...to the very first of what will surely be many exciting, harrowing and heartstring-plucking entries in this, my brand new travel blog! Beginning now and happening with more regularity once my trip is underway, I plan to update from the road periodically with tales of adventure and intrigue, laughter and pain, and what will most likely be general weirdness induced from the mind-numbing cold to which I will soon be subjecting myself.
I’m betting many of you saw my announcement on Facebook around a month ago regarding this road trip plan but, if you did not, here’s the deal:
Bright and early on November 23, having hopefully figured out how to cram myself and my dog into a pickup-truck-turned-camper full of gear, I will embark on what should be the adventure of a lifetime: a road trip to, quite literally, the four corners of the US. Just me, my dog Gabby, and all the cold-weather paraphenalia I can get my hands on.
As I’ve planned it so far, the route is as vague* as it is ambitious - I can’t say for sure when or where it will end but its miles number in the thousands. It is by design that this trip has no end - my goal is not to take a quick vacation and then return home to my life in Nashville, refreshed and ready to get back to the grind. No, by the time I leave, I will no longer have a home in Nashville, or anywhere else for that matter, and that is precisely the point. It will end when it ends.
*Actual route may vary
(Source: Walt Disney Pictures)
As someone who has always been meticulous to a fault about planning my future, this is a deliberate departure from the status quo and a grand experiment, to see what kind of a life I can make for myself after throwing everything up in the air. You could say that the grind has finally ground me down, so now I’m just letting the wind whisk away the dust to wherever it may, clichés be damned.
You're probably thinking "Okay, he's quitting his job and moving into the back of a truck, big deal - crazy people do that all the time, what makes him so special?" Well, quite possibly nothing. Maybe I am one of those crazy people and I just haven’t realized it yet.
Or maybe I’ve thought long and hard about every possible option given the status of my life right now and this is what makes the most sense. Long story short, I'm working at a job where I felt from the very beginning like I didn’t fit in, within a profession that I’ve been slowly losing interest in for years, and living in a town I knew wouldn’t be my forever-home (sorry Nashvegas). Oh yeah, and also throw in a relationship-gone-south for good measure. Got all that?
So, what do you do when your job ain’t cuttin' it, your town ain’t cuttin’ it and your gal ain’t cuttin’ it?
You write a country song. Obviously.
Or, if you're like me and have no musical talent, then you turn your life into a country song (living in Nashville will do that to you); you take your dog and your pickup truck and ride off into the sunset.
Since songwriting isn’t my forte, I suppose that leaves the regular kind of writing (if this turns out to also not be my forte, I’m going to need y’all to tell me). Several folks have suggested that I keep a trip journal to document the adventures and pitfalls that are inevitably going to come out of this trip and, given that my brain’s capacity mismatches its age by at least a couple of decades, having a written copy of my travels for future reference seems like not only a fun idea but more like a mental insurance policy. So, in time, when the tallness of my tales starts to get out of hand, you'll have a handy record of what really happened to put me in my place (unless, you know, I just make shit up to begin with - who's gonna stop me?).
My plan, though, is to take this documentation one step further by keeping a private and public record of the trip; a private journal to serve as a stream-of-consciousness brain dump and a public blog (this thing here) that distills that book of nonsense into something interesting or, dare I say, helpful to you, the reader.
This decision to drop everything and drive across the country is only a symptom (or solution?) of a series of larger problems that I’m still in the process of working through. One of my main goals in keeping a blog is that hopefully, my friends (or anyone else) can see that they aren’t quite as alone in their struggles as they thought. We all have our battles but not everyone looks like they're fighting one. I’m going to try and keep this real, honest and optimistic - to share the lessons I’ve learned and to invite input from you on tales from your own personal journeys. Hell, if nothing else, look to me as a cautionary tale of what not to do when the going gets tough. I mean, I don’t think I’m crazy but do crazy people know they’re crazy?
I’ll let you, the reader, make that call.
CWO