I won't say a hero, 'cause what's a hero? But sometimes there's a man — and I'm talkin' about Dave here — a man who looks at a wedding invitation from halfway around the world and writes "fuck yes" on the RSVP card even though it weren't one of the options. Now this here blog goes back better than twenty years, so settle in.

Dave's been a few places. Built houses for tsunami survivors in Thailand and made friends there he's still chasin' around the globe two decades on. Rode the rails clear across Mongolia into Siberia and stopped in a town called Irkutsk for no better reason than it bein' a square on the Risk board. Flew into Havana on a Russian jet with airline peanuts four years expired and seats that weren't rightly bolted down, sat by a lake in Hanoi gettin' interrogated by a pack of girls who mostly wanted to know why a fella so old wasn't married yet, and dragged himself up to Annapurna Base Camp on a trek he had no business attemptin', his trail journal mostly just cussin' out the buddy who talked him into it. He's turned himself into Man Jerky at thirteen thousand feet over a Bolivian salt flat, damn near took the five-hundred-dollar prize as the only fella in a pole-dancin' contest in Australia while wearin' a borrowed tiger-print g-string, and waited seventeen days for an airline to find his underwear in Istanbul. The man even made it to Machu Picchu — by his own account, mostly so nobody'd bust his chops about skippin' it.

And here's the thing about ol' Dave: somewhere in all that wanderin' there's near always a bout of food poisoning, a cold-water plunge he had no earthly reason to take, and a pint or six waitin' at the end of it. He keeps goin' back out anyway. He's got himself a creed: Don't be in a hurry, don't be tired, don't be hungry... and you can handle just about anything the road throws at ya. So pour yourself a Negroni (if you're doin' it his way), pull up a chair, and have a look around. The Dude abides... and ol' Dave, well, he's still out there somewhere, takin' er easy for all us sinners.

— The Stranger