Learning from Gary vol. 1
On turning left
I’d like to intro you to my coffee guy. Gary Dobbins runs Vieques Coffee Roasters out of a shed in his backyard. Most tourists who come to Vieques, a sleepy island off the Puerto Rican mainland, take a right off the boat and head towards the downtown of San Isabel II. But take a left, walk a few blocks, commit what feels like trespassing past a few lounging cats, and you find yourself at Vieques Coffee Roasters.
Walk in to find Gary, a man God cut from the same cloth he used for Rick Rubin. Gary smiles at you with his eyes and asks “Do you want a cup of coffee?” Say yes, stay and chat; ask him about his bean supplier’s hacienda and the history of the word “mocha” and whether different pour-over techniques actually do anything, and he’ll comp your coffee. He wants to talk. He wants to enjoy coffee with you.1
I’ve learned three lessons from Gary, and I’m going to share them one at a time. The first and most important is that the world rewards exploration.
This is a profound truth. Kids know it, which is why life is so good for them, and why time goes by so slowly. Adults forget it, which is why we blink and turn 40.
It’s easy to go to Vieques, turn right, get a ride to the bioluminescent bay, and go back to the mainland. This is what travel blogs would have you do. Nobody tells you to turn left and find Gary. Nobody ever tells you to find Gary.
The problem is that while the world rewards exploration in the aggregate, not every jaunt gets rewarded. Sometimes you turn left and find nada. The more you find nada, the more your little optimizer brain discourages exploration in the future, the more you stick to “tried-and-true” TikTok recs and travel blog lists of “10 must-do’s.” You play it safe! And why wouldn’t you? Why go to Socotra when everybody is going to Paris and having a good time?2
But exploration doesn’t need to be extreme. Exploration is just curiosity with feet, a mindset carried out with steps. It rejects the mean, hushes the voice that says “there’s probably nothing there,” and honors the fact that the world is chock-full of surprises for those with eyes to see.
The cool thing is that exploration compounds. My chats with Gary led me to visit Hacienda Tres Angeles, his source farm on the PR mainland. This, in turn, makes me the most insufferable of coffee snobs, somebody who knows his farmer and his roaster personally. But snobbery aside, I’m better for it! I have a coffee guy now, and the coffee’s really good! And it’s not even tariffed, God Bless the USA.
I’m proud to be, at this writing, one of Gary’s 55 glowing Google reviews.
I haven’t been to either. But look at how crazy this bikepacking trip looks. “This route has been awarded a difficulty rating of 9 out of 10 and is not to be undertaken lightly. The search for water can easily become an obsession all along the route, and the necessity to filter and purify it make things even more difficult.”