I first heard Alex Banayan’s voice on Big Questions with Cal Fussman, a podcast and thought it was just another interview. Not far into that interview I realized it was so much more than that. Alex had written a book. Not just any book, The Third Door. Not very far into the podcast I decided I had to buy this book. By the end of the podcast I could not wait to get out of the car and pre-order the book. When I was offered a chance to read a galley copy I jumped on it. 

When the copy arrived I knew it would be difficult to find time to read, but I opened it and started. Then I couldn’t put it down. So I didn’t. Cover to cover I read every word without stopping. Alex’s incredible journey to make this book was as fascinating as the interviews he made to write the book. 

The gems in this book kept on coming. Like proverbs for the modern age. In so many ways the story reverberated with things I have found over the course of my own life. Except I didn’t learn them from Jessica Alba or Quincy Jones. I may have Spielberged my way into more than one place, but I never Spielberged into Spielberg. But the story, and the lessons, didn’t stop there. Alex took the third door to the mysteries of life and how to be successful.

There are so many nuggets throughout the book it is amazing. So what is the secret? Well, what works for one person may not work for another. Maybe not even for anyone else but it still works and there are lessons to be learned. Tim may do it one way, Elliott another, Larry still a third way, Cal may do it with a grandma’s best goulash recipe but at the end of the day, and the end of the book, there’s a way for you, too. 

Kiss more frogs, get a bigger pipeline, don’t just wonder, make it happen. The secret is in the book. But you have to read it to find it.

It releases in a few days, but until then you can preorder it on Amazon by clicking here.

As I struggle to become more technically savvy to keep this from happening again I haven’t yet figured out how to just send an email to subscribers but I think making a post will let people know, and those that are actual subscribers and not just weird automated malware providers will see this. I am not deleting everyone, though of the 50 or so names I’ve deleted so far I haven’t recognized any. If I accidentally delete you I’m apologizing in advance and asking you to re-subscribe. As a point of reference, I’ll try to finish this and post something new by 11 May.

So look for another post from me before next Friday and if you don’t see one, check back at byrdmouse.com. Thanks for your patience and understanding and we’ll talk again real soon.

On our trip to Poland back a few months I posted on Facebook that I was blowing out the carbs, in my fuel-injected, turbo-charged diesel. Car guys will get the fact that there is neither a need to blow out the carburetor nor a carburetor in my Jetta TDLie. Real car guys can probably correct me and tell me my Smokeswagon Diesel isn’t fuel-injected but as I said in the Facebook post: don’t harsh my mellow.

During that trip there were times I had the cruise set on 190 kph. With a family of four and luggage to boot in the vehicle. No, I’m not setting any land speed records, but come on, a four door sedan cruising at almost 120 mph. Not shabby by any measuring rod.

Mind you, my self-professed love of the original roadway is not all based on speed. There is a certain joy in humming along at 150 kph (about 90 mph) and just hitting the pedal on the right because you can. But it isn’t all love of speed. The fact that people will actually pass police cars is nice. Not shitting in your shorts when you see a police car on the side of the road while you’re doing 90 is ranking on the list, too.

Today I was popping down to Munich, about a 200 km drive that we made in 2 hours avoiding a 30 minute traffic jam, and I began to finalize my Autobahn Priority listing. All Mercedes want to be in front of the BMWs. All Beamers want to be in front of the Audis, and the Audis want to be in front of the VWs. I have yet to exactly place the Skodas, Fiats, and Alpha Romeos, and I left the American vehicles where they belong–off the list. Also not classified is who the VW wants to be in front of because as a VW driver myself, I would be polluting my statistical data set. I want to be in front of everybody, I’m just not driving there all the time.

Noticeably absent from the list is my favorite of all cars, the Porsche. Where do they fall in the traffic lanes of the autobahn? In the exact same spot the 500 pound gorilla sits: Wherever they want.

I never modeled my life after Uncle Doughnut, but to this very day no matter how full I am there is still room for hot Krispy Kreme doughnuts (and peach cobbler but that’s another story), and I love bread. There is a soft spot between my breastbone and my belt line for them. My affinity for these aren’t all because of him, but no doubt he had an impact.

Back to today’s email. It included a link to a 60 Minutes clip about Rick Steves. I had never heard of Rick or his brand of travel books. Then again, until I got here I’d never heard of Rothenburg and didn’t know why my Introduction to Bavaria instructor mentioned that all Americans want to go there. But Rick’s explanation of why Americans should see Europe resonates with me. It resonates because even before I heard him say it, it is my own.

