Obligatory Intro Post:
Are these supposed to be long? Well, I'm a story teller and a writer so here goes...
Pizza delivery was not my forte, but it was my job during my senior year of High School. My father was in the mob and I really hated his underworld lifestyle so I started taking criminal justice courses at my local community college and as a result did a presentation on the United States Coast Guard as part of a class assignment. I was completely fascinated by the Law Enforcement aspect of the service so I dumped off the pizza boxes and joined the service at the age of 19.
20 years later at the age of 40 I retired from the Coast Guard as a Chief Petty Officer. My specialty was counter narcotics and anti-terrorism force protection. I also did a ridiculous amount of search and rescue and alien migration interdiction operations throughout those 20 years. My shining moment in service was as the Logistics Section Chief for the Hurricane Katrina Operation where I worked in the same room as the Vice President, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Attorney General, and a few other folks along that tier. I've always loved helping others. This was a perfect career for me.
But my Coast Guard career had me spend many years sailing all over the world including 2 trips to Antarctica. So the travel bug and minimalistic lifestyle were already in my blood.
But there is more to the story....
While I was in the service, I became a professional boxing promoter in 2001. Guess I should mention that as it lends to the rest of my story and how I got here to Overland Bound. I've never known how not to work, so one job wasn't enough.
I started by working low level fights for a few years but ended up doing the biggest fights in the world. (Think HBO and Showtime PPV) Did that for around 15 years working with the top folks in the business. Yes, I've hung out with Don King in a Denali. Keep in mind I was still Active Duty in the Coast Guard during all of this.
As part of the fight promoting, I used the fledgeling social media sites (remember Facebook wasn't really online until 2004 and not open to the general public until 2006) to promote fights and became quite adept at it. Eventually to the point where I met some fight fans who were filmmakers in Hollywood and they asked me for help on social media promoting the films they were creating.
All of that went quite well so I ended up starting my own company nearly 8 years ago which focuses on social media marketing. This allows me to do my work from anywhere in the world as long as I have an Internet connection. My clients include folks from small family owned concerns to a Fortune 500 company where I run their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Life has been good. My wife and I have one child together (20 months old who has been a full-time traveler since birth) and 4 older kids from a previous marriage that we both are very close with.
In February 2014 my wife and I sold everything but the business and bought a 40' Diesel RV and started traveling full-time. We typically move around 250 miles every two weeks. In addition to the RV we have a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon Unlimited which we dubbed "GUARDIAN". We started blogging about our adventures at RVWanderlust (for the RV journey) and Jeepsies (for the Jeep adventures). I'd link them but I wouldn't want to break any forum rules on my first post here. So I'll let you do the sleuthing if you are interested.
It was actually my wife that came up with the idea to overland. Actually, she wants to visit every country on the planet that the State Department doesn't say you'll die in. I think there are currently 185 of them. So I think eventually that's the goal. But for now we're just getting our feet wet into the Overlanding Community.
I ran across Overland Bound while doing research on international travel in a Jeep. YouTube was my friend and I ended up on one of Michael's videos about the map feature which stuck with me. I watched it twice. On the second watching, my wife was eavesdropping and said, "You should join that." So here I am.
What are our plans? Well, for now to start prepping our 2014 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon Unlimited for Overlanding. Right now it is set up as a moderate rock crawler / daily driver. But we are actively in the process of converting it into more of a full-time overlanding vehicle.
Our first purchase was our ARB 50QT Fridge/Freezer. Our second was a roof rack, a RTT, and an awning which we'll be getting in September. We've already ordered and paid for all of that business. So we're pretty stoked! We were planning on hitting up Overland Expo East this year, but the timing isn't going to work out well for us. So we'll be devouring the content those who make it there put out.
Anyway, that's how we ended up here. We became Overland Bound Member #OB14045 today, and we're really impressed with the site. I can see us becoming supporters of some level very soon. Well done to the entire Overland Bound team!
We genuinely look forward to making friends here and meeting up with folks all over the country /world. Currently we're on a 13 state, 11 month, 2 country tour we've dubbed the Western Mountain Loop Trip. It's been incredible so far and we're only about half way through.
Right now we're in the middle of nowhere Montana. By Saturday we'll be at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Medora, North Dakota.
So if you can friend people on here, feel free to send me a friend request or follow or whatever. Shoot me a message, get to know us. We really do love meeting other like minded adventurers and travelers everywhere we go. For us, Overlanding is just the next logical step in our journey to visit the world.
Eric aka Jeepsies
(Brittany and Caspian say hi too!)
