Investment Biker E-Book

Rogers Jim

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 749

Beschreibung

This book is about the author's amazing trip across six continents and the world economy and society. It discusses who's sinking and who's swimming, which countries are on the rise and which are collapsing, where you can make a million and where you could lose one. Every place he stopped on the trip, Rogers talked to businessmen, bankers, investors and regular people. He learned reams of information that you'd never learn from reading the financial pages of any periodical. Delivers a thrilling account of the journey of a lifetime and provides tips that would enable you to pay for a trip just like it.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Part I: Dunquin to Tokyo

1: A Flight to Russia

2: New York

3: Crossing Europe

4: Linz

5: Central Europe

6: On to Istanbul

7: Old Turkistan

8: China

9: XI’an

10: XI’an to Beijing

Part II: Tokyo to Dunquin

11: First Class in the First World

12: At the Edge of the World

13: Across the Wild Tayga

14: Siberia

15: Ulan-Ude, Zima, and Kansk

16: Novosibirsk and West

17: Moscow

18: On to Ireland

Part III: Dunquin to the Cape of Good Hope

19: Africa: The Sahara Desert

20: Sub- Saharan Africa

21: Down a Lazy River

22: Home of the Always Victorious Warrior

23: Escape

24: Zambia and the Great Zimbabwe

25: Botswana

26: South Africa

Part IV: Rounding the Horn

27: Overland Down Under

28: The Uttermost End of the World

29: Buenos Aires

30: Chile and Easter Island

31: On the Shining Path

32: On Darwin’s Trail

33: The Darien Gap

34: The Canal to the Rio Grande

35: Home and Beyond

Afterword

Appendix I: How We Packed for Our Twenty-two-Month Motorcycle Trip

Appendix II: Daily Log

About the Type

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Part I: Dunquin to Tokyo

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AROUND THE WORLD WITH JIM ROGERS

INVESTMENT BIKER

JIM ROGERS

Copyright © 1994 by Beeland Interests, Inc.

This edition published by arrangement with Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

This edition published 2000 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate,Chichester, West Sussex PO19 8SQ, EnglandTelephone ([phone]

Email (for orders and customer service enquiries): [email protected] our Home Page www.wileyeurope.com or www.wiley.com

Reprinted July 2003, November 2003, August 2005, June 2006, November 2007, April 2008, April 2010

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP UK, without the permission in writing of the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the publication.

Neither the author(s) nor John Wiley & Sons. Ltd accept any responsibility or liability for loss or damage occasioned to any person or property through using the material, instructions, methods or ideas contained herein, or acting or refraining from acting as a result of such use. The author(s) and Publisher expressly disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability of fitness for any particular purpose.

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Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following forpermission to reprint previously published material:MCA MUSIC PUBLISHING: Excerpt from “See See Rider” by “Ma” Rainey.Copyright © 1943 by MCA Music Publishing, a division of MCA, Inc.Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.Used by permission.Maps reproduced with permission from Harper Collins (UK)Cartographic, from ‘The Times Atlas of the World’.

All photographs from the author’s collection.

ISBN 978-0471-49552-9 (pbk)

For those of you consumed by the passion to see it all and fathom the world as it really is. And for C. Rider, of course.

I would like to thank Donald Porter, without whose insight and editorial guidance this book could not have been written. Thanks also to Marshall Loeb at Fortune.

PART IDUNQUIN TO TOKYO

1A FLIGHT TO RUSSIA

I WAS BORN IN 1942, the eldest of five brothers. My parents met in the thirties at the University of Oklahoma, where both belonged to academic honor societies. During the war, my father served as an artillery officer in Germany. After the war, he joined his brother in running a factory in Demopolis, Alabama, a state in which my people had lived since the early nineteenth century.

With the birth of so many boys, my mother, an only child, was rapidly in over her head. She made us competitive and full of high jinks. The five of us learned drive from our father, who taught us to push to make happen whatever it was we wanted to do. From him we learned how to work hard.