Early on he says that if when you travel the experience isn’t to your liking, change your liking. At about 3:50 in the video it gets really good, and at 4:30 the hook was set. I stopped watching news on the television back in the 90s but I knew 1) the question she was about to ask, and 2) his answer at 4:30. This is why I wanted to move my family to Europe, to get them out of the country to see what the rest of the world is and how it works.

I saw part of the world from inside a tour bus with tinted windows. The buses were an armoured SUV and an MRAP. The windows were bulletproof. But the view was eye-opening enough that I realized that I wouldn’t be a good father if I didn’t show my daughters that despite the fact I wanted to put them on a pedestal they would never change the lightbulb by standing still and waiting for the world to revolve around them.

Rick’s reasons repeat themselves. Last week I mentioned to some Germans I work with that as Americans we are arrogantly ethnocentric. Just today I told some other Germans I was glad to be in this country because they have common sense. At the Nuremberg Zoo (Tiergarten Nuremberg) Saturday Ginger and I both saw and commented on things we’d never see in the states. Some pansy would sue because they stubbed their toe on an uneven sidewalk or missing bollard. It was excessive that my daughter jumped the fence to join the llamas in their compound but here, unlike America (more specifically Norte Americano for my Bolivian friend), they don’t protect us from ourselves. The insanity that is the norm that causes us to not know which bathroom to pee in just doesn’t manifest itself here. The reasons TO travel continue to reassert themselves as we DO travel. They are underlined, quotated, highlighted, parenthesized, capital lettered, and away from everything else on the other side. Constantly.

Byrd Boys love Biloxi. I am a fifth generation Biloxian, and all my uncles on the Byrd side spent the majority of their life either in Biloxi or right next door (one lived in Ocean Springs, the town where Biloxi was founded in 1699, another story for another time). I never imagined living anywhere else, and once I left I never imagined living there again. Before I left I saw the first two volumes. I’ve seen a lot of the United States and love it almost as much as Biloxi. The more I see of the other ten volumes of this giant world the more I realize how small it is. Taking my family out into the great big world is going to show them how small it is, too. Uncle Laurence didn’t make me want to leave to see the world, but he did remind me why I did. Rick Steves reminded me why. We both are doing our part in our own way to make an impact on American narrow-mindedness.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

-Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Fair warning world, the Byrd’s are loose.

P.S. Neither Dad, Mom, nor my Mother-in-law can blame Uncle Laurence, Aunt Maggie, or Uncle Scotty for causing me to move my wife and their grandchildren 5000 miles away. At least until they’ve come for their first visit and seen the Achtung, the Complicated, the Proper, and the Lovable Chaos for themselves. For my part I can’t wait to meet the later or show the former.

Few things are more American than the thrill of the open road. The freedom to move about the country and the countryside is ingrained in us. Especially in the South. Where there are fewer big cities, things are spread out, and we talk of how long between places is in minutes rather than miles. Getting your driver’s license in the South used to be a rite of passage. My daughters didn’t seem to revere it as much as I did, but then again I got mine even earlier than they did.

The Mississippi I grew up in gave licenses to 15 year olds. That is insane, but so is our love of cars. I once joked that we have a 0.95 driver to vehicle ratio in Alabama. No one called me on it so that means either they didn’t catch it or they agreed. Point is we love our cars and the freedom they bring us.

So yesterday mine arrived.

I went down before they opened to start the paperwork to pick up my Smokeswagen TDLie. Fresh off the boat and delivered to me covered in frost and ice, but it was my car. Not a rental, not a borrowed ride, not the government-owned vehicles I’ve been riding and driving in, my car. My little slice of what I brought from America.

After patiently completing the paperwork I finally got to drive off in my own vehicle with a grin splitting my face from ear to ear. People that know me know I smile a lot. This smile was bigger than that. It was bigger than getting my first car, bigger than buying my first car, bigger than driving my first Porsche, bigger than big with elation to boot.

It seems like it should be such a small thing, yet in the land outside my comfort bubble it is a sign that things will return, they’ll bounce back, and I will survive because I am free at last to do what I want, when I want, without having to walk or wait for the bus or someone else.

Next up, finding a house.

