Five2Nine is the travel blog about Matt Kelley and Neil Defalco, two Baltimoreans who could never seem to hold down a regular nine to five job, so they opted to see the world and write about it instead. 

Music for reading: Mogwai – Travel Is Dangerous, & Pelican – Ephemeral

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My life’s trajectory changed over breakfast at the Lost in the 50’s Diner in Hamilton last month. It was early morning and vendors for the annual Hamilton Streets Festival had just begun setting up their tents along a closed off section of Harford road. Neil and I were sitting in a booth towards the front of the narrow eatery recovering from a night of heavy drinking.

“You know we’re going to die one day,” he said to me as he began to look up flights from Baltimore to Edinburgh on his phone. “I mean, what are we going to do, not go? Well that would just be depressing. How’s August, 28^th sound to you?” He asked.  “Fine by me,” I said and with one touch of the screen we had committed to our mission.

The plan is simple in theory. Fly over to Europe with a bunch of camera equipment, find interesting stories about people or places and put together videos. It isn’t going to be easy. Both Neil and I have businesses we still need to help run and do work for while we are over there. Neil’s been cutting his teeth in real estate. I’ve just started a video production company with two other partners. It would be a working journey, but then again, that was kind of the point.

 

The idea first started a little over a year ago after a number of drinks I wouldn’t care to count in a bar with a name I can’t remember. I was working as a freelance writer in Baltimore. Neil had just come home from a cross-country trip in a 2003 GMC Savannah conversion van. At some point during his trip he fell in love with the nomadic lifestyle and hasn’t been the same ever since. He met a lot of people while he was on the road that he claims, “changed his whole perspective on shit.” Often times he would record his conversations he had with them on his phone. He tells me he has countless hours of these conversations and that one day he is going to use them to write a book. I’ve never heard the recordings but I’m willing to take his word for it.

 

 

Itching for adventure, we reached the conclusion that we needed to put out a travel magazine. We went through several iterations on the concept along the way, all of which possessed a fair bit of gaps between conceptualization and actualization. Still we persisted. Ultimately we decided that the best thing to do would be to just get the hell out there and start recording. We planned a pilot trip to the Florida Keys with a bunch of our friends last January. There were seven of us in total so we rented a 12-passenger van. We split our trip between Islamorada and Key West.  There wasn’t much direction in the endeavor and Neil was nursing a broken foot. Needless to say, not much came of the footage. Still, we had a good time, caught a few fish and met some interesting people. The seed had been planted.

 

 

Which brings us to now. Preparation over the past month has been hectic but gains are steadily being made. We’ve decided to forgo the construction of an entire website and instead have chosen to nestle up here at What Weekly. The plan is to write every day and have at least one post a week. There will be narratives from our travels as well as objective reporting pieces. We’ll have stories about music, art and anything else that might strike our fancy.

So far, the most helpful person in our trips preparations has been my old friend Ryan Harvey. Ryan’s a political activist and a folk singer. He toured through Europe and even Egypt a few years ago and is probably one of the most connected people I know. He gave me the names and contact information for about a dozen people across Europe who would potentially be able to help us along our travels

 

 

We’re also meeting up with my old band mate and friend Grietje in Edinburgh. She’s from Germany but lived in Baltimore for a number of years before moving back home in 2013. She is, for all intents and purposes, our European liaison. She’s been everywhere and knows how to travel on the cheap, but most importantly, she’s someone I’ve gone on the road with before and I trust her.

 

As I am sitting here typing, I am 24 hours away from being wheels up and out of Baltimore for a somewhat indefinite period of time. It’s something I haven’t done since I lived in New Orleans back in 07 and 08. I learned a lot of lessons when I was there. Things like: don’t mouth off to cops when you have a gram of weed hidden in the stash pocket of your messenger bag, most people really do assume that all of Baltimore is like The Wire, and that I have a real problem when it comes to missing my friends and family.

Thinking on what’s in store and how I am going to react when separated from a deeply rooted network of friends and loved ones is the part that scares me the most. Still, it’s just one of many obstacles I’m going to have to face while seeing what the rest of the world has to offer.

If any of you readers out there have recommendations for sites, people or stories, shoot us a line at matt@whatweekly.com. We’ll be checking our emails daily and posting photos and stories on the fly, so we invite the input of anyone willing to give it.

Twitter: @lunarmatt

Check out more What Weekly travel stories here.