On a Whim and a Nickel

There has been some confusion of who I am. I am afraid it all began a number of years ago and that to date, most of the trouble stems from a small party my friend Chris Williams gave during the holiday season in 1990. To put it simply, my name is Charles Dunn. I am from a small town north of San Francisco where vineyards outnumber people 50 to 1. I grew up around grapes, staying away from the more complicated matters involving people. They always seemed to be dissatisfied with life, or with their friends, or their car, or clothes, or the weather, or their favorite sports team. In high school, when everyone else was spending summers in Europe, I spent them tending grapes, or taking long walks along the pacific. I didn’t understand what the grand attraction was in travel. Travel meant mixing with other people; people that didn’t even speak my language. What was the fun in that? It sounded like a lot of hassle.

But Chris ruined all that for me.

It was December 19, 1990. I was in Laguna on Chris’ insistence to attend his annual Holiday house party. We had met a few years earlier at the University. Chris had put an ad in the local paper looking for a personal fashion consultant and I for lessons in break dancing. When I wasn’t lecturing him on the benefits of plaid he was demonstrating his agility by spinning on his head. What became of these meetings was a good, solid friendship.

It was nearly midnight and I was making my good-byes to the host when a gentleman whom I was introduced earlier to ---a Mr. Kennedy--- announced that he had prepared a slide show from a recent trip. Though I had no affection for travel I did love a good photograph. The remaining few of us gathered in the study to view these images from a place Mr. Kennedy called ‘Nepal’. And this is the thing: from the moment I saw the first slide of the mountains I knew it was someplace I had to go. Just like that. Not another thought entered my mind for the next hour.

I returned home with this thought haunting my every move. I saw the Himalayas in cloud patterns, in tea leaf formations, in the way the ocean roared on a windy day. There was no helping it. I was going to Nepal. April of ’91 found me on a 24 hour plane ride to the mythical city of Kathmandu and for the next six weeks I walked in the mountains experiencing something I never thought I would: the love of travel. When I returned home I had the bug. Within a month I was biking my way down the coast of Baja. Six months later I was in Europe for the first time. I haven’t stopped since.

I explain this to you because of the confusion that I have always been a traveler. Until that night in Laguna I had avoided travel like some bad French apéritif. Since that night though, I have thought of little else. Friends and family have been pestering me ever since that first trip to share some of my stories; some photographs or pleasant memories. I have always put them off believing that what I experienced was for myself alone. But recently, that Mr. Kennedy who had shared his photographs and memories, died. It started me thinking. His stories and images had changed my life; opened my eyes to the world. Wasn’t it selfish for me to keep all that I had experienced to myself? I will begin then, as Mr. Kennedy did when he explained how he began his first trip to Nepal back in the ‘70’s:

"On a whim and a nickel."

the mad innkeeper
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