You may think the smelly and obviously homeless gentleman sitting at the corner with his hand held out is lazy, a drunkard, or addicted to some drug. In a lot of the cases, you would be right - but I contend that some of them became that way because it literally takes all day just to survive.

In the first and second parts of this series, I explained why I'm homeless today with my significant other, and shined a bit of light on what a homeless person has to do in order to eat and sleep. Now I'll elaborate on why it is so hard to get out of the situation.

Unless you keep your things with you at all times or have a locked place to keep them, you run the risk of having it stolen every time you leave it somewhere. Fear of losing what few things you have will keep a person pretty well tied down to a small area. It's tough walking much more than a few blocks at a time carrying 60lbs of luggage. Now imagine doing that every day to chase after meals and a place to sleep - you can forget looking for a job.

Fortunately, we have the majority of our stuff stored with a friend who is also letting us take showers too. With the bicycles we acquired today from a very generous man (he has probably been giving bikes to the homeless for a few years now), we are much more mobile.

You won't last much longer than a few days standing and walking for 16 to 20 hours a day, every day. Bicycles mean we can go more than 6 blocks without a break, get there faster, and do so without aggravating our feet much more. When we were walking everywhere, it would take until lunch to make the 34 block hike from the breakfast location to the lunch location. Now we just might be able to fit in some job hunting time - and that too is an altogether different story.