About

I started my first business selling bead gecko keychains door-to-door in my neighborhood.

Things escalated from there.

By middle and high school, I was breeding geckos and bearded dragons, selling snacks out of my locker, delivering thousands of crickets to classmates with my friend Chris, running a paper route, building websites, working at a reptile store, and becoming increasingly obsessed with saltwater aquariums.

I also started traveling.

Growing up, trips usually meant visiting Mexico. In high school, I started venturing farther away and discovering how much I liked being somewhere unfamiliar.

Somewhere along the way, people started asking a question:

Where's Pablo?

It could mean two things.

Where is Pablo traveling now?

Or:

What is Pablo working on now?

Eventually, I put the question on the internet.

Where's Pablo became a place to write about the things I encountered while traveling. That led to sponsored stories, professional travel writing, photography, press trips, and opportunities to keep going places and telling people what I found there.

Then life went in some other directions.

I came home from a stretch of work in Central America and opened a reptile store. Years later, after working brewery shifts, driving Uber and Lyft, flipping thrift-store finds, and saving what I could, I opened The Midnight Oil Bookstore in Greeley, Colorado.

The bookstore grew. Where's Pablo got quieter.

But I never really stopped wandering.

These days I might be behind the counter at the bookstore, sitting in a hostel in Costa Rica, digging through a stack of rare books, experimenting with a 3D printer, reading something I found in a little free library, or staring at a very small bug for much longer than a reasonable person probably should.

So the question still works.

Where's Pablo?

This site is where I try to answer it.

I write about places I go, people I meet, books I read, places I stay, things I build, and whatever else catches my attention along the way.

I'm less interested in telling you the ten things you absolutely must do somewhere than I am in telling you what happened when I went there.

Turns out, after all these years, I'm still doing essentially the same thing:

Going somewhere.

Getting curious.

And seeing what happens.

Thanks for stopping by my little blip of the internet.

-Pablo