“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
-Yogi Berra

This is not a blog about food. This is a blog about taking the fork.

It’s about plunging mapless into the spaghetti maze of a souq. It’s about jumping out of a plane to cure a fear of heights. It’s about aspiring to dive 100 meters below the sea and to shoot 100 miles up, to the edge of space.

It’s about connecting with people all over the world who are doing what they love. Sometimes they’re doing it on the side – nights, weekends, vacations. Sometimes they’ve quit their cube-job and are doing it full-time.

It’s also about understanding the dynamics of a place and its residents by exploring history, politics, economy and culture. It’s about trying to capture all this through words and pictures (static and moving) and sound.

Finally, it’s about being unafraid to look like a fool while living this life of exploration. Because sometimes the fork appears to take you nowhere.

 

Speaking of which.

I started this blog in early 2008 as an easy way to stay in touch with my friends and family during a two-month trip to SE Asia.

Over the years it’s morphed several times. In April 2009 it became “Range Life,” a name and spirit borrowed from the Pavement song: “I want a range life. If I could settle down, then I would settle down.” At the time I sold or abandoned all my stuff (except 13 boxes of books) and flew to St. Petersburg, Russia, to begin an open-ended journey. As I traveled east, this blog became a hyperpersonal account of both my travels and my struggle to figure out what a “range life” means.

In September 2010, after 17 months on the road, I flew back to the US “for a visit.” Eighteen months (and counting) later I’m still here. So. A fork to nowhere? Wait and see.

 

About me

I’m a freelance travel and culture writer. Clips of my professional writing are collected over here.

I was born in a suburb of Boston, from which I escaped (to New York) as soon as legally possible. I later lived in Budapest, Hungary for almost five years. Now I ping-pong between New York City and Boston. I’ve backpacked through about 50 countries on four continents.

I’m a scuba-obsessed PADI divemaster, space-travel and eclipse enthusiast, a lover of yurts (or gers, depending on where you are), a part-time follower of politics, and a Red Sox zealot. Which makes the reference to a quote by Yankee great Yogi Berra rather uncomfortable.

In a past life, I spent four years as managing editor of Release 1.0, a monthly newsletter that covered influential internet start-ups, major technology trends and their impact on business models and society. I also spent eight years running product design and development teams for internet companies in the US and Hungary.

Christina Koukkos
@ckoukkos
christina [at] koukkos dotcom