My entrepreneurial efforts started early. I had my first job at the age of five, picking up bottles at baseball games. In 1948 I won the concession to sell soft drinks and peanuts at Little League games. At a time when it was a lot of money, my father gravely loaned his six-year-old son one hundred dollars to buy a peanut parcher, a start-up loan that put me in business. Five years later, after taking out profits along the way, I paid off my start-up loan and had one hundred dollars in the bank. I felt rich. (I still have the parcher. Never know when such a dandy way of making money might come in handy.)

With this one hundred dollars, the investment team of Rogers & Son sprang into action. We ventured into the countryside and together purchased calves, which were increasing in value at a furious rate. We would pay a farmer to fatten them, and sell them for a huge profit the following year.

Little did we know that we were buying at the top. In fact, only twenty years later, on reading one of my first commodity chart books, did I understand what had happened. My father and I had been swept into the commodities boom engendered by the Korean War. Our investment in beef was wiped out in the postwar price collapse.

I did well in our isolated little high school, finishing at the top of my class. I won a scholarship to Yale, which thrilled and terrified me. How would I ever compete with students from fancy Northeastern prep schools?

When I went to Yale, my parents couldn’t take me up to New Haven. It was too far. So on that first Sunday, when all college students are supposed to call home, I got on the phone and told the operator I wanted to call Demopolis, Alabama. She said, “Okay, what’s your phone number?”

I said, “Five.”

She said, “Five what?”

“Just five.”

She said, “You mean 555–5555?”

“No,” I said politely, “just five.”

She said, “Boy, are you in college?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She blazed, “I don’t have to take this from you, college boy!”

Finally, persuaded I meant no disrespect, she gave it a try. This was back in the days when the Connecticut operator had to get the Atlanta operator who had to get the Birmingham operator who finally got the Demopolis operator on the phone.

My Connecticut operator spoke first. “I’ve got a boy on the line who says he’s trying to reach phone number five in Demopolis, Alabama.”

Without missing a beat, the Demopolis operator said, “Oh, they’re not home now. They’re at church.” The New Haven operator was stunned speechless.

As my college years sped by, I considered medical school, law school, and business school. I loved learning things, always have, and I certainly wanted to continue to do so. In the summer of 1964 I happened to go to work for Dominick & Dominick, where I fell in love with Wall Street. I had always wanted to know as much about current affairs as I could, and I was astounded that on the Street someone would pay me for figuring out that a revolution in Chile would drive up the price of copper. Besides, I was poor and wanted money in a hurry and it was clear there was plenty of money there.

At Yale I was a coxswain on the crew, and toward the end of my four years I was lucky enough to win an academic scholarship to Oxford, where I attended Balliol College and studied politics, philosophy, and economics. I became the first person from Demopolis, Alabama, to ever cox the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race on the Thames.

I began to use some of what I had learned in my summer job on Wall Street, investing my scholarship dollars before I had to turn them in to the Balliol bursar.

After Oxford I went into the army for a couple of years, where I invested the post commander’s money for him. Because of the bull market, I made him a tidy return. I came back to New York and went to work on Wall Street.

I eventually became the junior partner in a two-man offshore hedge fund, which is a sophisticated fund for foreign investors that both buys and sells short stocks, commodities, currencies, and bonds located anywhere in the world. I worked ceaselessly, making myself master as much as possible of the worldwide flow of capital, goods, raw materials, and information. I came into the market with six hundred dollars in 1968 and left it in 1980 with millions. There had been costs, however. I had had two short marriages to women who couldn’t understand my passion for hard work, something my brothers and I had inherited from our father. I couldn’t see the need for a new sofa when I could put the money to work for us in the market. I was convinced, and I still am, that every dollar a young man saves, properly invested, will return him twenty over the course of his life.

In 1980 I retired at the ripe old age of thirty-seven to pursue another career and to have some time to think. Working on Wall Street was too demanding to allow reflection. Besides, I had a dream. In addition to wanting another career in a different field, I wanted to ride my motorcycle around the entire planet.

I’d always wanted to see the world once I realized Demopolis, Alabama, really wasn’t the center of the Western World. My longtime lust for adventure probably came from the same source. But I saw such a trip not only as an adventure but also as a way of continuing the education I had been engaged in all throughout my life—truly understanding the world, coming to know it as it really is. I would see it from the ground up so that I would really know the planet on which I walked.

