free rommy New York → Kansas City → San Francisco → Stockholm → Berlin

Projects & Adventures

A rundown of all the major adventures, journeys, personal challenges, and ridiculous stretch goals I'm setting for myself. Maybe noting them in this blog will hold me to some of them.

fd.ly

Coming soon...oooh the suspense!

Winter 2010 Rickshaw Run

On January 1st, 2010, after months of preparation, charity fundraising, and Skype conference calls, I, along with Seema and Chris took off from Pokhara, Nepal and drove over 2000 miles (3500 kilometers) to Cochin, India...in a tuk tuk.

Read more about it at http://tuktukgoose.com.

Read one work by every Nobel Prize laureate

A goal I set for myself in 2008, my goal is to read one work by every great writer that has won the Nobel Prize in literature. There are so many books in the world, I might as well use the Swedish mother of all prizes as a starting point for narrowing it down to the great ones. I've read the ones in bold.

• 2009 - Herta Müller
• 2008 - Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio - The Book of Flights
• 2007 - Doris Lessing
• 2006 - Orhan Pamuk - Snow
• 2005 - Harold Pinter
• 2004 - Elfriede Jelinek
• 2003 - J. M. Coetzee
• 2002 - Imre Kertész
• 2001 - V. S. Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas
• 2000 - Gao Xingjian
• 1999 - Günter Grass
• 1998 - José Saramago - Blindness, The Double
• 1997 - Dario Fo
• 1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
• 1995 - Seamus Heaney
• 1994 - Kenzaburo Oe
• 1993 - Toni Morrison
• 1992 - Derek Walcott
• 1991 - Nadine Gordimer
• 1990 - Octavio Paz
• 1989 - Camilo José Cela
• 1988 - Naguib Mahfouz - The Beginning and The End, The Cairo Trilogy, Midaq Alley
• 1987 - Joseph Brodsky
• 1986 - Wole Soyinka
• 1985 - Claude Simon
• 1984 - Jaroslav Seifert
• 1983 - William Golding - Lord of the Flies
• 1982 - Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
• 1981 - Elias Canetti
• 1980 - Czeslaw Milosz
• 1979 - Odysseus Elytis
• 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
• 1977 - Vicente Aleixandre
• 1976 - Saul Bellow
• 1975 - Eugenio Montale
• 1974 - Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson
• 1973 - Patrick White
• 1972 - Heinrich Böll
• 1971 - Pablo Neruda
• 1970 - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
• 1969 - Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot
• 1968 - Yasunari Kawabata
• 1967 - Miguel Angel Asturias
• 1966 - Shmuel Agnon, Nelly Sachs
• 1965 - Mikhail Sholokhov
• 1964 - Jean-Paul Sartre
• 1963 - Giorgos Seferis
• 1962 - John Steinbeck - A lot. See below.
• 1961 - Ivo Andric
• 1960 - Saint-John Perse
• 1959 - Salvatore Quasimodo
• 1958 - Boris Pasternak
• 1957 - Albert Camus - L'étranger
• 1956 - Juan Ramón Jiménez
• 1955 - Halldór Laxness
• 1954 - Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises
• 1953 - Winston Churchill - The Gathering Storm
• 1952 - François Mauriac
• 1951 - Pär Lagerkvist
• 1950 - Bertrand Russell
• 1949 - William Faulkner
• 1948 - T.S. Eliot
• 1947 - André Gide
• 1946 - Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf, Demian, Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund
• 1945 - Gabriela Mistral
• 1944 - Johannes V. Jensen
• 1943 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
• 1942 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
• 1941 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
• 1940 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
• 1939 - Frans Eemil Sillanpää
• 1938 - Pearl Buck
• 1937 - Roger Martin du Gard
• 1936 - Eugene O'Neill
• 1935 - The prize money was with 1/3 allocated to the Main Fund and with 2/3 to the Special Fund of this prize section
• 1934 - Luigi Pirandello
• 1933 - Ivan Bunin
• 1932 - John Galsworthy
• 1931 - Erik Axel Karlfeldt
• 1930 - Sinclair Lewis - The Jungle
• 1929 - Thomas Mann
• 1928 - Sigrid Undset
• 1927 - Henri Bergson
• 1926 - Grazia Deledda
• 1925 - George Bernard Shaw
• 1924 - Wladyslaw Reymont
• 1923 - William Butler Yeats
• 1922 - Jacinto Benavente
• 1921 - Anatole France
• 1920 - Knut Hamsun - Growth of the Soil
• 1919 - Carl Spitteler
• 1918 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
• 1917 - Karl Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan
• 1916 - Verner von Heidenstam
• 1915 - Romain Rolland
• 1914 - The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
• 1913 - Rabindranath Tagore
• 1912 - Gerhart Hauptmann
• 1911 - Maurice Maeterlinck
• 1910 - Paul Heyse
• 1909 - Selma Lagerlöf
• 1908 - Rudolf Eucken
• 1907 - Rudyard Kipling
• 1906 - Giosuè Carducci
• 1905 - Henryk Sienkiewicz
• 1904 - Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray
• 1903 - Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
• 1902 -Theodor Mommsen
• 1901 - Sully Prudhomme

