Project Hitchhiker | travels, stories and adventures in lifestyle design
welcome to my blog
Project Hitchhiker is the online creative outlet of Mike H.
Mike’s adventures have taken him across 3 continents, including driving a motorcycle for 6 months across Southeast Asia, hitchhiking across Canada and Japan, and walking 1000 miles along the coastline of Nova Scotia.
Mike’s passions are music, travel and motorcycles (in that order).
Mike’s dislikes include writing about himself in the third person.
This site is a collection of his travels, stories and adventures in lifestyle design.
To celebrate hitting the $10,000 savings mark last month (remember, I was in debt almost that amount this time last year) I made two new purchases. And *** are they fun.
Two super portable toys created with traveling musicians in mind. Having played with these toys for the last month, I’m having trouble remembering how I lived without them.
The Martin Backpacker
Weighs less than 2 and a half pounds. This thing is about as small as a guitar could get, without losing any of the overall functionality of an acoustic guitar.
After a long hiatus, I’m getting back into music. Playing, writing, creating.
The other day, sitting down with the guitar and playing for a few hours, I realized that I NEED to play music. That music needs to be a bigger part in my life than what it’s been in the last few years. Another realization: I’m not content now just playing established songs — I want to create. I sat down for a few hours tonight writing and felt really great. I think what I’d forgotten in the last few yeras was that creating and playing music is at least a small part of my major definite purpose.
After writing the last post about hitchhiking to Montreal to see TOOL, I got to thinking. How could I be so obsessed with a band and a genre of music so much eight years ago, and yet now when I listen to the same band I feel overwhelmed. Overwhelmed in a bad way. Like the music that represented my life and feelings so perfectly years ago, is now way too heavy and NEGATIVE for me.
I think we all intuitively realize on some level that music aligns you with whatever its VIBE is – whether it’s angst, lovestruck-ness, happy go lucky, sadness – but we rarely take a minute to consciously think about it. For instance, when someone just breaks up with you, you might listen or relate to songs about lost love, feeling down, broken hearts. Or it’s possible you would listen to heavy aggressive music because that’s how you feel. Or maybe you try to listen to happy music to cheer yourself up – to try to get out of that slump.
