 Hello my friends. I have some very exciting news to share with you. I am holding the very first copy of my book, The Long Way Home. I'm so excited and I just can't hide it. I am really proud of this book. It's been a long time coming. I put so much heart and soul and hard work into creating this and it's finally here and I'm so excited. I am over the moon excited. It's actually a book. I can't believe it. A lot of you have been following my channel for years and you've heard me reference this adventure. This book is about my very first adventure when I rode my bicycle from Honduras and Central America all the way back home to where I live now, Boulder, Colorado. This adventure is what set me off on a crazy career path of documenting my adventures and sharing them with the world in hopes of inspiring other people to go out and challenge themselves. This book encapsulates my life as a Peace Corps volunteer and the challenges I faced and the beautiful moments I shared with the locals and of course all the fun times with the kids. I was a youth development volunteer. I was constantly in schools and doing fun projects and it talks about the bonds and the relationships I created with these people and how much they meant to me and then the anguish of my final day of service and saying goodbye to everyone and how hard that was for me but at the same time how exciting it was that I was setting off on the adventure of a lifetime. I was 25 years old. I had never done anything like this before. Everybody told me it was crazy. Lots of people told me not to do this, not to ride my bike home through all these dangerous countries but I believed in myself. Bueno, aquí estamos. Cargados con las niñas. We got the girls here. We're ready to go and try out to see if this cart works. We passed the test and the main reason why I wanted to get on my bike and ride home instead of just getting on an airplane and flying home and being home in a matter of hours. I wanted time to think. I wanted time to think about the work that I had done as a Peace Corps volunteer for two years but also have time to think about the future and to dream about what I wanted to do with my life. I was just a young man searching out answers in the world and I didn't know what my next step was. I didn't have a job lined up and I thought what better way to think about life than sitting on a bicycle for eight hours a day for 4,000 miles. We're having a lot of fun. We get a little uncomfortable every now and then. We get a little tired. We get a little cranky but overall baby this is quite amazing and we're loving it, right Jeff? Isn't that so? And this is it. It's all in here. It's fun loving. It's deep. It's meaningful. You'll learn about my childhood to a degree and I'm just really proud of it. I'll keep on saying that but I'm just really proud of this book. It's exactly what I wanted it to be when I first dreamed this up. You see when I set out on this adventure I knew that someday I would write a book so I took very detailed notes. I journaled every single day in hopes of someday writing a book about this. I spent a lot of time at the end of every day taking down notes and journaling about everything. All the people I met, the beautiful things I saw, the feelings I was having internally and I was hyper focused. Even didn't matter how tired I was, I got out my pen and paper and I wrote in my journal because I knew that someday I would write this book. What I didn't know is how long it would take me to write this book. This is, I finished this adventure 17 years ago in December 2005. Today is December 20th, 2022. So why did it take so long to get this book out? Well it's hard to write a book and when I got home from the adventure in 2005 I bought a computer with the goal of writing a book and I sat down and I wrote about 100 pages and it's hard. It's excruciating, writing and not just making it some sort of boring journal entry but making it interesting. And then I got interested in video and I just never went back to the project until the pandemic. In 2021 I finally got into my video footage and made that long video of my ride home from Honduras. So that popped up on my channel in 2021 and then I thought well as long as the video is out there I should go back and look at my journals and I finally broke out all the dusty journals and got to work. And so this book has been, you know, a labor of love essentially for the last year and a half but it was really written about 17 years ago in a dusty dirty sweaty tent all the way from Honduras to Boulder. And look at this. It even has color photos. You're gonna love seeing 25-year-old Ryan. Last year being this is what we live on. About two cans of these a day maybe and at about a hundred farts too. You know I had no idea that this adventure would lead to my life today. I thought I would just go on this grand you know journey, learn about myself, meet wonderful people, challenge myself physically and then I'd get home to Boulder and get a nine to five job in the journalism world and call it good. But I had no idea that this adventure was going to spark a lifetime of adventure and it's for that I am forever grateful. I'm going to share the dedication page with you right here. This story is dedicated to all my niños and niñas en barrio terreno las peranzas Honduras. Leaving you was the hardest day of my life and I'm forever grateful that we got to spend two amazing years together. And you see all those kids that are around me in that photo. I am still in touch with all of these kids but guess what? They are no longer kids. They are all young adults and they're doing great. And I've been back to Honduras four times since I finished my service in 2005. And so Honduras will always have a huge part of my heart, my corazón. There are also some really awesome maps in the book that my neighbors Andrew and Ani helped me create so you can follow along. Now I want to talk about how I actually created the physical book. So it's really important for me to support local businesses and to create products that are as eco-friendly as possible. I'm always thinking about Mother Nature. You