Hey Team,

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted an update but there is BIG news this time around! Bigger than Amtrekker? Who knows…maybe!

So what’s the new adventure? After some serious pondering I figured:

1) I think I nailed unemployment pretty well. Pretty tough to do homeless vagrant better than I did…if you don’t mind me saying. Something I haven’t tried in awhile? Employment.

and

2) I learned an awful lot about the Internet, New Media and the social web while wandering around the country like a technologically advanced hobo.

So, it only seemed natural that I unilaterally decree myself the “Greatest Employee in the World,” start a new website and hold a WORLD WIDE employment contest where companies can compete over who “gets” to employ yours truly! As shamefully egotistical as that sounds I think this is actually going to be a REALLY fun adventure. Check out the website at: http://www.greatestemployeeintheworld.com or…if you’re prone to carpal tunnel the acronym redirects too. http://www.GEitW.com

The idea is that companies will enter the contest by making a job offer and posting a short video about their company. (That way even the companies that don’t win get plenty of free exposure.) Then visitors to the site will get to vote the job offers up and down and after two months the top 7 offers and 3 wildcard picks will be interviewed on video and those videos will be placed online for one more week of voting to bring the top 10 down to the final four. After that I’ll make the final decision!

The winner gets…um…me. I’ll take the winning job offer in their company for a six month contract WHILE I produce a short form documentary every week about the job, the company, the experience…think Amtrekker meets Dirty Jobs! Basically the “winner” will get two employees for the price of one (me doing said job and me being the social media community building, blog writing, documentary making guy that you all know and love) PLUS a mountain of buzz to start things off right.

Here’s why I’m so freaking excited about this: A mid-sized company without a huge marketing budget could get a GREAT deal (or I could see a larger company just using a tiny chunk of their marketing budget to do something new and original in this space)! AND, I get to move somewhere and do something I’ve never done before while producing entertaining videos and blogs to share with all of you guys! To paraphrase Michael Scott, “That’s a win-win…win.”

So if you have a twitter, facebook, blog, podcast, website or even something bigger I’d be forever grateful if you’d help me spread the word! You can even download the press release here if you want to REALLY help spread the word! Also, if you own your own business that could use some attention (or if you know someone who does) here’s the link to enter the contest!

Thank you all SO much for paying attention to Amtrekker and I have a feeling this could be even more fun!

Thanks Team!

Brett.

Enjoy the New Year’s Eve shenanigans! Here’s my gift to you (inspired by a desire to vindicate myself in the face of that crazy SOB William Shatner).

“Amtrekker travels to Beulah, MI to create a crop circle!

Failures and ethnically insensitive impressions ensue.”

I’m done.

Brett.

Cruise ships are not a form of transportation. They’re more like huge freaking hotels that you’re locked inside of for 16 hours at a time with a few thousand of your closest friends (provided you don’t have many actual close friends), and when they finally open the gates, you’ve been mysteriously teleported to yet another strange city. I guess teleportation is technically a form of transportation…but let’s not dwell. Here’s my point:

You can’t go around comparing cruise ships to airplanes just because it makes your environmental impact argument sound better. Hell yeah it takes less fuel to fly from Ft. Lauderdale to Grand Cayman than it does to take a boat. Know why? Cause you’re transporting 200 people…not five THOUSAND people in a huge freaking floating city that allows for more entertainment and adventure in exotic locales than the average working class family would have the opportunity to experience during their one and only week of vacation a year by any other means.

And for those people, cruising is perfect. I can’t imagine a better way to get a smattering of everything a great vacation has the potential to offer. Not everyone can drop everything and travel for extended periods. (And for that matter it would be kind of a bummer if they could…who would sell you all the knick-knacks you don’t need at various ports if everyone were off globetrotting?)

In my case, although I had a great time on the cruise, it’s tough to get out of the Amtrekking mindset. I probably got just as much out of wandering around Ft. Lauderdale watching passed out drunk people pulled off of buses while I make phone calls trying to figure out where I’m going to sleep. Once a hobo, always a hobo?

