About
What’s all this then?
Glad you asked. I’m Dave Stevenson, and I’m travelling around the world with my wife. I used to have a great job, a nice flat and a generally pretty super life in London. We spent our weekends wandering around Hampstead Heath, cooking breakfasts, and was generally behaving like responsible Europeans.
And now?
The best thing about being a journalist is the travel. Over the last four years I’ve spent a lot of time in train stations and airports. For the most part I was running: airlines are no respecters of schedules, and I came to accept that pegging it through airports trailing computer cables, socks and trinkets was a fact of life.
Every now and then, though, I would find myself with time to kill. My book forgotten on the hotel nightstand and my laptop battery exhausted, I would stare listlessly at the departure board: rows of imagination-capturing places that I couldn’t reach. I had a planes to catch and people to see, after all.
So in February 2008, my wife (who is much better at remembering to collect books from nightstands than I am) and I left London. We went to Russia, Mongolia, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and Australia by June, with Hawaii, Alaska, Canada, the USA, Mexico, Guatamala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica still to come.
That’s quite a list.
Yep.
So what’s the site for?
Like your relative’s annoying toddler, I’m terrible at holding still. A year without creating anything sounds boring, so while we’re gone I’ll be updating this site: where we are, what we’re doing, and the various ways I’ve managed to get us into spectacular trouble.
I like your site…
Thanks! I’d love to take all the credit for it, but I can’t. It all runs on Wordpress, the free blog software, and the theme is called Mimbo2.
After that, I’m using RECAPTCHA to keep spam down (a hundred per cent effective, since you ask), and Tag Suggest Thing because life’s too short to think of my own tags.
When it comes to images, I use my Flickr account to store and share my pictures. I can be relied on to produce my beloved camera at the slightest provocation, so there are thousands of shots here. There’s a link at the end of most stories to the relevant Flickr set, as there are almost always going to be more images on Flickr than can realistically be squeezed into a single story. I use Lightbox 2 to keep posts with lots of images tidy.
When it comes to video I use the Flash Video Player, which is both brilliant and free. My videos can be found en masse at Blip.tv, while the high-res videos on SFTGE are powered by the wonderfully-flexible pbembed-Flash.
I don’t like your site…
That’s fine too. Why not send me an email at dave@sorryforthegroupemail.com and make a constructive suggestion? I also accept random abusive emails, although I’m less likely to reply.
I want a legal disclaimer.
Eh? Fine. I take care to make sure the information on SFTGE (to give it its still-quite-complicated acronym) is accurate. It’s important to me that the prices and details here are right, but I can’t promise everything. Details might change, prices could rise, and other details might get lost in translation. Don’t spend any money or do anything silly until you’ve checked for yourself that SFTGE has it right.
Finally, these words are copyrighted. Please don’t take them and use them on your own website. My images are a blend of all-rights-reserved and various creative commons licences: check which before using them. And if you do use them, please let me know. It’s good for my ego.