watch my videos. You know how I nerd out about this stuff. And luckily right here in Boulder there's a print shop called D&K Printing. They're a family owned business. They've been around for over 60 years and they are all about the eco-friendly process of printing. So all of the paper in this book is 100% recycled paper. Not one tree was cut down to create this book. And the inks, and this is the really interesting part, all of the ink in this book is algae based. So it's non-toxic and it's about as eco-friendly as a book can be. All right, here we are at D&K Printing. This is where all of the magic does happen, literally. We're a small printer, but the biggest printer in Boulder. We are known for high quality and green printing. We do a lot of work with 100% recycled papers, algae ink. The paper we're using today comes from a domestic mill in the Midwest. It's 100% recycled. Our inks that we use are all low VOC volatile organic compound. On the text of this book, because it's black, we got to use a unique new product called algae ink. Algae ink is the next step forward and ultra-reduable, grows fast, prints great, better for the environment. Each one of these humps adds a color. You have yellow, magenta, cyan, and black. The sheets come through the press that way, come through this way, one color getting added at a time, spits out the final product at the end of the press. The press runs about 10,000 sheets an hour. We're fine-tuning the color for the cover, so we'll run a few sheets, scan it into the computer, figure out what colors maybe need more or less, and then update the press so that it prints that way for the next sheets. So I'm signing off here to make sure to give my approval that the proof looks awesome and it does look awesome. So here we go. So there's consequences to everything in life being good or bad, and the consequence of paying local people to make this in a super eco-friendly fashion is that this book is a little bit more expensive than your traditional paperback book. The book is $25, but that's not all that much money when you think this is like my life's work and you're getting the most eco-friendly book possible, and I was able to pay local workers in Boulder a living wage. That's all really good, and I'm proud of it. Also, this is self-published. I am the publisher in this case, essentially, and so I had to front all of the money to print all these copies to do everything, so I spent a lot of my life savings on this, which is totally okay. I was planning on doing that. It's a dream come true to be able to do this, but I'm going to need your help. That's why I'm saying this. I need your help to share the word about this book. I am the marketing machine behind this. I'm going to be promoting it on my YouTube channel and my other social media outlets, but it would help a ton if you tell your friends about it. I can count on you. Team Deuzer, you're number one. We've done this before. We've had fundraisers where you've rallied and supported me, and now it's time to do it again. Smells like new eco-friendly book. You know what? I should have tried to figure out a way how to print this on like bean paper. Wouldn't that be cool? Maybe someday in the future, there will be like bean paper, kind of like how they have hemp paper. Something to think about. I just thought about that. I'm going to patent it. Bean books. I would now like to give a huge shout out to my friends at Priority Bicycles. They are hooking me up in the biggest way possible. So, when you self-publish a book, you are responsible for taking the orders, packaging the books, and going to the post office over and over and over. And I wasn't about to do that because my apartment is tiny and I don't have room to store thousands of books. So, when Dave caught wind that I was doing this project, he said, you know what Ryan? We have a warehouse and we have all the systems in place to do something like this. So, if you send me the books, we will deal with all of your fulfillment. Oh my god, thank you. This made my life so much easier and they're not charging me anything. They are just hooking me up, which is incredibly generous of them. And here we go. Oh, I'm coming back. Don't worry. I bought all of these very eco-friendly mailers from a business here in Boulder called Eco & Clothes. And so, you will get your book in one of these. And these are 100% recycled paper. You can recycle them in your mixed paper recycling. There's no plastic involved. Usually, when you buy a book or lots of other trinkets and things on the internet, it comes in plastic. And you know how much I hate plastic. Plastic is really bad for the environment in so many ways. So, thank you Dave and the team at Priority for doing this. Such a huge hookup. And I'm eternally grateful for your friendship. I didn't do this adventure alone. This is my good friend Jeff. This is the back cover of the book. And he came down and met me in southern Mexico. And we rode all the way to Boulder together. He's always been my adventure buddy. Very dear friend. And you will learn all about him in this book, The Long Way Home. Available now on doserbook.com. Quick recap. I wrote a book. It's called The Long Way Home. 17 years in the making. It's super eco-friendly. It's printed locally. Priority is doing all of the fulfillment. And, I forgot to mention, it's 204 pages long of pure heart and soul. And the goal of this book, just like with my YouTube channel, is for you to read it and feel something and get motivated or inspired to go out and challenge yourself in some way, shape, or form. It was really important for me to create a book that really hits people in the hearts, hits you in the feels, right? You're going to feel all of my emotions that I went through on this journey. And also, it's paperback as you can see. I want you to travel with this book and read it in your tent as you're on your own adventure. How cool is that? You know, I don't like hardback books, mainly for the fact that they're hard to travel with. They're big and bulky and they're not as eco-friendly. So, I made a purposeful decision to make this only in paperback. And