It’s really tough to explain. I think it comes down to chaos. I crave the unknown and live for those moments when the New Jersey beach patrol skids to a stop on their ATVs to tell me that I need to find a better place to sleep than underneath their pier. I’m not going to pretend that those are always fun times. In fact, for they most part they REALLY suck. But…that’s where the best stories come from.

Enough rambling. In short, are you traveling with friends and/or family just trying to relax and maybe see a few sights with your limited time off? Are you looking for an easy all-in-one solution to getting trashed with friends and not having to drive back to the hotel? Do you love seeing new sights but would like to have your hand held in the process? Take a cruise.

Want to explore the world, learn a little more about humanity and collect stories? Want to contract an especially virulent form of drug resistant tuberculosis? Take a bus.

I’m done.

Brett.

I’ve been sitting here staring at this blank page for a little over twenty minutes now trying to decide what I’d like to write about the Princess Cruise that a handful of twittering travel folk were invited on (and I got to tag along for some reason). I think one of the big problems is that I had more fun than I expected. It’s a tough blow when all of the stupid cruise ship jokes you have prepared don’t quite fit the situation any more. (Case in point, I didn’t get to spend all week fighting sunburned, overweight old men for the pole position at the buffet so my Formula-1 joke is out the window.)

Most importantly however, I’m just not used to writing about great experiences. You guys know better than anyone that 90% of the content on this site is a direct result of me having done something colossally stupid and the mad scramble to either rectify the situation or, barring that, at least come out relatively unscathed. If I have any complaints it’s that I kind of felt like I had my hand held for a week and I wasn’t given the opportunity to fall overboard, flounder at sea for a few days and finally get rescued by the Coast Guard just shy of losing my leg (and/or sea mammal virginity) to an over eager Caribbean dolphin.

It’s not that there isn’t plenty to say about the last week, I just felt like I should probably start with an overview. So here it is:

My Overview (in haiku):

Met some great people
Food, folks, fun and alcohol
…lots of alcohol

Bahamas were dull
But I won a ping-pong match
Ha! Take that, David

At Cayman Islands
Snorkeling distracted me
From offshore account

Cozumel is home
To some huge Mayan ruins
And the biggest effing mosquitos you’ve ever seen in your life! (How many syllables was that?)

Roatan has ghosts
I’m told they steal people’s pants
For sure the best stop

May have ADD
Beaches get old fast for me
…what was I saying?

More to come, friends! I’ll try to write a post for each stop, one for the ship, maybe even one on the environmental impact (if everyone else is doing it then I should probably jump on the bandwagon), AND…maybe I’ll get Justin a weirdthings.com post on those pant’s stealing ghosts.

I’m done.

Brett.

I could have made this post WAY longer than it would need to be to satisfy everyone’s curiosity and, as such, it may not make a ton of sense (Let’s be honest, how many of these do anyway?) but at least it was cathartic. As always, thanks for listening.

Hey Team,

I hate Best Buy.

I know what you’re saying, “Brett, you’re such a nice guy. I can’t imagine you being judgmental enough to not be willing to walk a mile in their shoes and try to see things from their perspective. Surely, they aren’t as bad as you would have us believe. In fact, I would venture to say that you are jumping to hasty conclusions and that you’ve probably had perfectly respectable encounters with Best Buy in the past and somehow you must be letting a single negative experience color your views of a fine upstanding company. Frankly, I expected more empathy from you, Brett.”

To you, I have only three things to say.

1. You talk too much.

2. You sound pompous.

3. I HATE Best Buy.

You guys already know that I’m currently somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean thanks to a generous offer from Princess Cruises and Gary at Everything-Everywhere.com. What you may not know is that I was REALLY looking forward to putting some videos together for both the Amtrekker site and Everything-Everywhere.com (and who knows, maybe even WeirdThings.com). It’s well documented that the video camera that served me so well during my Amtrekker travels met with an untimely demise so I figured now was the time to finally put out the dough and upgrade from a worthless pile of parts to something a little higher end.

