About Us, About Our Team

Mike has journeyed to over 42 countries in the course of business and personal travel. He spent most of his formative years taking things apart to see how they worked, and only later in life, realized the value of putting them back together again.


An avid motorcyclist, his first "motorcycle love" was a friend’s Sears mini-bike, powered by a 3-1/2HP Briggs & Stratton, cord-start, lawn mower engine. Driving this single-speed wonder earned him a dreaded session with Sister Dorothea and her paddle after a Sunday morning ride inside the school’s auditorium. He spent three years as an amateur 6-hour endurance racer in his early 20’s, and has owned a wide variety of motorcycles and sidecars over the years, his current favorites being the BMW "GS" series of adventure touring bikes.


Mike’s working career spanned such diverse occupations as motorcycle parts specialist, bartender, biomedical electronics technician, medical equipment designer and engineer. He serviced, then later designed, a wide variety of medical devices for Olympic Medical. He designed patient monitors for Spacelabs and cardiac defibrillators for Physio-Control. Somewhere in there was a three-year stint in military air defense thrown in for good measure. He retired from Microsoft in 2002 after a ten-year career in design, business development and product group management.


Realizing that ten years in high-tech had resulted in almost zero "downtime", Mike retired and joined Helge on the GlobeRiders World Tour in 2002. The sheer joy of adventuring lured him onto the GlobeRiders team, where he pre-ran the African Adventure with Helge in 2003. He now joins Helge in the planning, logistics and guiding of GlobeRiders tours, and authors this website.


Mike and his wife, Aillene, have homes in Cainta Rizal, Philippines, and Kenmore, Washington.