Adam Burgess says he has dreamed of driving around the world “since I was 10,” and now he’s nearly done it.
Burgess, MA ’02, is part of a nine-member crew of Drive Around the World, a Los Gatos, Calif., nonprofit hoping to raise $1 million for Parkinson’s disease research. The group’s goal: stitch together overland routes to carry them and their four Land Rovers across four continents and more than 30,000 miles, raising awareness and money along the way.
Burgess was part of the film crew that documented the trip, which began in Sunnyvale last November. The team drove to the tip of Argentina, shipped the vehicles to Australia, drove across the Outback, sent the cars to Singapore and as of August were heading north through the interior of China. They expect to finish the Asian leg in Kamchatka, Russia, then rejoin the journey in Alaska and finish later this fall back in California.
Burgess, who earned a master’s in documentary film and video production at Stanford, credits professor Kristine Samuelson for inspiring him. “Although my first job after graduation was building a veranda over the sliding backdoor of her house, she always had faith in my work,” he says.
