Welcome to my Year in Review, in which I share photos and stories for (1) your entertainment and (2) the practical purpose of remembering just what on earth happened over the past 12 months. Enjoy!

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January: Carretera Austral

When the clock struck midnight I found myself on a long-anticipated bicycle adventure with my friends Vince and Hannah. Over the course of five weeks we wove in and out of southern Argentina and Chile on the (in)famous Carretera Austral, cycling 1000km through glacier-carved valleys and bone-shaking rípio (gravel) in pursuit of the next cabaña and ever-elusive red truck. This was an adventure I’d schemed for multiple years, and it didn’t disappoint. Read the trip report for more details.

February: El Chaltén

Back in El Chaltén—the trekking capital of Argentina—I rented the same apartment I had last year, making it my homebase for reading, writing, and seeing the many friends I made over the past two seasons. I hosted a few great travelers through Couchsurfing and Warmshowers, obsessively ran my favorite trail (Loma del Pliegue Tumbado), and danced tango and cuban salsa.

I also cancelled the only Unschool Adventures trip I’d planned for the year (due to low interest) and tried launching a teen coaching program which also failed. Oh well! I guess I’m not working this year. 🙃 Which felt surprisingly okay, since a TikTok influencer had just promoted one of my books and spontaneously quintupled my Amazon sales for multiple months. Self-employment works in strange ways.

March: Buenos Aires

Back in Buenos Aires—my tenth time!—I shared a rental apartment with my brother Cooper and friend/employer/mentor Grace, who each flew down from the states to dance tango and devour steak with me. A few more amazing visitors showed up, I had my cell phone ripped from my hand by a motochorro (motorcycle thief), my tango teacher ran off to become a Zen monk, and I penned the most important thing I’d write all year: Conflicted Thoughts About Having Kids. Then, after a quick dip into Chile, I flew right back to Europe. I would spend exactly zero days in the USA this year.

April/May: UK, Spain, Germany, Austria, France, Netherlands, Belgium

Now the whirlwind begins! Following quick stops in the UK and Spain, I cycled from Freiburg to Innsbruck, boomeranged north to Jena and Leipzig, popped into dance weekends in Toulouse and Berlin, and pressed onwards to the Netherlands and Belgium. Along the way I visited dozens of friends, taught more dance connection, and schemed the next Unschool Adventures trip to Greece & Turkey. At the end of May, a summer love took root. (Click the link—it’s the second best thing I wrote this year.)

June: Netherlands & Switzerland

Back in the Netherlands I enjoyed a family visit and secured my 2-year residency permit faster than expected, allowing me to call Europe “home” until April 2026—AMAZING! I promptly departed for the hyper-expensive utopia we call Switzerland to pursue a flame which was not meant to be, cross paths with old California friends, and swim in the greatest outdoor pool ever.

July: U.K., Germany, Austria, Hungary

Nursing a compromised lower back in England’s rainy Lake District while crashing with old camp friends and their hilarious children, I popped into Oxford to see my friend Patrick give a talk about his excellent book and then back over to Germany for another fusion dance weekend followed by a cycle trip to Budapest with the summer love.

August: Austria, Denmark, Netherlands

I watched my friend Diana defend her Ph.D. in Vienna and then we joined a few other mountain-loving dance friends for hut hiking outside Innsbruck. The best night train ever shuttled me to Denmark to visit my old friend Liam, and then I cycled back to the Netherlands to housesit, visit Anouk (see 2023 in Review), and cross paths with the summer love again. (Are you following along??)

September: Belgium, Italy, Switzerland

Now begin the “dark times,” following a break-up that hit me particularly hard. (Again, see here.) Fortunately I had good friends around me—ones who appreciate when I make them tacos, which I consider a form of therapy—and many upcoming plans, including another hut-hiking adventure in the Dolomites (where I turned 42), a dance weekend near Turin, and friend time in Zurich. I also completed the introduction for my next book, Dirtbag Rich, and proudly announced it to the world.

October: Germany & Belgium

In Freiburg, I reconnected with German friends for a week and published my first broadly popular TikTok videos. Then it was back to Brussels for the real dark times—because the main reason I rented an apartment there was the ex. I focused on my new podcast, danced a lot, and even made a trip to Paris… but alas, the break-up + rapidly shortening days = sad Blake.

November: Belgium & Austria

November kicked off with a fusion dance weekend in Brussels, another one in Vienna, and tense conflict with the ex, who was present at both. I moved into a new apartment in Vienna where I organized group dinners, hosted friends, danced a ton, recorded lots of podcast episodes, and felt much more at home than in Brussels.

December: Vienna

The final month of 2024 has proved even more amazing: packed with dances, dinners, new friends, family visiting, and a truly magical tiny dance weekend. I even started co-organizing a connection-oriented fusion weekend, planned for September 2025!

I type these words from a train shuttling me across Austria on Christmas Day (Dec 24th in these parts), where I’ll join a friend’s family as a holiday refugee. Some days later, more dance friends will arrive to stay with me over New Year’s. Book progress is slow, but I’m not stressed. I still feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, even if I never imagined myself ensconced in big European cities, enmeshed in a little niche dance community, zig-zagging across the continent in pursuit of connection and adventure. It’s a wild life, and a good life.

And now for everyone’s favorite part of the Year in Review… random facts!

Adventures of Blake pieces published
32

Dance weekends deejayed

Toulouse Fusion (France), Fusionauts (Germany), Fusion & Friends (Germany), Monte di Fusion (Italy), Comfusion (Belgium), and Dance Blender (Austria).

