Joel Kiraly was born in Livermore, California in 1984. He was a pasty white child with corn-silk colored hair and a fascination with playing in the toilet with Thundercat toys. Around the age of 10 he moved to a quaint double-wide trailer home in Nevada and learned to play basketball on a plastic toy hoop that would eventually be wrapped in too many layers of duct tape to allow a standard NBA size ball to pass through. After a parental divorce, Joel would move to Dayton, Nevada and bounce around to different apartments with his younger brother and mother until graduating from the local high school in 2002.

In high school Joel excelled in sports, but never lasted long enough to move on to a collegiate level (he claims to have quit or been kicked off around half the teams he joined during highschool - a problem with authority), he did receive various awards including recognition as one of the top 100 seniors in the state of Nevada based on academic and leadership skills. With all his academic success and lack of financing and college entrance advisement he decided to attend Western Nevada Community College in the fall of 2002.

For the next couple years he worked full time at the local golf course during the season in the maintenance department.  Community College was a tumultuous time of decision making for Joel. He fought himself over what would be his concentrated field of study. After settling on philosophy he switched to computer science, then to electrical engineering, and then finally after graduating with a general studies degree he enrolled into the University of Nevada, Reno with a declared major in English literature.

Joel moved to Reno at the beginning of 2005 and moved in with his high school friends Ryan Cross and Howard Knudsen into a town house near the university eventually referred to as “Galt’s Gulch.” In addition to studying English literature, Joel added a minor in Japanese Studies, and after three semesters at UNR would travel to Okinawa, Japan to attend Ryukyu University for the 2006-7 school year.

It was in Okinawa that Joel most radically changed into the person he is today. International travel created a wanderlust that is only starting to be satiated. After returning from his year in Japan, Joel added another minor, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, and graduated in the December of 2008.

Currently Joel is preparing for an unsponsored bicycle tour of North America spanning from Nevada to Nova Scotia to Seattle to San Diego and back. When asked why he has decided to do this Joel said:

“Before I see the rest of the world I need to know what my country is. I hear a lot about what is ‘American,’ but I don’t believe in such generalizations. From the little experience I have meeting people from all around the world I am inclined to think there is not as much difference between most people as they would like to believe.

"I am digging through this earth looking for something. Some would call it truth or Edward Abbey’s bedrock or James Houston’s touchpoints or Thoreau’s deliberate living or Roosevelt’s strenuous life or Bruce Lee’s honest expression. That is what this journey is about. I am not going out with a pretension to find answers; only looking to push the questions I have brewing in my brain. My body is going to be exposed to the elements of our earth. I am going to be vulnerable. I am giving up some of the comforts I know in modern life to feel this exposure and vulnerability – trading the ceiling of my apartment for the stars of the sky, my bed for a sleeping bag, and my friends and family for strangers. I hope that by letting go of most things I will emerge from this with an understanding of what relationships are important to me.”