By Hope Smith

Photographer Kevin Connolly’s adventures abroad began when he found out how easy it was for a legless guy to hitchhike.

“When you’re sitting on the road on a skateboard, people really want to pick you up,” said Connolly, who was born without legs.

In his speech Wednesday night in Worsham Theatre, he told students how he had planned a trip to New Zealand through his college’s education abroad department as a sophomore, and found himself in a foreign country with no contacts and limited funds.

He eventually found a hostel with a bar attached in the hopes of making some friends who might take him wherever he wanted to go.

“I was trying to schmooze myself south, right into these two guys’ backseat,” Connolly said.

Shortly after, he met someone in the hostel who knew his name before Connolly had ever spoken a word to him.

“When a dwarf clad in all white, halfway across the world, knows all about you, you get kind of freaked out,” Connolly said.

The “dwarf” knew Connolly because he had noticed Connolly’s name on the bottom of the skateboard he uses as his main form of transportation.

After Connolly got past the small talk with the “dwarf,” he was asked an unusual question — “Do you want to fight? I don’t see legless guys that often, so I just kind of wanted to.”

Connolly agreed to fight only if someone would photograph it, but as he went to grab his camera, a group of old pirate-fishermen told Connolly and the “dwarf” they disapproved of the fight.

“So this is what I encounter my very first time travelling alone,” Connolly said.

After that night, Connolly bought a stack of plane tickets to a handful of countries in Europe.

Everywhere he went people reacted in similar ways to his disability.

Some people gave him money and food. He was “force-blessed in Yiddish” by one woman and physically picked up off the ground by a man while trying to enter a subway car in Ukraine.

“People still give me alms three to four times a day,” Connolly said.  “It’s a strange, kind of isolating feeling.”

With only a single photography class under his belt, Connolly learned photography through trial and error, snapping photos of people all over Europe as he rode by them on his skateboard.  After reviewing the shots, he noticed all of his subjects had the same look on their face, regardless of time, place and background.

“It’s like it was a level playing field on a global scale,” Connolly said.

Photographs from his trips were compiled into Connolly’s “Rolling Exhibition,” which started at his own Montana State University, and is currently being shown in UK’s Rasdall Gallery until Dec. 3.

After his trip Connolly found himself balancing his senior projects and wrapping up his book “Double Take: A Memoir.”

“We’re all curious, we want to find out about things we don’t know about,” Connolly said.