I wasn’t nervous, but I woke up nearly two hours before the alarm went off and couldn’t get back to sleep. Last night I had arranged to meet up with two friends for lunch. We had met in Kansas City five months ago right about the time I was interviewing and contemplating taking this job. Again, a story for another time. Since the week before we had gotten stuck in a stau (I have got to figure out how to put umlauts in here) near Wurzburg I was afraid I might not make it on time. As a safety measure I decided to take off early to insure timely arrival.

At 0630 I rolled out of the house for about a three and half hour drive. I skipped breakfast thinking I would drive right by the McDonald’s in downtown Grafenwohr. Instead, the GPS told me to turn left instead of right at the first light. Last week Peter mentioned that we could go clockwise or counterclockwise, so I decided to go with the GPS and turned left. There was no McDonald’s for two hours.

When handheld and dash-mounted GPS units became popular I resisted the urge. It was hard because as a former surveyor and someone who played with the technology long before it became feasible for mass consumption this was harder than one might think. But it was mainly driven by the desire that I did NOT want to become one of those people who turned just because the machine told me to. Flashback to this morning, I turned early. No problem, I was headed on the autobahn in the wrong direction (though not counter to traffic so I was safe). My previous training told me to go down an exit, turnaround, and come back. Sure maybe it was 12 km, but I was good. Until I got there. My instinct said turn left, my GPS said right. I didn’t go with my gut. I took the road less traveled.

Needless to say, it did not lead me back to the autobahn.

On my previous drive by idiot box experience back in the early 2000s the machine thought I was an 18 wheeler and took me a long way out of the way to turn around. Thinking that might still be the case I pulled over, turned around and sat perpendicular to the road I had just come from. Twice. Neither time helped.
So I drove through some gorgeous country, quaint towns, tight roads, switchbacks, and did I mention it was snowing? Had I not been worried about the fact that I had no clue where I was I could have enjoyed myself. The views were spectacular.

After about 2 hours I finally got back on the autobahn headed towards Wurzburg and feeling comfortable. I made it past the construction and the grosse stau from last week without incident when the GPS unit started telling me to get off at the next exit. I made my way to the side but thought that since there was no big diversion it must be thinking I was on a side street instead of the autobahn. So I ignored it. And found why it tried to direct me off the road.

I used the left lane and passed up a mile or so of traffic stopped in the right lane until I finally got stopped myself. This was worse than last week. I put it in park. People don’t get out of their cars on the autobahn. Today they did. Normally I’m the first to jump out. Having never met a stranger I talk to folks stuck in traffic. But I only do that when they speak English it seems. I couldn’t even tell what they were saying because they spoke in German.

After about 15 minutes I heard a helicopter. Quick aside here. When I was studying for my license they told me that ADAC in this country was similar to AAA in the states. Similar, but like all things German (except the wine), better. This time they mean it. If you’re on a bus trip and the bus breaks down ADAC will come pick you up and take you to a hotel until they fix the bus. Back to today, another difference from AAA, the helicopter was an ADAC helicopter. It was a very nice helicopter, more like Blue Thunder than TJ’s in Magnum PI—nice chopper. Soon I noticed the traffic on the other side of the road was stopped, I guess so the chopper could land.

After about 25 minutes I heard the lady behind me talking loud and saw two guys ahead and to the right of me run around their car like a Chinese fire drill. Two cars ahead someone turned off onto the embankment. I followed.

Now this is the kind of thing I might have done in the States. I don’t know if it was a road, some kind of access, or just the first vehicle melted the snow and drove over the mud to get to the parallel road that was 250 meters away. Either way I got back on track.

It was Level of Service A the rest of the way, to through, and past Frankfurt. I was doing 150 entering some tunnels they built just for noise control. Not walls, not noise attenuation, freaking tunnels, giant tunnels to keep the noise down. In Frankfurt they do have some runways/taxiways over the road, but these tunnels are for noise. One other thing I try not to do here is convert my speed into miles, what’s the point? The limits are given in kph, and I’d rather think I’m going 50 through town than 31. But 150 is still fast. That’s keep the radar detector on and look out for cops hidden behind the trees fast. They use speed cameras here, but that’s a different story. I don’t know how to spot them yet, but they haven’t spotted me either so it’s a draw.

Once I got to Wiesbaden, I didn’t have the address of where we were meeting for lunch, rather I had the address of the District Office so I was a little concerned about how to find where I was going. On the plus side, I was right on time so I called one of the guys I was meeting who wasn’t far behind me. Then, when I got lost, I talked him through how to find me and I followed him the rest of the way in.
All in all, an adventure packed day. I’m still not sure why they’ve trusted me with the ability to create my own travel plans or drive my government vehicle all over the countryside, but it’s too late now, Baby! Watch out Deutschland, I’m going to be alles uber.