somebody asked me recently, how is the book different now that you wrote it 17 years after the adventure? You know, and I thought it was a great question. And my answer was, you know what, there's a lot of perspective that I wouldn't have had if I had written this right in 2005 when I got home from the adventure. There's a lot more just wisdom, I think is the word. Hopefully, I've gotten wiser and more mature from the days when I wrote this book. And so, a lot of that, the perspective of my life now, today, has been injected into this book, an adventure from 17 years ago. And I'm really just proud of it. I've said that many times, but up until this point, this is really my life's crowning achievement. It's something that I had in the back of my mind for so long to someday write this book and to be holding it right now in my hands ready to share it with all of you means the absolute world to me. And you know, I started out this year 2022 feeling a little bit burnt out and wondering what the next step was and what I was going to do with my life. And I'm really grateful to this book and the writing process for giving me direction. And you know, it's all here and I'm just so happy you can see this smile as a very genuine real deal smile. You know, this book is a look into the mind of 25 year old Ryan. And I didn't edit out all the edgy parts. I wanted it to be real and raw and it's all here. So, in saying that, I don't know if I'd recommend this book to people under the age of like 10 or 11 or so. There's some swear words in here. I've been waiting a long time for this moment two months. It's time to put the American flag on the flagpole. We've got Honduras. We've got Guatemala. We've got Belize. We've got Mexico. Oh, yeah. America. America, I'm back. Oh, ebooks. So, there will be an ebook at some point. I will release that probably in a few months. And this is really specifically tailored towards everybody outside of the United States. The shipping on these books outside of the United States is insanely expensive and we can't do anything about it. So, I know people in England want this and Sweden and all over the place, but it's going to just be too expensive. The shipping is going to be as expensive as the book. And so, I don't want you spending that much money on this. Just wait until the ebook comes out. Deal? Look at my little baby. Look at my little book, baby. It's so cute. Oh, yes. Signed copies of the book. So, I was able to sign about 400 copies of the book before they were shipped off to the priority warehouse. And I opened up the preorders about a week ago. And so, the first 400-ish people are going to get a signed book. I also gave priority to my patrons to get in on this early. So, if you're not part of the first 400 people to buy this book, I'm sorry. I can't sign any more books because they are far away now in Pennsylvania. Now, your best bet to get a signed book is to come find me in Boulder. And hey, come find me in Boulder and we'll get a burrito and I will sign your book. How does that sound? All right. Check it out. I got that whole stack signed and ready. And I made one very special one with an amazing drawing of me. This is a self-portrait. There's only one of these. So, whoever gets this book, please post it to social media. This is kind of fun. It's like the Willy Wonka golden ticket. We are trying to put together some sort of book tour this coming spring in 2023. Priority is going to help me put this all together. We're going to have priority 600x's and you can try them out and you can buy the book and we're going to try to do something along those lines. So, stay tuned for some sort of a book tour in 2023. Oh, and yes, I will also do an audiobook for sure and I will read it and that will come out sometime. I've just been so busy just getting this out that I haven't been able to deal with ebooks and audiobooks and all that other stuff. But there will be an audiobook at some point and maybe I should practice with you right now. So, I am going to read one of my favorite pages from the book. Excuse me, here we go. We should have listened to the warnings. The wind throws our bikes around like ragdolls, knocking us off the road over and over. As we ride nearly sideways past the toll booth, we are soon the only thing moving on the highway. The traffic is completely jammed up due to an accident caused by the wind. Ambulances screech past, terrifying as the highway has no shoulder. Police block the road. We fight with all of our strength to keep our bikes riding straight but one burst of a wind, oh man, I need to get better at reading. Dirt blows into our faces and cakes our mouths. I feel sand between my teeth. I stop to put my foot down for balance as the high-powered gusts slam us from the west. Why can't we be writing eastward? So obviously I need to practice my reading out loud but that gives you a taste of what it will sound like. All right, this is the final little bit. I promise you. Thank you all so much for supporting me, for supporting this channel, and for believing in me more than anything. It means the world to me. And one of the main reasons why I was able to self-publish this book is because of you because I already have an audience. I didn't need a publisher to be my marketing machine and I was able to have full control of the process and make the book that I really want to make and write it in the way that I want to write it and not have editors say, not tone this down, not cut this out. Nope, it is me just like my YouTube channel. It is me, it is my heart and my soul. So thank you so much for purchasing this book. You are right. You're going to buy this book and thank you for just being on Team Dozer. It means the world to me to have this channel and I love you all. I'm giving you a big hug and I can't wait for you to read my little book, The Long Way Home. Like and subscribe. Welcome to Colorful Colorado. Wow, wow, wow, wow. The Rocky Mountains. I love you Colorado! Oh man! You know we're in Colorado now. We're in Colorado. So there we go. Colorado flag is flying baby. Welcome home Jeff and Ryan. Woo! Yes, it feels good! Snowy Colorado.