These days — that is, since 2014 until now, summer of 2017, I’m living near a small college town, Unity, Maine. I have rented a cheap cabin at the end of a gravel road, about a mile and a half from the village. I set up here to grow cannabis and thereby accumulate the funds for more travel.

My experiences on a 2012 year-long bicycle tour, London to Hong Kong, convinced me to plan for more travel, lots of it. Rather than return to a life of long days, weeks, and seasons on roofs and ladders, I resolved to change livelihoods, again. The slate roof business was good to me, but I came to regard it as a crude and limited way to fund a life. I had treated it as a temporary expedient, foregoing business cards, business status, insurance, advertising or even a sign on my truck; yet it returned more money than my previous career, massage therapist, which returned more than the career before that in the bicycle retail and touring industries. I suppose I should put “career” in quotes, since I never identified as a bicycle pro, massage therapist or tradesman. I identify as a bicyclist, musician and traveler, lacking the drive to make any of those resemble a real career.

Selling Christmas trees is the closest I have come to a career; 2017 marks thirty years in the business for me. Still, one notch above a lemonade stand for five weeks a year does not seem to meet the definition. As for the other forms of livelihood I have dabbled in (B&B proprietor, writer, farmer, fisherman, truck driver, tree planter, hospice aid, and more), they were similarly temporary, half-baked, and not me.

So growing cannabis seemed to be a natural next step. I had grown a bit and I had built some cannabis-growing facilities for pay. I started small in 2014, ramped up as quickly as I could, and now I am approaching the end of my cannabis growing days. A three-year plan to return to full-time cyclotouring became a four-year plan when I decided that I wanted a Volkswagen Westfalia camper bus to compliment my touring bicycle as a some-time traveling rig.  As THAT project got out of hand, my harvests exceeded expectations. Still, the plan to start traveling with a comfortable grubstake morphed into a plan to start traveling with a comfortable camper, a classic touring bicycle, upgrades to my ski and camping outfits, and pro-level musical instruments. So far so good. I am on track to meet my planned departure timing, Spring 2018.

These days I’m riding bicycle a lot, finishing up a long, decades-old bicycle to-do list and in the middle of a decades-old lutherie list. I’m making three left-handed mandolins from scratch; one with found and scavenged wood and hardware (a practice piece on which to make learning mistakes), one with good wood and hardware (to refine what I have learned), and one with the highest grade musical instrument wood and hardware I could find (the “keeper”). I will likely sell the first two, which will just about cover the outlay for tools and materials.

To compliment the heavy expedition rig used on the London-Hong Kong ride, I have built a light touring bicycle: a racing frame with added rack fittings and fresh paint; modern Campagnolo components; skinny 700c wheels and tires; and lightweight panniers, racks, fenders and lights. It was a labor of love, an over-budget project with many roadblocks and design changes. It came out better than I could have hoped for.