Jim Crawford has lived a varied and unconventional life. A musician and songwriter, Jim has also worked as a carpenter and cabinetmaker, taking time off to sail in the South Pacific and bicycle through Australia and New Zealand. In the early 1990s, Jim spent time in Central America notably studying the demise of the traditional fishing culture in a Belizean village. He received his MS in Geography from Virginia Tech in 1995. Jim loves talking with people about their lives and has shared their stories as a writer and through several documentary films he has produced, including Down in the Old Belt: Voices from the Tobacco South.
"""The why of our travel is curiosity, to experience new places, new people. It is not based on the physical, in fact physical holds only a minor part in this play. This travel is the geography of hearts, the vital center and source of our beings, emotions, and sensibilities."" ""I contemplated the future and regarded the past. It amazed me how 26 years had flown by. But how much had changed, really? How much had stayed the same? 'Never go back, ' my grandmother tearfully told me a long time ago. Her comment was upon visiting the home where she had grown up, a place she had known intimately. Our going back, our retrace, would be to places we had glimpsed for mere moments, rarely more than a few hours, but places that touched our hearts. I wondered if we would feel the same way."""