Yeah, it’d make a better ending to say the name of the song, but that’s in bad taste in this country. I’m slow but trainable.

Maybe it was the stress of having lived in 5 different hotel rooms over the last 45 days. Maybe it was not having viewed a single new place to live yet. Maybe it is the lack of a vehicle to drive around in. Maybe it was the whole 5100 miles from home in a new continent. But maybe it was just the third meeting in which I was the only non-German speaking person and EVERYTHING was being discussed in German.
For some time now I’ve been thinking about re-naming my blog. Over the weekend the inspiration of what to call it hit me: Outside the Comfort Bubble. I am so far outside my comfort bubble it isn’t funny. Today was just a massive exclamation and emphasis of that point.

It’s also an odd point because I started blogging not only because I wanted to write but because I had time on my hands. What I was doing at work at the time was easy. I was on cruise control. My blogging started to taper off when I reached into the unknown. Or as a friend, fellow engineer, and blogger would say I began to stretch myself. Even my writing began to taper off as I further reached with my deployment to Afghanistan. Since arriving in Germany just over a month ago the desire to write, to point out my observations, and just plain express myself has been building but that step outside the comfort zone is overwhelming. I am a sponge soaking in new information and trying to find a way to process it.

There’s the new location, new roads, new rules of the road for driving, new language, new staff, new support staff, new standard operating procedures, almost none of the things that I have taken for granted remain. I remain the most humble person you will ever meet, yet I was good at what I did. In taking this new job and moving most of my family I said, “I got this, watch and see.” Since arriving, I have gone from “WTF!” to “WTF?” What have I done? This is going to be a challenge. This is going to be harder than it already has been. I see that now.

At the end of the day on the way home I heard on the radio Tubthumping. Now it isn’t that I’m a big Chumbawumba fan, but something about the lyrics resonated with my eternally optimistic side. No, it isn’t that I was concocting a session wherein I alternated whiskey drink, vodka drink, lager drink, and cider drink. It is the reminder that I get knocked down, but I get up again. You’re never gonna keep me down.

It will be a few days before I fix the blogpage. It may be a few days before I post anything else as well. But it’s coming. I am reminding myself as I recently did my oldest daughter of my favorite piece of kitsch hanging in the Biloxi Hard Rock. It is a signed drum head from Alex Van Halen that reads, “Fall down 7 times, stand up 8!”

On this day most of us remember where we were when we still had a World Trade Center in New York, New York (the town so nice, they named it twice).

For my part, I was going in to work late because I had something to deliver for work in downtown Birmingham. I was going to give my brother-in-law a ride to his condo in Dirt Pile (known to everyone besides he and I as a little burg named Mountain Brook). I stopped at my normal gas station, a Jet Station. You cannot make up the good stuff.

When I went in to pay the clerk told me that an airplane had flown into the World Trade Center. Now this did not concern me one little bit. NOT IN THE LEAST! Because I am a Civil Engineer, at the time I was still in school, in fact, I was taking my Structural Steel class. But I wasn’t worried because I know that skyscrapers are designed to withstand an airline collision. Of course, that design is predicated on the fact that the pilot realizes he’s headed for a building and is attempting to avoid it. The Empire State Building was hit by a B-25 in 1945. It is, to my knowledge, the highest fire that has ever been successfully put out. But when the pilot realized a collision was unavoidable he was still trying to avoid it.

Getting back into the truck we continued on and heard that the second tower was hit. Immediately I realized, the first plane wasn’t trying to miss and we were in for a bad day. Modern sky scrapers are not made to hold the weight of the floors above them. The floors are designed to hold up the weight of the floor, the weight is then transferred down. It is a fascinating concept that is a part of the reason I never wanted to be a structural engineer, however, no engineer can ever look at a structure without thinking load transfer ever.

As the radio told us the second tower was hit I turned to my brother-in-law and said, “Johnny, some country just used to exist.” I was as positive of that then as I am now.

Not bad, except there should be a building blocking the view from this angle, imagine the surprise of the people inside as that one disappeared. Or as the casino barge ran into the hotel.

