“There came a time, he realized, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realize the strangeness of anything,”–James Hilton, Lost Horizon

We are in Vancouver. Why?

We are experimenting with what it’s like to have a home base. We are taking a reverse vacation.

Five years of living out of suitcases, with nowhere to hang a hat and nowhere to receive mail, started to take its toll on the body and mind. It wasn’t just the wardrobe malfunctions and the slow Internet. I was becoming a little jaded, even bored. Yoga was practically impossible to fit into a whirlwind schedule and being out of touch with my body is a bad feeling.

The initial rush from visiting somewhere new would quickly subside into the humdrum of daily life, with its attendant concerns about Internet speed, the location of the nearest grocery store, and where we were going to live next week. Even when we spent two or three months somewhere, it still did not seem sufficient to let the mind and body discover their natural long-term rhythms. We lost a sense of purpose. Traveling became solipsistic: only meaningful inside our own minds.

Diversifying my business by cleaning up this blog and rebranding Drink Vicariously, getting back into a regular yoga routine, drinking less beer, and becoming more focused and productive are going to happen because I’m not constantly on the go.

Now that I see that blogging can be part of a marketing mix, I will be maintaining the blog regularly now. I want to start using it more as a means to build the Drink Vicariously brand, and to network (ick!) with other travel bloggers to potentially tap into this elusive market. So you can expect more re-tweets and culling of information from other websites and blogs, all within the general framework of travel, drinking culture, and related topics. It will make the blog less personal, less about us, which is probably a good thing. No one likes narcissism. Forgive me if it takes a while to catch on to the language and etiquette of blogging. It does not come naturally to me. Feel free to leave us comments and suggest what you want to see more of, hear more about, and understand.

I am systematically and painstakingly editing the 16,000 photos I took in 2013 and this is taking up a lot of my time. But if you are interested in photo essays, please visit my Flickr. Username = beershine. There might be more bird photos than you bargained for, but bear with me, I sometimes take pictures of cats too.