Happy Birthday Serena!!

Hope your day is filled with lots of big waves and lots of little surprises.

Love,

Your comrades

So, this first peer edit doesn’t quite seem fair, with my initial selects just over 100 but Will sending me 234 pretty photos to agonize over. Choosing a theme–in this case “Yellow 1999 Nissan Micra and its adventures”–made things immensely easier. I read so much about this car and its antics that I came to realize it was pretty much the 5th member of Team Great Job! There is a lot of other excellent travel photojournalism in those 234 photos, (and I am sure even more in the 10k Will took!) but these are my favorite photos taken of or in the car. For some of these shots I can imagine Will sprint far enough away from the car to get the composition he sees in his head. It makes me immensely happy.

Great job Will!

We arrived at the Mongolian border after driving all night, passing through frigid Russian mountains just before dawn. At around six in the morning, just as the first light was making a jagged outline of hills visible around us, we found a circle of Mongol Rally cars parked in a circle like Conestoga wagons, protecting a handful of tents.

Will hasn’t had time to e-mail any photos or write a post, but he did manage to get quite a few shots up on the good ol’ flickr. Even though they are from earlier in the trek and not the Eastern European photos I eagerly await, they will do for now. Check them out here.

Will sent a quick update yesterday from a couple’s home, where he and Team Great Job! stayed in Poland. The team was off to see a mechanic to make some upgrades on the Nissan Micra they are driving to Mongolia. From Will:

A quick hello before we go out to find supplies for our journey in the city of Ludz (pronounced oudge), the second-largest city in Poland.  We are staying with a super-nice couple who have written in Polish some explanation of what we need and why we need it that we can show to people today.  For us, it’s a very welcome respite from camping.

We drove from Munich to Prague and explored the city with one of Ryan’s friends two days ago and put some serious mileage on our feet getting through the city.  Then we left our campsite yesterday morning and took some wrong turns out to the city before making it through the forested mountains of the Czech Republic.  The resort towns along the way reminded me a bit of California’s national parks, and we stopped for pizza in a P

This is the inaugural post of the Meridian Collective. As of today, the collective includes Serena Renner, Will Parson and Jackie Snow. While we still have a lot to iron out in terms of what we hope to accomplish with this collective, we do have a lovely mission statement, which is as follows:

“Meridian is a collective of young journalists with a passion for telling stories through any medium necessary. We find inspiration in our daily lives and use words, photos, video and new media to bring the world to others. Meridian is as much a conduit as it is a vessel; our goal is to create an active community to help like-minded journalists grow, develop and promote their own work. We encourage each other’s artistic vision and use our individual talents to strengthen the group. Our skills are varied yet we share a common purpose — to inspire, connect and use journalism as a vehicle to promote social consciousness across the globe.”

We will use this blog to share the trials and tribulations that go alon