to the point that I don’t take time off. It can be so liberating to be able to work on what I want, instead of working to someone else’s agenda, that I get caught up chasing this task, that cause, today’s new idea. I took longer vacations when I had a paycheck, because it was a contractual obligation. It was a good idea. Left to my own schedule, I can sprinkle enough events around to interrupt any lengthy trip. Time to return to that good idea of time off. Time to get out of my self-defined rut, even if it means jumping into another one by setting a goal like walking across a country.

The idea of the vacation comes from corporate America. The idea of crossing a country is from my past. As I recently blogged about, this is the ten year anniversary of my bicycle ride across America: an experiment in losing weight that failed. The trip did succeed though. I learned a lot about myself, people, and America. Like I said in the book, “I can’t say that it was fun but I am definitely glad that I did it.” (The now more experienced writer in me automatically started editing that line.) The ride, like most such journeys, changed my life for the better. I want to celebrate the ride with another journey. So, to celebrate a self-powered diagonal trip across a country, I am going to do it again, but different. The goal is to walk across Scotland from the southwest to the northeast. It is an experiment in finding a new way to relax and enjoy. I suspect there are more pubs along a walking route in Scotland than there were hotels for a bicyclist traveling American highways.

So, I am taking a vacation, but not from the blog. I like blogging. Evidently, someone else out there likes the fact that I blog. Traffic is climbing fast enough to double every few months. I don’t know if that will continue, but it suggests that the blog may need a home with more room. Something I’m saying must be useful, or entertaining, or both, and that’s a good feeling. I’ll keep blogging as I walk, but I don’t want to take along my laptop and the old way of doing my blog required lugging the machine along. All of my stuff will have to fit in my pack and survive Scotland’s fall weather. I’m fairly sure that my Mac would rather stay home, despite the Scottish origins of the name. Moving to WordPress lets that happen. I can blog from anywhere I can find a computer and a connection.

WordPress is also an experiment for me. I’m old enough that, at some level, I have a habit of following corporate loyalties. I like Apple, its products and its services. I write from a Mac using iWeb, a bit of Apple software. I stopped shy of using some of their online services, because of the habit I have using Earthlink for web hosting. Remember earthlink? I’m surprised they are still around. WordPress is new; and is free just like Facebook, Google, Wikipedia, and others that are in my bookmark list. Open source services have challenged corporations by experimenting with a new revenue model. They give away their services for free. Even the old adage, “you get what you pay for”, becomes irrelevant. Free services can provide whatever they want, if they have volunteers or alternative funding. Working with WordPress, the free blog service, was easier than working with Earthlink, the service I’ve paid for every month for the last decade or so. This is worth a try.

Experiments involve risk. They are attempts that are accepted as risky. Doing anything different is a risk. Trying a different lifestyle is a risk. Traveling to a foreign country is a risk. Starting a business is a risk. Each of us were a risk. Babies are not guaranteed. Without taking on the risks of childbirth there would be no humans. Without taking on the risk of businesses our current civilization wouldn’t exist (and some would argue that it is a failed experiment, though I don’t think the experiment is complete). Without taking on the risks of trying something different there’d be no way to a better life.

So, next week, the blog will have a new home and I should be in Scotland. Hopefully you won’t notice the difference, except perhaps in my tone; and I’ll be pleasantly wandering the land of scotch whiskey, kilts, pubs, lochs, history and fine people. They’re frugal I hear. I wonder if I’ll fit in.

(What am I thinking? It’s Scotland in the fall! It can be cold and wet and it’s farther north than Seattle. Oh well, like I said, this vacation’s an experiment.)