Ten years ago last Saturday I lost contact with all but one of the family I had in the middle of Hurricane Katrina. My Dad, Mom, Uncles, Aunts, Cousins, there are too many to count. Predominantly they were in Biloxi, a few in Ocean Springs, one as far away as Diamondhead (near where the eye passed), but brackish blood runs through the Byrd veins.

The unwritten rules of hurricanes seem strange to most uninitiated. Cutting the grass the day before it hits, having an ax in your attic, calling everyone you know after the power goes out. I was at work 320 miles away as the storm hit, but still in contact with my family. My sister had half-evacuated. She left her home a half mile from the beach in Biloxi and went to her fiance’s house in Saucier, maybe 10 miles inland. Mom, Dad, 3 uncles, 2 aunts, at least 2 cousins and a second cousin all stayed in Biloxi. Another aunt, uncle, and at least 2 cousins were in Ocean Springs watching the storm arrive.

The stalwart survivor of countless storms since the late 19th century lost to Katrina

About 10 o’clock. I couldn’t get Dad. He, Mom, and a friend of the family were in his house four miles from the front beach. I heard from my sister about 10:30, there was water up to the window sills in the house. None of my other relatives were reachable. Then my sister again about 11, the house had 4 feet of water in it. And then the reports stopped. Not the calls mind you, just the reports there was no news to report. No one knew anything. I was on the phone with cousins in Texas, Washington, an Aunt in Georgia, and people I had not talked to in over ten years. But no one in my family on the Coast except my big sister. The storm passed through my own neck of Alabama. Bad wind, lots of rain, a few limbs down, power out. A neighbor lost some shingles. The power came back on, still no news.

Eleven o’clock turned to noon, one, three, nine pm. The phone was glued to my ear but not with family on the Coast except T-Byrd. On the way home from work I flagged down an SUV that was so full of people there were two guys riding in the back with their feet hanging out the glass because there was no room and told them to follow me for a meal. I tried to take them to our church where we housed a Red Cross Emergency Shelter full of people with names like Thibodaux and Arceneaux with thick Cajun accents. Working with them reminded me of the family I had no contact with. These were the lucky ones that got away just before the levees cracked. They were anxious to get back home to pick up the pieces and start rebuilding, as they had three times before. Yet still no word.

A casino mercifully wiped out the Ohr Museum, unfortunately they built it back.

Tuesday, 8 am. Noon. Two o’clock. I talked with people I didn’t even know. Someone who lived down the street from my second cousin twice removed (I love living in the South where you can keep track of these things). I relayed messages and numbers from friends, old friends, and strangers to anyone I could find. Five pm, and still no word. Seven, midnight. My cousins in Texas and Washington were as frantic as I, yet none of us wanted to admit it to each other (am I wrong? I know at least one is reading this now). I was the connection between all of them. I had no idea where our family was, but I was not going to let them down. My own wife had our children under control, freeing me up to do what little could be done to find out about the rest of the family.

Wednesday morning, six am, nothing. Eight, nothing. Then nine, a strange number on the phone. Nothing odd about that now. I had been dialing and being called from area codes and phone numbers I still don’t know. I answered and heard my Dad’s voice.

The relief that washed across me was strong, but guarded. They were alive. The conversation went like this (not a paraphrase or fuzzy memory here, this is my occasional anal-retentive memory at its best):

“Dad, you have no idea how worried I was.”

“Why, we were alright?”

“Dad, the last I heard there was 4 feet of water in your house.”

“And?”

“Dad! Mom’s only 5 feet tall!”

“Ehhnn.”

I could hear him shrugging his shoulders. They had borrowed a neighbor’s car and went out checking on things until they found someone who had a working cell phone and called. Within an hour I had reports from all of the Byrd extended clan, no fatalities, no injuries, two and a half houses in need of complete stud to stud, floor to ceiling rebuilding. Uncle Pat and Tara had some pine trees down in their yards (within a mile of one another).

The Biloxi/Ocean Springs Bridge lovingly referred to as the bunnyhop bridge.

This was the point at which the wave of relief was complete. I hung up my phone for a half hour and basked in the glow. After nearly forty-eight hours of not knowing, I received the greatest Birthday present of all time: the knowledge that my family, that had not bothered to evacuate or retreat in the face of a Category 5 storm (later downgraded to 4) was alive.

Tullis Manor, not the big thing, that is the casino that took out the historic home

At the least it was better than my sister’s who now shares a birthday with not only the late Michael Jackson but the anniversary of the storm that changed it all.