Read all of John Steinbeck's works

My favorite author. I was going to try to read all his books in 2005 before the year ended. That proved a bit ambitious. The ones in bold are the ones I've read.

• Cup of Gold (1927)
• The Pastures of Heaven (1932)
• The Red Pony (1933)
• To a God Unknown (1933)
• Tortilla Flat (1935)
• The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath (1936)
• In Dubious Battle (1936)
• Of Mice and Men (1937)
• The Long Valley (1938)
• The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
• Forgotten Village (1941)
• Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941)
• The Moon Is Down (1942)
• Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (1942)
• Cannery Row (1945)
• The Wayward Bus (1947)
• The Pearl (1947)
• A Russian Journal (1948)
• Burning Bright (1950)
• The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951)
• East of Eden (1952)
• Sweet Thursday (1954)
• The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957)
• Once There Was A War (1958)
• The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)
• Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962)
• America and Americans (1966)
• Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969)
• Viva Zapata! (1975)
• The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)
• Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989)

Drive a motorcycle across Europe

From Lisbon, Portugal to eastern Turkey.

Visit every European capital once

• Albania/Tirana
• Andorra/Andorra
• Armenia/Yerevan
• Austria/Vienna
• Azerbaijan/Baku
• Belarus/Minsk
• Belgium/Brussels
• Bosnia and Herzegovina/Sarajevo
• Bulgaria/Sofia
• Croatia/Zagreb
• Cyprus/Nicosia
• Czech Republic/Prague
• Denmark/Copenhagen
• Estonia/Tallinn
• Northern East Prussia/Kaliningrad
• Finland/Helsinki
• France/Paris
• Georgia/Tbilisi
• Germany/Berlin
• Greece/Athens
• Hungary/Budapest
• Iceland/Reykjavik
• Ireland/Dublin
• Italy/Rome
• Kazakhstan/Astana
• Kosovo/Pristina
• Latvia/Riga
• Liechtenstein/Vaduz
• Lithuania/Vilnius
• Luxembourg/Luxembourg City
• Macedonia//Skopje
• Malta/La Valletta
• Moldova/Chisinau
• Monaco/Monaco
• Montenegro/Podgorica
• Netherlands/Amsterdam
• Norway/Oslo
• Poland/Warsaw
• Portugal/Lisbon
• Romania/Bucharest
• Russia/Moscow
• San Marino/City of San Marino
• Serbia/Belgrade
• Slovakia/Bratislava
• Slovenia/Ljubljana
• Spain/Madrid
• Sweden/Stockholm
• Switzerland/Bern
• Turkey/Ankara
• Ukraine/Kiev
• United Kingdom/London
• Vatican City/Vatican City