50 Years of Exploring the World

I recently turned fifty years old, which is a very strange thing for me to say. That’s the age of that annoying old lady Sally O’Malley on Saturday Night Live, who I never thought was funny. But hey, time happens and I’m very lucky to be able to say that I’ve been to a few places and had some pretty interesting adventures over the past fifty years.

For a few years I’ve been planning to make a video series talking more in-depth about my experiences, especially those before I started making videos on my YouTube channel, Gabriel Traveler. But for now I thought that I would write a (not very brief) synopsis of everywhere I’ve been over the past fifty years of my wandering, bumbling existence on planet Earth.

Here goes…

1972–1974: Born in Vancouver, Canada in April 1972 to American parents Jim and Vicki, who had recently moved to Canada. After two years, when I was a year old the three of us moved back to Los Angeles, California, where they had been raised. My brother Christo was born in L.A. in 1974.

1975–1977: The four of us moved to the tiny town of Glen Ellen, California, north of San Francisco and lived there for two years.

1977–1987: In 1977, when I was five years old, we moved further north to the town of Willits, California, where my parents purchased a raw piece of land with no structures on it about five miles outside of town. Over the next few years my parents built a large wooden cabin, a big work shed, a car port, planted gardens and orchards…