Hi Steemians! This is my first post and I am excited to contribute to the community with my photographs and travel stories!

I'm a 24-year-old from Colombia, currently living in San Francisco, CA. I'm an Environmental Engineer by trait and an outdoorsman by heart. While I greatly enjoy city life and the great cultural richness that it offers, I spend a great deal of my time in the mountains, on the beaches, in the deserts, and in the forest. I like to think of my life as a journey of exploration on two wheels (most of the time I'm either on my motorcycle or my bicycle), sprinkled with work sessions where I do the typical 9-to-5 office job or the not-so-typical "field operations management in remote places" job. I have found that in order to successfully combine my current stable workman's routine with my desired nomadic life style there is one key ingredient: SPONTANEITY!

Through my posts, I will be sharing some of my adventures, my photography, my stories, and my hobbies in hopes of spreading the idea of spontaneity as an important element of a fulfilled life and create a community of "spontaneauts".

Wednesday Night Camping!

I'll start by sharing an improvised mini-camping experience from not too long ago. In May of this year (2017) a few things were quickly changing for me in my personal and professional lives due to much-anticipated bits of great news being intermingled with unexpected and shocking snippets of bad news. My personal goals, my work responsibilities, and the health of loved ones started to dance with each other in weird ways.

I normally go on some sort of adventure on the weekends, but there was a particular week in May, when the adventure couldn't wait until the weekend. It was a Wednesday. 5pm. I left the office. Rode my motorcycle home. Grabbed my sleeping bag. Grabbed my sleeping pad. Grabbed my headlamp. And drove off. There had been no previous planning, but with my mind wondering, my body performed these tasks with great ease and perfection....almost as if that was my after-work routine on most Fridays haha.

It wasn't until I was half way across the Golden Gate Bridge that my mind came back to Earth and I asked myself where I was going. I know the coastal roads north of San Francisco pretty well so I quickly chose one of the few campsites that have easy road access and melodically played with the clutch, the throttle, and the breaks through the windy roads until I got there. Not to go into the details, but after allowing myself some time for reflection and eating dinner (a few handfuls of trailmix that I always keep in the topcase of the motorcycle) I rolled out my sleeping bag and sleeping pad, and cuddled on the bare ground under the swaying eucalyptus trees and the quarter moon.

Halfway through the night I awakened to raindrops on my face. I quickly turned on my headlamp and realized that I was engulfed in dense fog and that the real rain was only about to start. Without a tent to shelter me, I made my way to a nearby picnic table and contorted my way underneath it. It wasn't the most comfortable bed, but at least I was somewhat sheltered from the rain. With the soothing sound of the raindrops crashing against the table above me, I quickly fell back asleep like a baby in its crib.

6:30 am and my alarm went off. Everything was drenched! Without giving it much thought I rolled up my sleeping bag, threw a few more handfulls of trailmix in my mouth, and got on the motorcycle for my trip back to the city: that place where monotonous routine sucks the life out of its inhabitants.

So I rode back across the bridge, navigated through the tall buildings of downtown, took the stairs up to my office, went into the backroom and hung my sleeping bag to dry. I then changed my shirt and sat down in front of my computer to begin another stretch of 9-to-5. Co-workers poured in at 9am but had no idea what I had just gone through, after all, it was just another Thursday morning. Maybe my smile gave it away because it contrasted greatly with the tired faces of those around me.

Short, unplanned, magical mini-camping trip that made my Wednesday night feel like a weekend!