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There are two sorts of people who will read this book. The first is the armchair enthusiast who loves to read about other people's adventures. I am this person to a number of other authors and travelers. When you're done with this book, go to youtube.com and search for Kombi Life, I've followed Ben and Alaska since they were in Chile, I feel like I know the guy as well, perhaps even better than many of my friends I've known for just as long and I have never met Ben and probably never will. But I love following along. If I can make one or two of you have as good a time reading this book and I've had following Ben and Alaska (and later Leah) I will be very happy. 

The other sort of person who will read this book will read it as entertaining research because they will be planning their own adventure of some sort. If you are this person, or think you could be this person, for you I have some super secret inside travel advice: you can do it.

I know, cheap platitudes and we're only like a dozen paragraphs into the intro, you should get your money back, send this crap back to Amazon or wherever. Except that it's true. To do what we have done you need only two things and they are such simple things that you will not believe me when I tell you that they are all you need until years from now after you have actually done what you set out to do and you think back and find yourself nodding sagely while saying hey, that idiot in that one book was totally right.

The two things you need to do this are 1) a powerful will 2) a sense of humor. 

The second seems easier to come up with right now, but trust me it's actually the far more difficult thing to have. When you've been under your vehicle for hours and nothing is going right and you don't even know what the problem is yet and you're covered in sweat and oil and grease and transmission fluid and it's been hours since your wife did anything but glare at you from the top of the engine compartment and your kids are screaming and beating the crap out of each other because they've run out of other things to do and you just hit your head on the drive shaft so hard you see stars and the top of your palm is blistering up from where you touched the exhaust manifold by accident two hours ago when you fist glided to the side of the road after the engine died, your will is fucking useless to you. You need a sense of humor and you need everyone around you to share that sense of humor or you are going to have an absolutely miserable time of it and running crying to the mechanic every time you break down and that is no fun and no way to live.

So. Will and humor. Will at least can be worked on. There are exercises to help build your will. I've sprinkled them throughout this book, you'll know when you read them. In the beginning though you need to make sure you can act as though you truly believe in yourself. Because like that cheesy old saying, if you can't no one else will either. You don't have to actually truly believe in yourself. It might even be bad if you did, you might turn into an arrogant asshole. But you do need to be able to fake it. And here's the thing, everyone is faking it. No one has the slightest idea what they're doing 90 percent of the time. We all have things we've done so much we're good at them, but how many of those things do any of us have? Half a dozen? Maybe a dozen? We're all mostly making it up as we go along.

Look, I've done all this stuff I'm about to write about and yet I'm sitting here in Mexico, it's late on a Friday night, and I have barely enough money to my name to cover next month's rent, nothing for the one after that and very little in the way of possibilities to make any money to shelter, feed and cloth my family, let alone get back on the road. But deep down I know I will because I believe that I can. And I am motivated because I have no other choice. Those are the two major components of will, believing you can do something and finding the motivation to make it reality. Or rather to get reality to arrange itself the way your want. Because it's not me, it's not you, it's the world around us and behind us that make things happen. There is a flow to life, we simply nudge it here and there in direction we want it to go.

"In me is the spirit of greatness."