My journey started on January 19, 1978 in Buffalo, New York.  We lived in a little village outside of Buffalo called Angola, New York.  Not much going on there except for snowstorms.

We moved to Lackawanna, a suburb of Buffalo, when I was quite young.  We moved back to Angola when I was 5 or 6.  Little did I know, my life would explode with travel in the coming years.

When I was 8, we moved to Griffith, Indiana.  Over the next four years we would take several trips to and from both sets of my grandparents – one located in Schenectady, New York and the other in Lackawanna.

When I was 12, we moved to Syracuse, New York.  When I was 17, we moved to East Palmyra, New York – a little village a few miles outside of Rochester, New York.

When I was 18, I moved out to Crown Point, Indiana where I would spend 4 years studying pastoral theology and waiting for 1 year for Katie to finish her degree.

Things were heating up travel-wise.  In 1999 we were married and took our honeymoon in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, Canada.  It was the first airplane flight for both of us.  That was over 300 flights ago…

In 2000 I made my first trip to Bulgaria.  We were in the capital of Sofia for a couple of days and the rest of the time we were on the Black Sea in Varna.  We spent one day in Frankfurt, Germany on the way home.

In 2001 we moved down to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania for a few weeks to help one of my friends start a church.  We also started traveling the United States presenting the work we hoped to do someday in Bulgaria.

We visited New York City and Albany and Syracuse and Buffalo and Niagara Falls and Utica and Elmyra and many other places in New York.  We visited Pittsburgh and Harrisburg and Philadelphia and Erie and Punxsatawney in Pennsylvania.  We visited Columbus and Toledo and Cincinnati and Cleveland in Ohio.  We visited Indianapolis and Fort Wayne and Lafayette and Terre Haute in Indiana.  St. Louis and Denver and Louisville and Atlanta and Tampa and Orlando and New Orleans and Chicago and Washington, D.C. and Charleston and Baltimore and Montreal – been there, done that.

We visited New Hampshire and Vermont and Maine and Connecticut and Massachusetts and the Carolinas and the Virginias and Tennessee and Kansas and Alabama and Mississippi and Kansas and South Dakota and Nebraska and Wyoming.

In 2003, just a few months before we moved to Varna, Bulgaria on the Black Sea, I visited the Philippines for two weeks and Japan for a day.  In 2004 we took a week to go to Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon.  In 2005 I visited Istanbul, Turkey for the first time.  In 2005 we visited Nurnburg, Germany for the first time.  In 2006 we visited London, England for the first time.

Bucharest and Cluj Napoca in Romania.  Thessalonica in Greece.  Ephesus and Ankara in Turkey.  Mannheim in Germany.

In 2010 we started traveling Bulgaria.  We have now been in over 300 cities and villages in Bulgaria.  I will not write a list of them.

In July of 2012 I went to Cairo, Egypt and taught in a Bible college in Alexandria, Egypt on the Mediterranean Sea.  From October 10, 2012 – January 3, 2013 (a span of 88 days), we drove over 8,000 miles and flew over 20,000 miles in visiting 20 states and over 30 churches.

In 2013, Katie and I visited Jerusalem, Israel.  Cluj and Bucharest and Sofia and Istanbul and Bursa and Ephesus in 2014.  Prague and Budapest and Vienna and Bratislava in 2015.

It is January 26, 2016.  By the end of this year – in the next 11 months – I will have been in 40 states, 7 countries and over 90 churches.  That is all just in 2016.

Thank the Lord for hundreds of thousands of miles on the road and tens of thousands miles through the air…safely!

I love being a missionary.  Thankfully, I still love traveling.  How long will that last?  I’m not sure.  I have a story or two.  I will share them on this page – Pilgrim in Blue Jeans.