Traveling through TSA with electronics is kind of a pain but luckily inspiration struck! I could use Best Buy’s brilliant buy-it-online-but-pick-it-up-in-store policy and instead of picking it up in California I could just pick it up in Florida and save me an entire trip across the country with a new piece of equipment. Genius!

Things went wrong pretty much from the beginning. I couldn’t find my credit card so it seemed like the perfect time to try out Bank of America’s “Safe Shop” service, which generates a one-time use credit card number so you can make “safe” purchases online and not have to worry about anyone stealing either you card number or identity.

Sounds great, right? The big problem there is that when you show up at a Best Buy in Florida and give them your credit card (an apparently MANDATORY part of the process) the number wont match. Furthermore, it turns out that arguing with successively more important employees (up to the corporate level) for an hour and a half wont help. Also, opening your computer, going to the Bank of America website and SHOWING them the “electronic credit card” (WITH MATCHING NUMBERS!) wont work. Instead you’ll just get progressively more frustrated as you stare at the video camera you’re dying to try out that is less than four feet from you and yet, forever out of reach.

Finally, in a fit of impotent frustration I decided that it was a lost cause and I was willing to do whatever it took to get the camera. The only option? Cancel that transaction and repurchase the camera in store. BUT, you know what happens when you cancel a sizable purchase? The authorization stays on your card thereby using up enough available credit to prevent you from running through a second, equally sizable, purchase!

The most mysterious/so-frustrating-I-wanted-to-gouge-out-a-complete-stranger’s-eyes part? If I wanted to ship it to my home I wouldn’t have even had to SHOW my card. But I wasn’t in California. I was in Florida. And jumping on a cruise ship the next day.

I hate Best Buy.

I’m done.

Brett.

You know who’s amazing? James Randi. Now that I think about it, I suppose that’s why he’s called The Amazing Randi. Huh. Go figure. If you don’t know who I’m talking about then let me give you a couple broad strokes. Randi is a retired performer who used to be a magician and a mentalist and currently heads the James Randi Educational Foundation. You may have heard of his Million Dollar Challenge, which offers a prize to anyone who can prove under scientific rigor that they have some type of extra-sensory perception. All you have to do is be able to say what it is you can do and under what laboratory conditions you can perform said talent. It’s been available for decades now. Guess how much the foundation has given away in the name of the challenge. That’s right. Zero.

Pretty awesome right? It’s great to know that someone is out there trying to prove that “real” psychics are more often than not, ridiculous amoral performers preying on people who miss their dead relatives deeply. In short, James Randi is one of my personal heroes.

And…I got to meet him at dinner the other night! It was a pre-Carl Sagan Day dinner in South Florida filled with skeptics and snapping dressers. (I was wearing a t-shirt. I probably should have been at the kid’s table.) My childhood hero was looking a little haggard but still impressively spry and hip considering not only his advanced age but also the fact that he is neck deep in a radiation battle with colon cancer.

I sat about eleven people away from him on an ‘L’ shaped tabled and spent most of dinner either talking to a painfully pompous guy next to me or candidly watching Randi’s every move. Finally, dinner ended and the time for the group to mingle was upon us.

I met a few very cool people (whose names escape me right now but I none the less enjoyed my conversations with) until finally I had made my way around to the man of the hour. Justin, the friend who took me to the dinner (and editor weirdthings.com) had worked with Randi recently on a couple of projects, so he made the introductions.

Up close Randi looked even more fragile, but considering the amount of respect and reverence I was carrying with me he might as well of been ten feet tall and dressed like the Beast Master, primed and ready to kick the collective asses of any people that dare insult his ferrets. Our lengthy discussion went a little something like this.

Justin: “Hi, Randi. This is my friend Brett. He spent two years traveling around America crossing crazy things off of a fifty item life list.”

Brett: “Hello!”

Randi: “Oh! Look, they have food over there.”

(That’s what he said as he walked away…)

I’m done.

Brett.

