Today’s Thursday Travel Inspiration is Thomas from The Chronic Adventurer.
Late one evening in a hostel in Singapore I met Tom, the typical British gentleman. Absolutely lovely! When I met Tom he was on an amazingly adventure from the UK to Australia. Stopping by everywhere on his way. And I was on a lonely work trip delivering a load of horses from Australia to Singapore. A day at the Singapore Zoo later and promises to meet again in Melbourne. Which we did.
The below is an extract from his blog- The Chronic Adventurer.
My name is Thomas and in December 2011 I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease which is a type of Inflammatory Bowel Disease(IBD). Like everyone who is diagnosed with a chronic illness it hit me pretty hard especially as I had to have surgery to reduce the symptoms.
To get my head around my new way of life I tried to learn as much as I could about the disease but the more I read the more I got depressed by the negativity surrounding it. This made me think that everything I wanted to do before being diagnosed I could no longer do.
The epitome of my silver lining attitude and doing stuff because I have IBD is my plan to cycle the 1000 mile distance from John O’Groats to Lands End in June 2014. This is because there is no way I would being doing that without the motivation that having IBD gives me and boy won’t it be great to say when my Crohn’s does flare up again that “at least I cycled the length of Great Britain whilst I was healthy enough to do so!”
I couldn’t accept this though so I made 2013 the year of adventure to see what the new me could do and to my surprise I can do quite a lot! At first my attitude was “I am doing X, Y or Z despite having IBD.” However this way of thinking could easily slip back into “I can’t do X, Y or Z because I have IBD”
Thomas is an inspiration to us. Despite the pickle pie that life has thrown at him, it hasn’t stopped him from getting on his bike and tackling some amazing adventures. You can follow The Chronic Adventurer on Facebook and Twitter
Read his story here-