Books read

Magnificent Rebels (Andrea Wulf), The Snow Leopard (Peter Matthiessen), Work: A Deep History (James Suzman), Ultrasomething (Brendan Leonard), Nuclear War: A Scenario (Annie Jacobsen), Surprise Kill Vanish (Annie Jacobsen), Wasteland (Oliver Franklin-Wallis), Stuff Matters (Mark Miodownik), Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich (Harald Jähner), Vermeer’s Hat (Timothy Brook), The Anxious Generation (Jonathan Haidt), The Birth of the Pill (Jonathan Eig), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (George Orwell), The Dream of Europe (Geert Mak), and looots of Cormac McCarthy.

Kilometers cycled
mucho/viele

Quotes discovered + appreciated

The only thing worse than authentically expressing yourself and then getting attacked is limiting yourself to safe, permissible kinds of expressions and getting attacked.

—Meghan Daum

The artist must prophesy not in the sense that he foretells things to come, but in the sense that he tells an audience, at the risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts. His business as an artist is to speak out, to make a clean breast. But what he has to utter is not, as the individualistic theory of art would have us think, his own secrets. As spokesman of his community, the secrets he must utter are theirs.

—R. G. Collingwood

America almost singlehandedly convinced the planet to abandon the ancien regime, and to adopt some (crude) version of representational government. We were the OG anti-colonial movement (an accolade which we could have spent more time reflecting on). We went on to demonstrate that radical hotheads like ourselves could foster industry and innovation, provide a crucible for new ideas and social movements, provide welcome and sanctuary for millions on millions of outcasts and seekers, tolerate extraordinary degrees of personal deviance from the norm, and fight courageously in many ways against many kinds of evils, at home and abroad. Our monument among the nations is already glorious, and I am proud to pledge my allegiance to that. We don’t need to try for immortality, as well. No nation gets that prize, in the end. We all die, and surely it’s nice to know when that’s the next move, and have your plan for it.

—Ethan Mitchell, Hebdromedary #18

Where should I go?
‘Cause I’ve been everywhere
But I belong nowhere but in your arms
Give me a sign
My darlin’, let me know
If I should let you go
Or if I should fight

There’s a place
Inside my mind
Where you and I can dance
Endlessly you hold on to me
And for the first time in a long time
I’m home

—November Ultra, The End

Pensamos, he said, que somos las víctimas del tiempo. En realidad la vía del mundo no es fijada en ningún lugar. Cómo sería posible? Nosotros mismos somos nuestra propia jornada. Y por eso somos el tiempo también. Somos lo mismo. Fugitivo. Inescrutable. Desapíadado.

[We think, he said, that we are the victims of time. In reality the way of the world is not fixed in any place. How would it be possible? We ourselves are our own journey. And that’s why we are time too. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless.]

—Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“It’s not that I don’t like things, I mean some things are very nice, but they certainly take a distant second place to being able to live your life and being able to do what you want to do. I always knew that I didn’t want to work.”

McCarthy suggests that unless artists make their own work their first priority, and material comfort and economic security a “distant second,” they may never truly find out what they’re capable of.

—interview with Cormac McCarthy

I grow into these mountains like a moss. I am bewitched. The blinding snow peaks and the clarion air, the sound of earth and heaven in the silence, the requiem birds, the mythic beasts, the flags, great horns, and old carved stones, the rough-hewn Tartars in their braids and homespun boots, the silver ice in the black river, the Kang, the Crystal Mountain. Also, I love the common miracles—the murmur of my friends at evening, the clay fires of smudgy juniper, the coarse dull food, the hardship and simplicity, the contentment of doing one thing at a time: when I take my blue tin cup into my hand, that is all I do. We have had no news of modern times since late September, and will have none until December, and gradually my mind has cleared itself, and wind and sun pour through my head, as through a bell. Though we talk little here, I am never lonely; I am returned into myself.

—Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

The Open Road. The great home of the Soul is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not ‘above’. Not even ‘within’. The soul is neither ‘above’ nor ‘within’. It is a wayfarer down the open road. Not by meditating. Not by fasting. Not by exploring heaven after heaven, inwardly, in the manner of the great mystics. Not by exaltation. Not by ecstasy. Not by any of these ways does the soul come into her own. Only by taking the open road. Not through charity. Not through sacrifice. Not even through love. Not through good works. Not through these does the soul accomplish herself. Only through the journey down the open road. The journey itself, down the open road. Exposed to full contact. On two slow feet. Meeting whatever comes down the open road. In company with those that drift in the same measure along the same way. Towards no goal. Always the open road. Having no known direction even. Only the soul remaining true to herself in her going. [. . .]

It is a new great doctrine. A doctrine of life. A new great morality. A morality of actual living, not of salvation. Europe has never got beyond the morality of salvation. America to this day is deathly sick with saviourism. But Whitman, the greatest and the first and the only American teacher, was no Saviour. His morality was no morality of salvation. His was a morality of the soul living her life, not saving herself. Accepting the contact with other souls along the open way, as they lived their lives. Never trying to save them. As lief try to arrest them and throw them in gaol. The soul living her life along the incarnate mystery of the open road. This was Whitman. And the true rhythm of the American continent speaking out in him. He is the first white aboriginal. ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions.’ ‘No,’ said Whitman. ‘Keep out of mansions. A mansion may be heaven on earth, but you might as well be dead. Strictly avoid mansions. The soul is herself when she is going on foot down the open road.’

—D.H. Lawrence, Whitman

Thanks for reading.
♥ Blake

(Previous years in review: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011.)