Long Time No See

Wow, it has been a very very long time since I posted to this blog. 2760 days or 7 years, 6 months and 19 days.

Where to start when such a period of time has passed? I´m re-starting this blog principally because I am about to embark, for the second time, working as a mountain bike guide. My last post was about six months into the first time I did this job. Looking back it´s a shame that I only ever made one post about it.

I think this was due to the vast number of changes that were happening in my life then. I had left Asia, where I had lived for 12 years. I had lost my job, which came to represent the end of a career that had been years in the making. I was also going through a divorce.

I was almost 40. My life´s work that I had worked hard to achieve and taken for granted had been completely destroyed. In effect I had to start again. I had to rebuild my life without a country, a home, a career, a relationship or any idea how to do it. My ex used to say it was a mid-life crisis but in reality it was a crisis of identity. Who was I? What did I want to be?

My blog was a scrap book of my mountain bike adventures in Asia and at that time I didn't have any enthusiasm to re-visit this life and be reminded of it. Only recently have I been able to look at it with fondness.

In 2009 I was thought my life was over, the guiding job was a way of finding a safe place, an interim that allowed me to heal and plan what to do next. It was an adventure completely different from the expat lifestyle, the corporate career and the wife that completed the triumvirate of what I saw as "success" According to this standard my life was over.

Here, in a European mountain town, seven and a half years later things look very different. This is what I am going to write about.

Lets us begin....