You know, before COVID, I was an office guy.

This is Mike Straub.

Mike's a company man.

He's worked for the same place for 30 years.

He's a software engineer by trade.

He's now an executive there.

And Mike enjoys his work.

But the thing that he really, really enjoys is vacations.

Yeah, I have a fair reputation at work of being the vacation guy.

And so, you know, oh boy, where are you going now?

What are you going to do?

And when COVID hit, Mike realized that his vacations no longer had to end when Monday came back around.

You know, I think most people have had the fantasy of working remotely and traveling the

world and lounging on beaches. And Mike wanted to do something like that. But he wanted to

take it a little bit further. I'm going to burn a lot of vacation, but I'll keep in touch working one or two days a week

through the trip. Mike was about to take a trip, and it was a big one, a 6,800-mile journey

entirely by water. He would begin this trip in Omaha, Nebraska, where he was going to connect

with the country's longest rivers to travel south, all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.

He'd go east through the Gulf, then down around Florida, then north, up along the eastern seaboard,

ultimately into the Hudson River, through the Erie Canal, past

Niagara Falls, west across the Great Lakes, and finally, back down to the rivers to end up

where he began in Omaha, crossing his wake, as they say. This great circle of water in the U.S. is known as the Great Loop.

...