Hello Steemit! I want to introduce (and verify!) Adventure Every Day

How in the world did I get here? To Norway, to the internet, to Steemit? And what is Adventure Every Day? And who am I?

I’m still not quite sure of the answer to those questions myself (especially that last one 😏 ), but as long as I am here, I would like to be a good member of the Steemit community and give you all some background.

To that end, my name is Mike, I am from Ohio, USA (hopefully that is satisfactorily specific) and since I neglected to do so in my first post, here is a verification photo:

I am a real person! 😃

Early Life
Up until last year, I lived my whole life in Ohio, and that’s quite okay – Ohio is a great place. It’s home. It’s where my family and friends are. It’s where I went to school and got an engineering degree. And I love it. It’s perhaps not the most exciting place in the world, but it has a nice mix of rural and urban, some of the world’s best roller coasters and sweet corn, is the “birthplace of aviation” and just might be home to a Bigfoot-like creature that I bet you didn’t know about (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grassman). It also happens to be extremely important in deciding the US president – nobody has won the election in over 50 years (and only 2 people in the last 112 years – Kennedy 1960 and FDR 1944) without winning Ohio, so you can either thank us or blame us for basically anyone who has been the US president in your lifetime. But why am I bringing that up in such a depressing election year? We're not here to talk politics. Let’s move on quickly.

The Ohio Grassman says Ohio is OK!

My Big Move
Although Ohio will always feel like home to me, I’ve always had big dreams of adventures and exploration. So when an opportunity came up to take a new job in Norway, it was a no brainer, once I talked my lovely girlfriend into it, that is. Despite never having traveled outside of North and South America before, I had always been quite interested in Scandinavia. I’m not sure I could fully explain why, but my ever-present longing for nature experiences combined with the amazing things I had seen in pictures probably had a lot to do with it. Or maybe a little bit of the success story that you often hear about the Scandinavian countries was a factor too. And maybe that those two yield a bit of mystery about this region – a place so far north, so cold, so challenging, but where the nature is so vast and pure and humanity is thriving. In any event, I packed my bags and set sail (figuratively speaking, as I took a plane of course) to Oslo.

This is the plane that brought me here

A Norwegian Experience
The nature here is indeed everything I hoped it would be, and the best part is that it is so accessible – take a short bus or train ride a few minutes outside of the city and you might think you were in a tiny rural village or (even better) in the middle of a forest completely untouched by man.

While I love the accessibility, I’m still a bit shy by nature (pun not intended) and relatively inexperienced in terms of outdoor/wilderness skills like fishing, so it can be difficult to just run loose on the adventures I dream of. It can also be a bit intimidating when everyone around practically grew up in the outdoors. Take skiing for example. I’m not a great skier (nor a good one for that matter), but your average Norwegian is. It’s incredible really. This is a country of only 5 million people, less than half as many as Ohio, yet it easily has the most Winter Olympics medals all-time. That blows me away.

All-time Winter Olympics medal count courtesy of Wikipedia

Anyways, my hope was that I would meet the right people that would help me get to the outdoors, and luckily enough, things seemed to fall into place. While I’ve met plenty of really great Norwegian people, I’ve also really enjoyed the experience of meeting fellow ex-pats from around the world. That includes my very good friend Oliver from Germany, who I happened to meet at a language class within the first couple weeks I was here. Oliver is a fellow nature enthusiast, only much better at it than me! We’ve had the fortune to go on some pretty cool adventures over the past year. So much so that, as I explained in my first post (https://steemit.com/adventure/@adventureevryday/adventure-every-day-is-launching-in-norway-introduction-with-short-film), we thought it would be cool to share our experience in an artistic format. And that’s how we came up with Adventure Every Day, and how we ended up here.

One such awesome camping trip

Adventure Every Day on Steemit
Oliver is really quite a talented photographer (see janoliverkoch on Instagram for evidence) and I had picked up filmmaking as a hobby since I got a new camera last Christmas, so we eventually decided that a YouTube channel should be part of it (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChtkEMDNZ3IjFcohGt5KhiA). But then a friend tipped me off to Steemit, and I quickly became enthusiastic. I love the idea behind it – creators getting rewarded directly for their content based on the quality and value it brings to the community (no ad services required!), and in a well-defined currency not subject to the actions of or faith in any sort of government. Pure genius!

So what we hope to do here is bring good, quality content to the community, primarily in the form of engaging stories of travels and adventures, but also with content on travel tips, destinations, technology, photography, filming and anything else travel/adventure-related that we think could be interesting, entertaining and informative. Or even better yet, topics suggested by fellow community members like you!

We hope you the Steemit community find that to be a positive and worthy objective. Feedback is always welcomed 😊

And to learn more about Adventure Every Day, check out my first post, which includes a short video trailer: https://steemit.com/adventure/@adventureevryday/adventure-every-day-is-launching-in-norway-introduction-with-short-film