“I’m Going on An Adventure!”

[The photo above is every country I’ve visited as of July 2024]

Heyyy,

Whether by poor chance, a wish to suffer, or some actual interest in hearing my thoughts, welcome to my blog! My name is Sam Orta and here is everything you need to know! Or at the very least helpful context.

(I updated this page recently. I archived the old page here because of nostalgia. Written three weeks after graduating High School.)

The quick summary is I’m a 23-year-old student from Piedmont California, near San Francisco. I spent four years getting the living daylights kicked out of me but got two degrees in environmental engineering from the University of Michigan. Which I (fondly) refer to as Piss Engineering. Hoping to go into humanitarian aid and clean energy in the future. Currently, work on sewers in Phoenix (I fit in them). I call it my Victorian Child Era.

I started writing this blog 6(?) years ago because of a stupid lie I told Anna, a good friend of mine that slowly became the truth. I want to visit every country on Earth! Now I have been incredibly lucky over the last 18 years to be with parents who possessed the financial means to travel and the style of parenting that believes taking your 10-year-old to the Korean demilitarized zone is a wise decision. So it began as a way for me to write my travels and the ways it inevitably went sideways. I also have a horrendous amount of audacity and consistently end up in strange situations.

However, in the years since I created this blog, it has expanded to other topics. I began with writing up the stories from my backpacking trips and later on to whatever I feel like. I’m not a good writer, but I like to think I try and I get joy from it. Which at the end of the day, is best I can tell what matters.

Some of my older posts have a rating system, the meanings are below. I ended up scrapping it as it turns out it’s hard to arbitrarily apply numbers to topics but alas.

I like telling stories, I think I’m ok at it. While I sympathize that being in an aluminum tube powered by liquid dinosaur bones at Mach 1 can be scary, it’s equally amazing and that goes for the cultures of the world as well. I love my hometown of the Bay Area, I love Ann Arbor, and I appreciate Phoenix. But there are so many amazing sites, people, and stories waiting to be discovered. Some of these stories I tell happen across the world and some in the more mundane moments of life. I just hope I have enough time to tell all the ones I want to.

So that’s it *shrugs*. I appreciate you stopping by, this blog has ended up lasting much longer than I expected and I’m proud of it. Hope you enjoy

Cheers,

Sam