When I take a big trip, like a three-month drive across China, Pakistan, and India, the best way to go is by motorcycle. You see sights and smell the countryside in a way you can’t from inside the box of a car. You’re right out there in it, a part of it. You feel it, see it, taste it, hear it, and smell it all. It’s total freedom. For most travelers the journey is a means to an end. When you go by bike, the travel is an end in itself. You ride through places you’ve never been, experience it all, meet new people, have an adventure. Things don’t get much better than this.

I wanted a long, long trip, one that would wipe the slate clean for me. I still read The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and I wanted to wean myself away from the investment business. I wanted a change of life, a watershed, something that would mark a new beginning for the rest of my life. I didn’t know what I would do when I got back, but I wanted it to be different. I figured a 65,000-mile ride around the world ought to be watershed enough.

In 1980 it was difficult to circle the planet—you couldn’t get anywhere. There were twenty-five to thirty wars going on, and the Communists wouldn’t let you pass through Russia or China. If I were going to go around the world, it was going to be like everything I do: I was going to do it to excess or not at all. My dream was to cross six continents completely—west to east across China, east to west across Siberia, from the top of Africa to the horn, across Australia’s vast desert, and from the bottom tip of Argentina right up to Alaska.

In 1984 and 1986 I went to China to approach officials about crossing the country. I even rented a motorcycle, a little 250-cc Honda, and drove around Fujian province to see what I could learn. Fujian wasn’t all that big, maybe the size of Louisiana, but with 26 million inhabitants it had almost seven times Louisiana’s population. I drove and flew to several provincial capitals, and put two thousand miles on that bike as research. Then, at last, in 1988, I drove clear across China on my own bike.

Back in New York, I went to see the Russians, as I’d often done before. Russia was still the big stumbling block to a drive around the world. I wrote letters and got others to write testimonials on my behalf. I hit an absolute stone wall. I’d go down to Intourist, and Ivan Kalinin, the director, would tell me it wasn’t even conceivable. There’s nothing out there in Siberia, he’d say, except bears and tigers and jungle and forest. Nobody goes there, nobody wants to go there, and in fact, all the people the Russians sent there had wanted to come back.

To my astonishment, no Russian I’d met had ever been to Siberia or knew anyone who had. No Soviet citizen seemed to have a clue as to what was in his equivalent of our nineteenth-century Wild West, just as most New Yorkers today know nothing about Alaska. Take the train, the Russians told me—the Trans-Siberian Railroad—or fly. Only a fool or a madman would drive.

I finagled a proper introduction to the Russian ambassador in Washington, but even he was no help.

I was slowly getting the point. Siberia wasn’t like driving across the United States, one boring freeway after another. It would be different. Maybe they were right. Maybe there wasn’t much in the way of roads. But you couldn’t drive around the world without going through Siberia, and if I were to fulfill my dream, I’d have to find a way across.

The maps told me that Siberia was seven thousand miles wide, about twice the width of the United States. As far as anybody knew, it had fewer than 20 million people, about the size of New York State’s population, but nobody knew for sure because no one had ever gone there and counted noses. I figured it was no wilder than northern Canada and Alaska, which would be fine with me.

In a desperate moment, I took a videotape of my trip to China to Ivan, the Intourist official, hoping it would show him that I was serious. He smiled wearily as he took it, but he actually watched it. The next time I came, he said, “There is one group you could write.” He didn’t know the English name of it, but he looked up the group in his official handbook. He found that he couldn’t translate the group’s name, so he just wrote it down in Russian, along with the address and everything else. It seemed to be an esoteric group called Sovintersport. I took the paper home, Xeroxed it, and pasted it on an envelope containing a letter in English stating that I wanted to drive my motorcycle from the Pacific Ocean to Moscow and on to Poland.

I said I’d meet any conditions the group wanted to impose—stay wherever they wanted, take any escort they needed to send along, even soldiers—I didn’t care. I had to go. Whenever I looked at a globe, Russia’s huge landmass jumped out at me. If I didn’t go across Russia I couldn’t tell myself I had actually gone around the world, and if I didn’t go around the world, it wasn’t the trip I wanted to take. I didn’t have much hope. Over the years I’d sent out twenty letters like this one.

