What the hell are you thinking?

Here's the deal: for a couple years now, I'm been putting together the trip to end all trips in my head.

Around the world, without ever leaving the surface of the Earth.

Why I Need This

All I do is work. I literally work a minimum of 70 hours a week. I write software. Nothing has ever really paid off, but I still love doing it, and I never run out of ideas, so I keep on keepin' on. But damn it I'm tired and I need a vacation.

I have pretty much been in school my entire life. I earned a B.S. in Mathematics at 21, from UCSB. Then I went to film school. Then I earned an M.S. in Computer Science at CSULA. Then I started a Ph.D. at UCLA.

Thankfully, I yanked myself right out of the Ph.D. program. I had been in school long enough.

But since then, all I do is work. I never take vacations, unless you count a couple hundred trips to Vegas and two short trips to New York (one by train). I haven't left the country since I was 15. My 20s are a fading memory. I need to get out of the US.

The Voyage

So the plan is, I'm going to leave Los Angeles heading west, hit as many spots as possible and return to Los Angeles from the east. This, so far, includes:

* Driving across the US, from LA to NY.
* Taking a boat from NYC to London.
* Training, hitching, and possibly motorcycling around Western Europe, slightly into Eastern Europe, and up to Scandinavia.
* Ferrying to Russia, and taking the Trans-Siberian into China.
* God knows how I'm going to get across China, but onward to Japan
* Boating from Japan to Hawaii
* Boating from Hawaii to Los Angeles

How Will I Pay For This?

This trip is going to take months. I'm broke. I'll be broke a year from now.

Get ready to laugh.

I'm planning on selling iPhone apps and using the money to finance the trip.

I'm currently building and submitting 2 iPhone apps a week. I have 6 in the store as of this writing. I'm not stopping until one of them hits, and then I hit the road.

So far, a lot of really great people have given me some amazing ideas for iPhone apps. I've got a list a mile long of my own ideas as well. I'll be listing apps as they become available on:

* this blog
* on my code blog at http://www.stromcode.com
* on my personal site http://www.rick-strom.com
* on my myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/strom
* on my company site: http://www.glowdot.com

and anywhere else I can spam links to the app store.

Oh, and I'll also be using this blog to round out my plans for the trip. If I decide on a place I want to visit, I'll make a post about it.

Wish me luck. And if you want to buy a couple .99 apps right now, here are two:

Ball Drop (game, .99)
Conway's Game of Life - Paper Edition (simulator, free)