About kingratt82  

I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, but I grew up from age 3 to age 20 in California, first in Long Beach, then in San Jose, then finally (and for the majority of that time) in Fortuna in Humboldt County. Fortuna is located smack dab in the middle of Redwood country and is situated at the western edge of the Coastal Mountains on the Pacific Ocean.

There is really no place like Northern California for me. Every so often I have to go back there, hike through the many Redwood groves, and recharge my batteries. It is the only place I call home, though, having spent so much time in the San Francisco Bay Area (SF, San Mateo, and Santa Clara, Sonoma, Mendocino, and Napa counties), I love those places almost as much as I do Humboldt.

Humboldt County gave me a love of nature--of trees, of wildlife, and of the protection and conservation of it. Paradoxically, I also love the city, I suppose because of the many times I've visited relatives in the Greater San Francisco/Bay area.

San Francisco International Airport (SFO) has forever been my launching pad to places unknown, adventures and explorations around the world. That airport has a special spot in my heart. Similarly, so does tiny Eureka-Arcata Airport (ACV), but only because it has been the stepping stone to SFO. Of course, so has the stretch of Highway 101 from Eureka to San Francisco.

In 2004 SFO became the airport that flung me to Japan, where I lived and worked and travelled for three years, leaving in 2007 to accept a job offer in Jacksonville, Florida (a place I absolutely hate for its uninteresting topography--i.e. lack of mountains!). While I was in Japan I travelled extensively throughout the Philippine Islands, meeting my now-fiancee Rowena, an Ilocana girl that hails from Mabini, Pangasinan province, Luzon. If you chew through my photostream enough, you'll see her in a few of the photos.

There's nothing quite like the Asian Pacific Rim (and the US/Canadian Pacific Rim). I love travelling throughout Southeast and Oriental Asia, maybe because subconsciously it is like myriad diverse, colorful, culturally-dramatically-different, topographically-similar versions of my own home region of Northern California. Though, on a related note, there is no city so diverse and wonderful as San Francisco. Wherever I travel in the Orient, I see bits and pieces of San Francisco, and for all wonder! San Francisco's diverse Asian peoples and, not consequently, huge number of them, brought various unique aspects of their cultures, architectural styles, and traditions to San Francisco and created a cool and unique-to-the-world fusion of American West and Pacific Rim-Asian.

Anyway, I miss Northern California some times (never moreso than now, living in the accursedly ugly State of Florida and the surrounding Deep South). This November I am moving back to Japan to work for 6 years, and I am very excited about that.

Apart from my extensive travels in the Philippines and Japan (Honshu, Kyushu, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima), I have torn Macau apart, seeing more of that city I think than half of its residents; I have seen pretty much everything there is to see in Brunei (of course, that's not saying much considering its tiny size); and I have travelled to parts of South Korea, parts of Thailand; to Guam; and even to Vladivostok, Russia.

Outside of Asia Pacific, I've been to Dubai, UAE; Bahrain; Doha, Qatar; Curacao, Netherlands Antilles; Panama City, Panama; Trujillo, Peru; Key West, Florida; Roatan Island, Honduras; Boston, USA; New York City, USA; Salt Lake City and Bountiful, Utah; Idaho Falls, Idaho; all over Oregon; Reno, Carson City, and Las Vegas, Nevada; Phoenix, Tucson, and the Grand Canyon, Arizona; Seattle, Washington; southern Pennsylvania; all over Maryland; Biloxi, Mississippi. And nearly everywhere you can think of in the Great State of California.

I'm Male and Taken.