Months later—after I’d forgotten about sending the letter—an answer arrived. It said, “Dear Mr. Rogers: Yes, you can drive across Russia. When would you like to go?” Three or four lines, two paragraphs, and a Mr. Valeri Sungurov was saying yes.

I couldn’t believe it. It was as if I’d been sitting outside a door, knocking on it every day for nine years, and it never opened, and then one day the damn door did open and a guy said, “Oh, come on in.” How could he have known I’d been standing there for nine years?

I promptly flew over to Russia to meet the people who’d said yes. I kept asking Oksána, the translator, “Do these guys mean this?” and she would reply, “Yes, what’s the matter with you?”

“Is this really gonna happen?”

“Yes, it’s going to happen. Why are you so perplexed and curious and disbelieving and questioning?”

Sovintersport was a Russian sports group that sponsored one-of-a-kind international sporting events. I’d been beating up on the diplomatic and tourist channels, and here were these Russians who considered long-distance motorcycle riding a sport. Lesson number one in going around the world: Know enough about the culture you’re entering so you can maneuver in it; otherwise you’ll get locked out.

I was elated, still a little disbelieving—could you really trust the Russians? Would one hand know what the other had agreed to? I might arrive at the border and be turned away.

But this might be my only chance. This trip was something I desperately wanted to do. I was going around the world! Full of excitement, I flew back to New York in December of 1989, planning to set off the following March.

2NEW YORK

HOW’D YOU LIKE to go around the world?” I asked Tabitha, my companion over the past few years.

“They said yes?” she asked. She’d traveled with me across Pakistan and India the year before, two saddlebags and one bike, five thousand miles, and she’d loved it.

“I want to leave in March; that’s four months,” I said. “Are you game? Africa, the Sahara, Siberia, across the Andes, and this time you can go to China, too.”

“What about my job?” she said. It was a job she loved, administering the grants for a small foundation, a great job for someone not long out of college.

“Quit it,” I said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime trip.”

I loved the way she ran her hand through her long blond hair, scrunched up her face, and cocked her head to think.

“How can we carry enough stuff?” she asked. “Some of these places—we’d need parts, gas, extra tires.”

She was right. I’d driven BMW motorcycles for the past twenty years. Being hopeless mechanically, I wanted the bike that needed the fewest repairs. Still, when I looked at the worldwide list of BMW repair shops, it didn’t include Zaire or Siberia or China, stretches of thousands of miles along the world’s worst roads.

“The ideal would be to take two bikes,” I said.

“But I don’t know how to drive a bike,” she said.

“Maybe you could learn. There’s a motorcycle school in Queens.”

She winced, not answering. She loved riding with me as a passenger. The motorcycle associations said 90 percent of their riders were men, but that was changing. There were even a couple of magazines now devoted to women’s motorcycle riding. At twenty-three, Tabitha was as adventuresome as any woman I’d known. Now in my mid-forties, I would have twenty years of motorcycle driving experience to draw on; Tabitha would have her youth.

“If something happens to one bike,” I went on, “the trip won’t be over. You take the driving lessons, and we’ll both sign up for the BMW mechanics course so if we break down in the middle of the jungle, we can fix the bikes.”

While I had sometimes spied her in the background as she was growing up, I first really met Tabitha Estabrook when her mother, Biffie, an old friend, dragged her over to my house so I, who taught finance at the business school at Columbia University, could tell her it was in her best interest to go to business school.

She was a tall, leggy blonde who had grown up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where, at the all-female Nightingale-Bamford School on the East Side, she had absorbed the fashionable political ideas of her time and place: that in an enlightened society the state would fix almost all of society’s problems. The Republican Party was an enemy of decency, a temple to greed, possibly the Great Satan Himself. Her father had been a Navy pilot after college, and now he was practicing law. As a schoolgirl, caught in the middle of her parents’ bitter and nasty divorce, she found Nightingale-Bamford to be a surrogate parent at an important time, and she continued to have great affection for her alma mater. At Amherst she fashioned her own major, an interdisciplinary course featuring Islamic studies.

