This week’s Hidden Gem is none other than Economics Professor, Kevin Cochrane. Along with an incredibly impressive resume, he comes along with past-time hobbies that would lead even the most seasoned adventurer to feel a twinge of jealousy.
Both Professor Cochrane and his wife, Stacy, spent their careers in investment banking. He worked for Citi Bank and his wife was the chief lending officer of the largest construction lender in the world.
“One of the advantages of being a ‘Wolf of Wall’ is if you don’t wolf of Wall Street your money away you can retire in your 40s, and we were very frugal. We were able to walk away in our 40s and never really have to work for a living again and just do what we want to do,” Cochrane said.
Both Cochrane and his wife knew they did not want to spend their lives in investment banking, and were planning a retirement, until an existential decision forced their hand. Cochrane had a heart attack, or what he calls the “occupational hazard of investment banking,” and was declared legally dead; obviously pushing their retirement dates forward by a few years.
“Oh, and by the way, you don’t see a light and you don’t look down on yourself. One minute you’re there and the next minute your waking up two days later in a hospital wondering ‘what happened,’” Cochrane said.
At that point, his bank was riding high and they decided to retire. They spent roughly the next 18 months tying up loose ends and finally retiring in 2006. “Timing is everything,” Cochrane said, referring to how lucky they had been to get out of investment banking before the 2008 recession.
From there begins the story that left me with a travel bug and a desire to buy a plane ticket to go anywhere. After realizing they had been everywhere in the United States for their jobs but had never actually seen anything, they decided to hop on their Harleys and do a road trip around the United States. That first trip took about three months and covered 18,000 miles.
What originally started as a joke to let their friends know they were still alive; they started a blog called “Riding 4 Beer.” The first few posts stated where they were, but progressively molded into the model that would eventually attract the attention of the Anheuser-Busch marketing department.
They created two self-imposed rules. The first rule being they could post phony photos but nothing photoshopped. Number two was called the “Aunt Jackie Rule.” Aunt Jackie was 90 years old at the time and the rule stated they could shock her, but never offend her. Each post would contain three paragraphs and four photographs.
Anheuser-Busch soon reached out to them and wanted to sponsor their tour. Initially wary, coming from a corporate world and not wanting their off-the-wall blog to be censored, they were finally sold on the idea when told, “We sponsored the Rolling Stones tour and didn’t censor what Mick Jagger sang.” The couple would spend their summers from 2008 to 2013 going on some wild adventures.
They rode around the perimeter of North America, twice, once around the world, once around the perimeter of China and once around the perimeter of Europe. They would do an, “around the World in 80 days or less,” without ever leaving the surface of the earth and never having an advance reservation.
“In the U.S. that’s not so rough, you can get off the road and there is a dive motel nearby. It is kinda rough in Siberia or North Africa,” Cochrane said. “The worst it got was in Prague, Czechoslovakia. We spent the night on the dock of a vegetable distribution warehouse because we couldn’t find anywhere else to stay. It was a great night, but it was a rough morning at 4:00 a.m. when the trucks started showing up and dumping vegetables”.
“I’m going to use this word, and I know it would shock Aunt Jackie, but even in the summer, Siberia is a bitch. Don’t let anyone tell you any different; 11 time zones of nothing and snow, even in July,” Cochrane said.
After their first tour around the United States, they decided to make their second one a little more colorful. “Riding 4 Beer Magical Mystery Tour, which is where we only went to places where people are nuts; like Area 51, Roswell New Mexico and someplace in Texas where cars roll uphill,” Cochrane said.
When asked by friends to travel with them, they often give the response “We don’t stay at Hiltons.”
“We went to Thailand and worked our way North, then walked across the land boarder, which is closed, into Laos and hustled a boat on the Mekong River into the center of Laos; then hiked across the Plain of Jars, then escaped out of Laos into Vietnam to the safety of Han-oy ‘said no one ever’ and from there worked our way out,” Cochrane said. “Those are the kind of vacations we take.”
If you are interested in looking further into their wildly, sometimes scary, but always exciting endeavors, you can still find their Facebook page Riding4Beer. Although, forewarning, if you’ve ever felt the desire to drop everything and runaway to see the world, this may be the trigger that makes you do just that.
In 2012, the couple were looking to move out of California and decided on Grand Junction. “We rode our Harley’s every year from Palm Springs to Sturgis, South Dakota for the Sturgis Rally. Grand Junction is halfway between the two and this is where we would stay overnight,” Cochrane said. “We’d been looking for years how to get out of California and we finally looked at here”.
Once they got here, they lived in a dive motel on the North end of 12th Street for three months until they were able to buy their home. Despite their lack of permanent residence, Professor Cochrane has been working at Colorado Mesa University since the day he got here. Having been searched out by Dr. Bridge, who was the chair of the department at the time. She saw Professor Cochrane’s name pop up in the American Economics Associate with a Grand Junction address and she contacted him telling him there are no certified public economists around here and asked if he had ever thought about teaching.
Having spent the last 10 years teaching at College of the Desert in California and three years at the University of California prior to that, he was happy to be teaching again and has been here ever since.
Adding to their storybook life, his wife, Stacy, decided to go back to school for ceramic arts. Now, she is a world-class potter, and tours the world making pottery. She is also the western “artist in residence” at the Chinese Ceramics Pottery Institute in Jingdezhen China. They spend roughly three months out of the year there, where Professor
When most people retire, they spend their free time gardening or learning how to whittle, but not Professor Cochrane. “I occupy my time with teaching a couple classes here part-time and then I write for several national publications. I periodically write for the Washington Times, Washington Examiner, Wall Street Journal and Newsmax – In which he has had multiple articles published just this last week. I write, mostly on economics, teach and goof-off either riding my Ducati or Harley,” Cochrane said.