There’s a lot to say about the Boston trip (and I’ll post most of it over the next couple days) but the real action happened during the cavalcade of errors that was my trek back to California. With that in mind…

After an early morning flight from Beantown, USA, I landed in San Francisco around noon with every intention of being back in Fresno by 4pm at the latest. Unfortunately, it was shortly after landing that I discovered I had hit the first of many snags in the day to come. You see, I’m not exactly what some folks would call “a planner” or “intelligent,” and as such, even though I knew this trip was coming a month in advance I still never thought to see if I had a ride from SFO to my car (which happened to be a full 45 minutes away from the airport).

During the glory days of Amtrekker I wouldn’t have thought twice about slinging my backpack over my shoulder and walking to the nearest public transportation, but this time around there was a new wrinkle. Arizona, my seven month old pup and the world’s greatest mutt, had escorted me to Boston for the week so suddenly I had to navigate the world with a backpack, a dog and a very awkward travel crate.

After a few phone calls I managed to find a ride into the city but technically no closer to my actual car. That’s when I decided to suck it up and head to the BART station. Apparently, however, they have a no dogs allowed policy…unless it’s a Seeing Eye Dog. To compensate, I put Zona’s backpack on and hoped it would confuse people long enough to jump on a train and watch the doors slide shut.

And that was the last time things worked out in my favor.

Eventually the train stopped in Pleasanton, CA and I realized I was still about 4 miles from where my car was parked at a friend’s house. After a long doleful sigh I thought to myself, “What the hell! I’m the freaking Amtrekker! Let’s do this!” I slid my pack on, tied Arizona’s leash to the waist strap, slung the crate over my back and started walking. I’m pretty sure it was less than a half-mile before I started hating life.

Arizona kept wanting to tied up my legs by running around me in circle sniffing everything in sight and the crate, despite the laws of physics, continued to get heavier and more awkward…but I trudged on. Then, what did I see?!

A bus stop, yes, but more importantly a Wal-Mart shopping cart just sitting there beneath the shelter begging to have a back pack and crate tossed inside! Then I though, “Why not?” and tossed Arizona in for good measure. Suddenly I was freed from my burdens and with a spring in my step and wheels beneath my feet I started to use the shopping cart as an impromptu skateboard. Now I was making great time! Suddenly the world got a little brighter.

However, being the responsible and loving dog owner that I am I started to get concerned that Zona didn’t have enough space in the cart to lay comfortably while I skated us to glory. I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and started trying to shove my pack underneath while making sure AZ didn’t make a break for it. I was pretty engrossed in the whole process. Which explains why when I looked up I TOTALLY wasn’t expected to see a cop standing over me.

“What are you doing?”

My only response was hysterical laughter. How exactly DO I go about explaining this?

“You know it’s an arrestable offense to take a shopping cart.” More laughter from my end. “I know it sounds silly but these companies lose a ton of money to stolen carts.”

“Well, to be fair officer, I didn’t so much take it from where it was supposed to be as move it slightly further from where it was supposed to be…”

“You’re in possession of it. It’s right here.” He pointed down emphatically. “With your dog in it.”

“I think I see what you’re saying.” I smiled again, hoping to keep things light.

I spent the next several minutes relaying how I came to end up there with my dog and her crate in a shopping cart while he had my ID checked to make sure I didn’t have any warrants out for my arrest. (Good thing I got that thing in Utah all cleared up. )

Eventually he decided I was mostly harmless and called me a cab. I hate cabs.

Luckily my friend that wasn’t able to pick me up earlier showed up right before the yellow van did.

Problem solved.

I’m done.

Brett.

Today’s post wasn’t written by me. Instead, the story of Beaumont comes from Christine S. a.k.a. The Brass Bunny. Thanks for the help, Christine! If you’re looking for the explanation for what the heck is going on here…click here.

Now, all that’s left for me to do is to step out of the limelight.

I’m done.

Brett.