At that first meeting we were attracted to each other. Even though I taught at the business school, I told her what I tell all my students, that she shouldn’t go to business school, that it was a waste of time. Including opportunity costs, it would cost her or her parents more than a hundred thousand dollars, money better spent starting a business, which would succeed or fail, either of which would teach her more about business than would sitting in a classroom for two or three years listening to “learned professors” who had never run a business prate on about doing so.

I asked her out, one thing led to another, and we began to see a lot of each other.

We kept discussing the trip over the next few days, and she began to plan as if she were going. It was natural for me to take her along. I’d made many long-distance trips—across Europe, the United States, India, China, and to Alaska along the Alcan Highway—and often I’d taken my current woman friend.

However, while she continued to be enthusiastic, as the week wore on I began to wonder about her driving her own bike. Yes, she once traveled on the back of my motorcycle from San Francisco to New York, but five hundred miles a day on a superhighway was no preparation for what we were planning. Sure, the roads in Pakistan had been bad, but there too she’d been merely a passenger.

“I’ve changed my mind,” I announced one night at dinner. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to drive your own bike. It’s too difficult for a beginner. Remember how bad the roads were in India and Pakistan? The ones in China, Siberia, and Africa are going to be even rougher.”

She shot me a hard glance. “You don’t think I’m tough enough?”

“No, I didn’t say that. This is just a long, long trip. This is the longest and toughest ride of all.”

“I can do it.”

I sighed. What had I started? “A rider needs several thousand miles—several tens of thousands of miles—under her belt for something like this. The pace we’ll have to keep up, the terrible roads, the weeks—months—of driving day after day will wear you out. You need experience. I remember how I was as a beginner. One time I came off an interstate, for God’s sake, and shot off into a cornfield because I was green and wasn’t paying enough attention. The first time I was on a gravel road the wheel skidded out from under me. I had bruises and raspberries everywhere. Well, in many of these places, we’re going to wish we had something as good as a gravel road.”

“We’re not leaving for three months. I’ll practice before we go.”

I took a deep breath and launched in. “Look, I’m not explaining this well enough. On the China trip I set out from Turpan to Hami with a film crew in a bus behind me. This was to be two hundred fifty miles, a quick day. We didn’t take much food or water because we were assured the road was fine and we’d arrive in Hami before dark. Well, that day turned out to be seventeen hours across roads that were a nightmare. We couldn’t stop because there was nowhere to stop—no place to buy anything to eat. We were in the desert, so there was no water. It was like being halfway across a sea—you are in trouble no matter what you decide to do. Once we were out there, we had to push on. I think we’d all have died if we’d stopped. Two thirds of the way there, the film crew was ready to give up, and they were riding in the bus.”

She stared at me so fixedly, I wasn’t sure what she was thinking.

I continued. “There’re going to be times on this trip when we’ll have to bust a gut to keep going, and it’s going to be hard, the hardest thing you’ve ever done. Half the world—more than half the world—is still rough, wild, unpaved, savage.”

Her eyes seemed to stare through me as she thought this over. “You don’t think I’m tough enough.”

“I think you’re plenty tough, but you might not have enough experience, even by the time we set out, for such a long, hard trip.”

“I’ll work and make myself ready, Jim. We’ve traveled thousands of miles on your bike. I have a pretty good idea of what I’m getting into.”

“But the pace. I run six miles a day to keep fit. You know enough to know this will wear you out as well as beat you up. There’s no way you can build up enough stamina in just three months.”

“I think I can.”

“You also know I’m a real pusher sometimes. I have to be. Like on that Hami drive, when I had to make sure we made it. As a matter of fact, the same damn thing happened the next day. A simple two-hundred-fifty-mile drive from Hami to Turpan took another seventeen hours.”

“Jim, I’ll keep up.”

I was still not sure she knew what she was getting into, not sure I knew what I was getting into. “We can’t go around the world driving three or four hours a day.”

Now she gave me a direct look. “Jim, if you don’t want me to come, say so. Go alone.”

