My Moldovan adventures have now come and gone, and I’m gearing up to take off back to the States, my home and my team. Greg and I wound up hitching a ride from Galati, Romania to Giurgiulesti, Moldova with some older dude with one of the most awesome cars I’ve ever ridden in. Greg was […]
It’s really been quite a whirlwind over the past couple days, replete with sleep deprivation, missed connections and uncomfortable car rides. My travel buddy has been holding up remarkably well, and I’m glad to have him along for this trip. I suppose he’s the one who asked for an adventure, and that’s pretty much what […]
Finally, this is officially a travel blog. It only took roughly 44 hours to get from my home in Asheville, to our first BJJ travel destination in Bulgaria. All of my flight connections happened remarkably as-planned, as did our bus connection in Bucharest to get down to the Black Sea coast here in Bulgaria. My […]
I think that when people hear the word “sustainability,” it typically conjures up images of dreadlocked, stinky white folk putting in a marginal level of labor on a half-hearted “urban farm” that everyone forgets about when June hits. Or, perhaps you might be thinking of a good farm-to-table restaurant in town that serves organic food? […]
Meet Greg. Greg showed up at our gym a few months back with absolutely no grappling experience whatsoever. Greg kind of wandered in and out of the gym on an irregular basis for a few weeks before he decided he would accompany me to a Clark Gracie seminar down in South Carolina. On the way […]
In Moldova I did all of my work as a volunteer, which means I didn’t get paid by my students at all. The Peace Corps gave me a stipend which was based on the average teacher’s salary in the country, and I was otherwise free to try and keep myself occupied through service. Our approach […]
All right… since this is a travel blog after all, I should probably talk a little bit about my itinerary and my expectations. Let’s do that now… I’ll be flying out of the Greenville, SC airport in the morning of August 8th. I’ll have a ~10-hour layover in Washington, DC, and I plan on spending […]
Katia’s story represents one of my many failures in jiu-jitsu. As the old adage goes, “you either win or you learn,” but I can’t help but feel that we actually lost something in this case, and as a result, I feel like this loss was far more profound than the lesson learned. When I started […]
OK, I have to start out by saying that this is not your “traditional BJJ travel blog” (if there is such a thing) but a BJJ travel blog it is, nonetheless! If I were to create my own category, this would be, “A BJJ Travel Blog With a Lot of Background Stories.” So, keeping that […]
