Once Upon A Cruise

The Budget Travel Olympian

No matter how low the budget bar gets, I always manage to limbo my way under it. I'm the Wilt Chamberlain of shoestring travel—putting up numbers so unthinkable that mere normals will never, ever reach them: **300 ports in 38 months.**

Milford Sound, New Zealand, a majestic fjord with waterfalls cascading down dramatic cliffs into the water.

As the Morgan Freeman of travel writers, everyone recognizes me but I never gain any due recognition. **Hotel @nyware** (edreif.com) hasn't exactly been the Edgar Allen Poe of knock-outs, the Emily Dickinson of ground and pound, the Robert Frost of woopings.

So I shoot pictures and videos and post them for the auditory and visual crowd—I call it CNN versus the alphabet.

The In to My Sane

It's just me, born with a Ph.D. in throwing junk up against the wall and seeing what will stick. Looking back, it's been the Colonel Kurtz of experiences. I've gone native and insane so many times, but in a Lance Armstrong Barbara Bush sort of way.

A person posing in front of a scenic ocean view, possibly from a cruise ship, with a vast blue sky.

Sometimes I am the census taker, sometimes, the cannibal psychiatrist. Margaret Thatcher once said, "Any man beyond the age of 26 who