“No, I didn’t say that. I’d love you to come. It’ll be wonderful having you along. But we’re going over the world’s worst roads, through some of its harshest weather, across the Sahara and the Andes, through epidemics in places where there aren’t hospitals, telephones, airports, or even telegrams, where there are bandits, terrorists—who knows what.”

Over the next few days we looked on the darker side of the trip.

We discussed the possibility that we might get killed. Tabitha’s reaction was that she could get killed in New York, too. As for me, I expected to make it or otherwise I wouldn’t have planned to set out.

I had to figure out what to do with my investments while I was gone. Investment markets are volatile beasts, and you have to keep an eye on your positions. They’ve always fascinated me. One of the first things I noticed about them was that they went down as well as up, and I remembered how excited I was when I learned you could sell them short—sell what you don’t own, and profit from their fall as well as from their rise. Where we were going there wouldn’t be phones, telexes, or faxes, much less daily newspapers. Most of my investments had always been long term, so I didn’t need to make any major moves. I cut back on my shorts, and I kept no futures positions at all.

Then, early in 1990, most of my money was in utility stocks, U.S. government bonds, and foreign currencies, and I pretty much left it where it was. I owned utility stocks, mainly distressed ones with nuclear plants such as Illinois Power and Niagara Mohawk, because I was convinced they’d hit bottom and would solve their problems. I thought U.S. interest rates were headed south, so I was bullish—optimistic—on bonds and bearish—pessimistic—on the dollar, that is, I expected the price of bonds to rise and that of the dollar to fall. I figured the politicians would do everything they could to keep the economy going. Since they’re not very smart, all they really know how to do is cut interest rates. I bought foreign currencies, mainly certificates of deposit denominated in guilders or deutsche marks, reasoning that the dollar would go down as the politicians cut interest rates.

As an American, I hated to see this happen. But as an investor about to set off around the world, I had chanced upon the perfect investment scenario, because these were holdings I wouldn’t have to watch on a daily basis. I would make money if I were right, and I wouldn’t get wiped out if I were wrong, because government bonds and utility stocks might go down, but basically they were secure instruments over time, as were the currencies of sound countries.

Whenever I travel, because of who I am, I notice promising investment opportunities. While this wasn’t an investment trip by any means, I suspected I would visit promising stock exchanges. In addition to experiencing the world and its people firsthand in the vivid and close way you can on a motorcycle, I knew I would learn about the markets in Africa, China, and South America, which I felt might explode in the nineties. I was also curious about the markets in Australia and New Zealand. I’d made a lot of money for myself and others by investing in sleepy markets that exploded upward. In fact, one of my first stops on this trip was to be Austria, where I was to give a speech to the investment clients of Oberbank. A few years before, my investment in the Austrian stock market had quintupled in three years. I wondered if I would find more such places to invest. With the world throwing off the shackles of socialism and Communism, I figured not only was the time right, but the opportunity might not be repeated for decades, if ever again in my life.

3CROSSING EUROPE

AS THE WEEKS SPED BY Tabitha stuck with it. She was going to go. I still worried that the trip was wrong for her and that she would change her mind at the last minute, but March got closer and we kept moving forward as if we were going to do it.

We bought spare cables, mirrors, a carburetor, and extra Michelin tires. We packed rolls of 3 M’s magic construction tape, two inches wide, clear, and seemingly indestructible, my favorite item for emergency repairs. We got sleeping bags, rain suits, and an extra helmet. Tabitha hunted up the wedding band she’d used on our previous adventures. We’d learned it made traveling a lot simpler if she wore one. We bought maps and plotted routes, as AAA had no trip tickets for getting through the Central Asian Republics, Siberia, and the Sahara. We doped out ways to get money into places without American Express offices and where the sight of a traveler’s check would produce suspicious stares. I battened down my office, and I made sure someone would look after my house while I was away. There were vaccinations to take and visas to obtain.

However, I wasn’t going to get any letters of introduction, nor did I pack my address book. We made the choice to make this trip serendipitously and spontaneously. We wouldn’t depend on old friends, personal or business, to put us up and pull us into gatherings of their friends. It would be more of an adventure to meet our own new friends, friends of the road. In this way we would have a different adventure, maybe better, maybe worse. We would play the trip as we found it.