What’s with this “locomote” thing?  Isn’t that like a train or something??  I think it was a song in the 80′s, right?

Wrong!
LOCOMOTE is a way of life!  It’s a new concept that’s gonna take the world by storm!!

….well, at least I kinda like it.  :P

Ok, so what is locomote to me?  It started in 2004 in Chiang Mai, Thailand sitting in the Rooftop Bar with a beer and a few new friends.  I had been traveling in Thailand for about 3 1/2 weeks, jumping from place to place and was just getting back from 6 great days spent in Pai, a small village in the jungle between Chiang Mai and Myanmar.  I realized that I was tired of just ‘moving’…there had to be something more to it. The call of the road had driven me that far, but simply moving wasn’t filling that hunger for me anymore, and it was starting to get a little bit old.  I looked around me and saw so many people moving, with no purpose or direction beyond adding a stamp to a passport or the hopes that they might find something if they just keep going.  I decided that from that point on, I was going to move with a reason.  I’m not just gonna move – I’m gonna LOCOMOTE!

Well, it took a little while before I came up with the word for it.  I had read Rolf Potts’ Vagabonding and loved how he had taken a term that meant one thing and really redefined it for a new generation of vagabonds.
I’ve always liked to think of myself, and all of us really, as just tiny specks in the universe.  If the universe revolved around me, how lame of a universe would that be!?  So the idea of being a crazy little speck, a loco mote, was really appealing to me.  And when combined they form locomote, a word that has the same meaning as move, but doesn’t really carry strong connotations with most people – I’m free to recreate the word however I want.  So a few months after returning from Thailand locomote was born, and it has been the defining philosophy that has directed my movements ever since.

LOCOMOTE ~ move with a reason

Think of a locomotive.  When it leaves the station with all the steam shooting out the chimney, it always has a clear image of it’s goal: to carry the people and cargo on board to their destination.  It’s not impossible, but it’s pretty damn hard to push that locomotive off course or slow it down until it has reached its goal.  As travelers, we can have a clear vision in our minds of what our goal is and speed off toward it like a big steel locomotive. Let’s not just wander aimlessly across the world – let’s locomote!

How can I locomote?
It’s really simple!
Wake up in the morning and grab a piece of paper and a pencil.
Write the answer to these 2 questions:

1) Where will I go today?
2) Why will I go there?

Then go where you planned to go and accomplish the reason you wanted to go there.
That’s all there is to it!