About Me

Hello. My name is Stephen. Like many, I have two lives which on the surface seem immiscible.

Hyde is a hiker, a biker, a bit of a runner, a tourist, a wanna-be triathlete and adventure racer, a tri-hard endurance anything who doesn’t train enough. He’d like to be known as an adventurer, but is really a weekend warrior who occasionally makes a weekend last a bit longer (like a year).

Jekyll is a sickly, reclusive Engineer who is a geek and enjoys his work.

Hyde is slightly shocked, but pleased, that despite not having any game plan, training regime, coach or supporters, indeed not even knowing what the game is about or to which end he should be running, he seems to be winning. Jekyll is terrified that Hyde will and his career will be ruined.

And moving on back to the first person.
I’m primarily an itinerant (or maybe a vagrant). In the 12 years since completing University, I have had nine different homes, managing to stay in only two of them for 2 years (I’ll rectify that next time). I’ve been lucky enough to have lived for short periods in Australia, Japan, Wales, Spain and the US. For roughly a year I travelled across South America on a bike for fun, and I’ve seen a reasonable amount of Australia, Western Europe, Korea, Japan, Suriname, Jamaica and Southern US with work. But work is work, the inside of a concrete bunker filled with computer screens in Jamaica is more or less the same as one in France, although the food is (much) better in France. I still call Australia home.

Only a mother could love it

The last year and a half I have had a ‘steady’, ‘normal’ job, where I blast around Europe working with some of the best in my field, on some of the more exciting projects it’s possible to have in this field. In theory I have been based in Barcelona, which has been kind of cool. So why would I leave something that sounds so good? Well, it sounds good, but in practice it wasn’t working for me. The work has been great, but my personal life has been slowly falling apart. Part of the problem is I still can’t speak Spanish, hence can’t talk to the locals. But I think the fundamental problem has been the amount of time I have spent travelling outside the city, and my tendency to bury myself in work when I am ‘home’. Hence I’ve not made any friends in Barcelona and could see that become a part of the city was going to take far more investment (read: time) than I was willing to make. So I decided to leave. Yes, I threw in the towel. Next time, yes, next time, it’ll be different.

The obvious thing to do would be to return to Australia, and settle down a bit. For the last ten years I’ve had an idea that an overland trip from Australia to England would be kind of fun. Going the other way should also work. So I’ll do the obvious thing in a less than obvious way. My first attempt at career suicide failed when I fell on my feet after riding across South America, let’s see how this goes…