Crustaceans and Rubber bands
by Christine S. a.k.a The Brass Bunny

My friend lives in Maine. That’s right Maine, the place that ass kisses Canada and where
the image of abundant seafood and lonely men come to mind. But this short tale is not about lonely men on a fishing boat finding love. Nay! This is about seafood dammit! More precisely about a rather unbelievably large lobster named Beaumont.

In my mail one day came this package. I was not expecting a package and I was wary. My first instinct was to think it was a bomb. Hey, I’m an irrational hermit who jumps to such conclusions. Needless to say I managed, before the blind panic set in, to look at who sent it. I was relieved to find it was from my friend in Maine. He had sent me a surprise. He had sent me, you guessed it, a giant ass lobster.

Now, I am not sure why he had sent me this or why he thought he should but he did. More intriguing though was the note I found attached to the lobster, who was also wearing a tiny top hat. Note is as follows:

Hey,

Thought you would enjoy this very big lobster my friend Tim caught the other day.
Tim was so surprised when he caught it that he had to take a picture of it. Tim is stupid like that.
Anyway, he took the picture before banding him and in the course of posing with the lobster, and don’t ask me how, one of the claws grabbed his pecker.
Yep, thing had a vice grip on his crotch like you wouldn’t believe. Thankfully, we got a picture of it, I put a copy of it in with the lobster.
We managed to get the lobster off him without damaging the claw, which is the best meat in my opinion.
Tim had to have a few stitches and has, so I hear, one hell of a bruise. Guess that will teach him that God made rubber bands for a reason.
Anyway, he let me have the “cursed thing” as he puts, Tim is also a drama queen. Well, I hope you enjoy it he is a big one.

P.S. By “big one” I mean the lobster, not Tim’s penis.

P.P.S. Oh, and I named him Beaumont, again the lobster, not the penis.

So, my friend in Maine decided, in his infinite wisdom, to send me this mammoth sized, penis pinching lobster. Not only that but to dress it in a top hat and give it a name. I don’t know if this was the proper motivation need to convince me to consume the beast. But, who am I to pass up free giant sized lobster anyways? Nobody with pride, that’s for sure. So I sent my friend back an email thanking him:

Hi -

Beaumont was a fine and tasty lobster. We ate like kings. All appendages spared. Enjoyed the picture, its on my fridge. Tim is kind of cute, is he single?

Later – C.

Here’s another little guest post treat to hold you over. This one is comparing Portland to Seattle as a result of the recent road trip. Feel free to leave a comment or two over at the Amateur Traveler site.

Here’s the link

And don’t forget about yesterday’s post!

I’m done.

Brett.

Here’s the thing about how I write posts for Amtrekker now days. I usually get an idea while I’m in the middle of doing something else that I can’t just drop so, like a respectable and professional writer, I whip out my trusty notebook, jot down a few lines and open up a Word document first chance I get. The trouble is, it seems Future Brett never speaks the same language as Past Brett.

Case in point: The only line I gave myself to go off of for this post was two words long. It said, “Rubber bands.” It’s even underlined. So…apparently there’s something that Past Brett really wants to say about rubber bands.

I’ve been wracking my brain for the last two days trying to figure out what the heck I was trying to tell myself. The only clues I have are:

1) I know where I was and what I was doing when I wrote the note and

2) I know it has something to do with travel.

As much as I love the movie Memento…this is kind of pissing me off.

That said, I suppose it could be worse. I once wrote myself a note that said:

Q: Why is he dead?

A: Crustaceans.

I would LOVE to know what that was supposed to be about. Whatever the thought behind that was I bet Past Brett was really proud of it and couldn’t wait to share it with the world.

In fact! I’m so curious, if someone wants to write me a post that would fit in with either of those notes I would be more than happy to put it up on the site as a featured guest post! That’s a great idea! This could be really fun! Send me your story (it doesn’t have to be long…I try to keep my stuff under 500 words) by Friday and I’ll pick out the best ones and let the world see what could have been!

Maybe with the help of Present You, Past Brett will finally get his message out!

I’m done.

Present Brett.