Our Mission

“Our mission is now an unmission – with no clear ideas or focus; our future is as unknown as the countries before us are unfamiliar. Which is just how we like it.”

So the truth is we don’t have a mission although the more exact truth would be that we have a vague collection of missions that change around all the time. But there are two defining characteristics:

1.We want this thing, this circuit around the earth, this portion of our lives to be successful (although we’re not sure how to measure that success)

2.These missions are global; we are interested in the planet earth here.

I have never had much of a life-plan. Certainly, I do have discreet ambitions, projects and things that have to be done – but no big, over-arching mission. And this trip is a reflection of that – a mission to get round the world; a mission to meet people and do stuff; a mission to experience some of the landscapes and nature that our planet has to offer; a mission to take a lot of photographs and shoot video; a mission to develop skills that I probably wouldn’t have time for living the crazy life we call staying-at-home. But none of that adds up to some big defining mission.

And you know, I like it that way: the future is the undiscovered country and I would hate to think that I know now what I will find there.

Earthcircuit missions:

■This was the first: To drive and explore the unfamiliar route out of Europe across Russia, a journey of overland escape that doesn’t involve crossing some great desert or other.

■To get to South Korea or Japan and become famous enough for doing so that someone offers to pay for the shipping back home. (Yes, at this stage the plan wasn’t even to get round the planet –  and the financial side of it was pure optimism).

■To do a complete earthcircuit, collecting artwork along the way and exhibiting it in somekind of global traveling exhibition. (We gave up on this idea after only a few weeks because we didn’t have enough space on the trucks to carry all the artwork).

■To collect our own panoramic photographs of our route, print them out and exhibit them at events along the way (well, we’re still doing that, kind of – since half of our crew returned to Europe, we lost half of that exhibitionary energy).

■To get a website going that inspires people to think about our planet in ways they may not do so normally. And here you are. I hope our global stories do that for you. This is a wonderful, incredible planet that we have here. None of the others we have found in our solar system or beyond seem to be even remotely as interesting as this one is. So join us as we travel around it…