Following My Global Spirit Guide

I launched this site to record my experiences in following the travelers’ Spirit Guide across the globe.  I will initially focus on my 2017 “bucket-list” journey to parts of Scandinavia and Estonia.  The inspiration arose from confirming, through a popular ancestry research site, that my great-great grandfather Adolph Hoehling emigrated from Tallinn, Estonia – then called Reval as a colony of the Russian Empire – to settle in Philadelphia and work as a cabinetmaker.

But I will also reflect upon my past journeys, both before and after retirement, and upon my early discovery of something that I then called “The Luck of the Traveler.”  I now elevate that concept to following a Spirit Guide, a deeper and broader entity than Luck.  I may add new travel adventures as they occur; stay tuned.

My first adventure “abroad” was taken while a graduate student at Yale, on a fellowship to study Southeast Asian language and culture.  My studies, and my inaugural journey, centered on Indonesia and Malaysia.  During my junior year at American University, a dear aunt of mine died and left me and my sisters a modest sum of money.  (She also bequeathed me her car, a sixties’ Chevy Nova with the big tail flaps; I was a novice driver, and managed to total the machine within a couple of months of possessing it.)

After my first year of graduate work in New Haven, I applied that modest inheritance plus some paltry savings to purchase a flight to Vietnam, Singapore, and Jakarta.  I had very little money left for board and lodging while abroad, and threw myself on the mercy of strangers for shelter and transport within those countries.  While hitchhiking about the island of Java, I came to attribute my safe passage to the Luck of the Traveler. .  More of that story later in this blog, but that experience guided me in subsequent journeys to trust the Spirit Guide.  I have since followed the Guide through much of Latin America and Asia, for work and pleasure.

Although about five decades have past since my introduction to the Guide, I chose to wander new terrain in northern Europe and Central America with the help of my unseen Friend.

Note:  Most of the blog posts here are written looking in the rear view mirror.  On the ScanEst journey, I wrote notes in an old-fashioned moleskine journal rather than trying to wordsmith on the computer as I travelled.  I have allowed these memories to percolate through time.  I have written each post as events occurred in historical time; to read them in that order, please page down to the earliest post and move forward from there.  YOU WILL NEED TO FIRST CLICK “BLOG” ON THE MENU LINE ABOVE, BELOW THE WEIRD PICTURE.