Mark Ecenbarger:  

1980's I started traveling for work this decade. I always had the wander lust so I hit the road. I was building Supercuts salons for my moms business, in the early 80's I lived Maryland, Arizona and Florida. After the Supercuts, I went to work for a company building retaining walls. Myself and 3 friend went homeless for the next 3 years. We traveled around the country from city to city building our walls. We lived in hotels and a job would last 6 to 14 weeks and then on to the next city. It was 3 years of very hard work and even harder partying. I got injured in early 1987, it turned out to be career ending. I spent the last 3 years of the decade going through 2 operations, rehabilitation, chronic pain control clinics and retraining. I have a 25% disability rating from this. In the end, this was the best thing that ever happened to me because it made me look at myself and say "Now What?". The Now What I came up with was even more fun and wild then the 80's. 1990's The Now What I decided on was Scuba Diving. I was already a certified divemaster and I thought I would move to the Florida Keys to ply my new trade. During the summer of 89, I was in school for part of my retraining when my mom called. Mom was also a scuba dive and had recently returned from a dive trip out of the country on a live aboard dive boat. She asked me "What would I think about doing my "Dive Thing" in Indonesia. I had to get a globe to see where Indonesia was. She also asked if I would like to take a 7 week trip there to check it out. I don't remember my exact answer but i know it included references to birds flying, fish swimming and poop stinking. The trip turned out to be 2 weeks of scuba diving on a live aboard dive boat, 2 weeks in Bali and 3 weeks in North Sulawesi. I was so jazzed that I agreed to move to Indonesia, supervise the contruction of a resort, train the local staff, open the resort and then manage it. I returned to the U.S. and enrolled in Golden Gate University and studied Hotel and Restaurant Management. The adventure began when I moved to Bitung, North Sulawesi Indonesia to start the resort in April of 1991. Here are some of the highlights from that time. It took 3 years to build the resort and train the staff, we opened in April of 1994. The name of the resort is Kungkungan Bay Resort (KBR for short) and it is a scuba diving resort. I had my first marriage during the early 90's. She was half Chinese and half Spanish and she was from Singapore. The marriage lasted 3 1/2 years...Expand for more