Travel Blog

We actually have a very extensive blog detailing our journeys while living full time in our motor home after losing our residence to hurricane Ivan at ww.dogparksandbrewpubs.com if you are interested. We have also published a book titled the One Shoe Diaries with photos of lost and abandoned solo shoes we have photographed during our travels. Hope you enjoy, it has all taken on a life of its own. Below is a more detailed description of our project...

In October of 2004 Hurricane Ivan unleashed its fury on Pensacola Beach, a thriving beach community situated on a small barrier island on the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico in Florida. My wife and I at the time had been renting a beach home there and it was destroyed by a 14' storm surge along with 20' waves and 120mph+ winds. Many of the residents met that same fate as us. It was a surreal experience to be instantly homeless overnight and have a whole lifestyle swept away in an instant. But instead of taking it as a setback, we viewed it as an opportunity to pursue a dream of living in a motorhome, touring this great country of ours discovering all it has to offer. We gathered up all of our belongings that survived and stuffed them into a storage unit. We purchased a 36.5' Georgie Boy Cruisemaster Class A motorhome and hit the road towing our Jeep Liberty behinds us toting our kayak atop it. In addition we had our mountain bikes on our ladder. We looked like we were headed for great adventures.

At the time I was already doing freelance graphic design and photography from my home office so continuing to do it on the road in remote locations would not be a problem so long as I could get an internet connection. This is what made this whole journey possible for us since we were going to be one of the very few people leading this llifestyle without being retired or independently wealthy.

As we journeyed around the U.S. we started to get the idea to write down our experiences, perhaps to compile enough interesting stories to create a book. But we wanted to do something different. With me being a photographer I wanted to incorporate my photos into the book but again wanted to do something out of the norm to differentiate our book. Finding that unique "something" did not prove to be so hard, in fact I know almost think it found us.

While exploring around the various destinations we began taking notice of the numeruos solo shoes littering the highways and backroads of America. We then got the idea to take photos of these shoes where they sat, without moving them or staging them and leaving them how we found them. By logging in their GPS coordinates we mapped them out on Google earth online to keep an accurate record of where we discovered each shoe.

Fittingly our first shoe we ever photographed was lying on the white sands of Pensacola Beach where our journey first began. I wanted the collection to grow quickly but had no control over when or where a lost or abandoned shoe would manifest itself. So I had to just keep my eyes open.

As luck, or fate, would have it the shoes kept appearing regularly, it seemed almost evry other day or so a new solo shoe would appear on the side of the road, or hanging from a wire or even occasionally floating on a body of water. I photographed each one, and with each one came a story behind the discovery, or a story about an adventure we had that day we found it. We started assembling the book which we titled The One Shoe Diaries.Â

The first volume is a collection of the stories and shoe photos collected on our trek from South Florida to Northern California. We even teamed up with a charity, Shoes That Fit, and did a gallery exhibition tour with their help. They would find us a venue to exhibit at and in turn we donated the proceeds from selling the shoe photos which we had enlarged to 20"x24" printed on canvas. It was a great deal of fun meeting many different people in locations we never would have visited had it not been for Hurricane Ivan.

We are currently self publishing the One Shoe Diaries hoping to be picked up by an agent and get it officially published. We continue to promote the book through gallery exhibitions and our website, OneShoeDiaries.com. We invite everyone to browse through the photo galleries of our website. We also have all of our travel blogs available there as well for informative information on little-known places around the U.S. to explore.