the outback In 2005, more than ten years after dipping my skates into the Atlantic Ocean and then thinking how nice it would be to skate through a desert again, I once again set out to see if i could manage to cover many miles, unsupported, on inline skates.

My goal was to cover more than 10,000 miles starting in Sydney and circling around the top and back again to Sydney ten months later.

This time – i did not complete my original goal – after more than three months and nearly three-thousand miles – I ran out of fuel both financially and physically. Australia kicked my ass. After more than 350 hours of skating in 71-days, and tearing through more than 40-wheels – I called it quits in darwin, in the northern territory.

I will try and get more written on this adventure as well, once I'm on the road of course... no more time now.

here are some articles written, and although some are with headlines: WORLD RECORD attempt, that attempt was just a way of adding something competitive to the journey, and even though I went further than the previous record holder, when I returned to the states I never bothered filling out the final documentation... I mean, I had more miles from the 1993 trek, so it didn't seem like there was a real point in doing all that paperwork, ya know.

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From Inline Planet:
Joe's Trek Passes the World Record for Longest Skate
With swollen feet and a sunburned smile, Joe Rehana rolled past the old world record for the longest inline skate on Monday and pushed on in pursuit of the 3000-mile mark. So far, the 35-year-old Illinois resident has skated 2730 miles. The Guinness Book of World Records lists 2595 miles as the length of the longest inline skate. ... Rehana started his unassisted trek on May 31st in Sydney, Australia. He had planned to roll the entire circumference of Australia (about 10,000 miles). But with his feet swelling with edema, he decided to cut short his trip. "I'm thinking, throw the skates into the sea and never look back," he says in his web log. (Here it is.) (Aug. 31, 2005)

joeTrek.com 2005
I worked with a good buddy, Mike Slone, to develop the first "live" site for a trek. Mike created a great layout and working with a new partner launching "Stellar," an outdoor online community website, Mike added the site to their network and had a cool map feature developed. The site content is no longer available online in its original format, but the front page of the old site is still online. I've uploaded most of the images to this site, I still need to recreate the picture information and I'm actually going to forget about the blog posts because really, all I did was bitch about how I couldn't handle that OUTBACK. It was hard, trust me, not fun on skates...

Crested Butte Weekly
A nice little article that my friend said makes me sound like a fish going for a lure... jumping at something "shiny." I thought he made a funny, but yeah, I sound like a fish. Thanks to Mark Reaman for letting my mug into his paper.
On the Wings of Opportunity
By Molly Murfee

BBC: Day in pictures [click to #2]

Another story from Inline Planet: American Pursues World Record in Skate Trek Around Australia

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there was a really fun one on ABC.com - which is not the US tv station, but the Australian Broadcasting Company, and it had audio but it's no longer online. oh well.