On August 2nd, 2007, I took off from St. Louis Lambert International Airport in a 727 pointed at Korea. Halfway around the world, Josh Vise--one of my longtime best friends--was closing down his life in Daegu, Korea, after teaching English there for a year.

He met me at the airport in Seoul with a few hundred thousand won in his pocket. Neither of us had a ticket home; neither of us had any clue when we'd return to America, only that it would be some time after traversing most of the planet by rail: Beijing through Mongolia on the Trans Mongolian Railroad, all of Russia on the Trans Siberian Rail Road, and then through as much of Europe as we could afford.

You really get to know a person when you live with them for weeks in a cramped Russian rail car with no shower; you get to know yourself when wandering alone through Asia with your world strapped to your back; you gain perspective on the essential kindness of others when your immune system collapses and you get stuffed into the sidecar of a motorcycle driven by a Good Samaritan who doesn't speak a lick of your language.

"Following Josh" is a travelogue about two men coming home--Josh, from living abroad during that critical year between college and "life." I flew out of my childhood hometown, and would "come home" to my fiancee in "our" new home in NYC. We were men on the verge of something, hurtling into a new tomorrow aboard the Trans Siberian Railroad.

This is our story, told from my perspective.

It is a work in progress; expect samples here later, but the final manuscript needs many more months of work.

--Dave