Basically at this point if I can’t find it on a map, it doesn’t exist.

I’m so humble, I know.

But it is amazing how looking at tens of thousands of points, parks, conservations areas, trailheads, trails, campgrounds, paths and tiny, unlabeled and unnamed forest roads can re-arrange one’s brain and optimize it for certain tasks.

The other day my partner was looking for a place on Google Maps. She’s actually better at navigation than I am, but now I am better at finding things (two slightly different skills). I looked at the map for about two seconds and said, “The trailhead is right there.”

And sure enough, it was.

A year ago I might have had to look for it for 10 minutes. Maybe 15. And I might never have found it. But now, I can just “see” in a way I couldn’t before.

It might be a fairly useless superpower, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.

On a a trip this long and complex, there’s a lot to keep track of.

We’ll be making a lot of reservations and obviously spending a good bit of money. For where we need to be and when, we’ve started tracking everything in a calendar (Thunderbird) with the data stored locally as we won’t always have internet access. We’ve heard calendars are useful for such things. Turns out to be true. ;-)

But a calendar is not a good place to track expenses, so we’ve also started a spreadsheet to know what we’ve spent, and what we still owe as some reservations only require a deposit. Later, we will use it to track other expenses.

All of this is good, but it means that we are doing more paperwork (or, rather, the computing equivalent of paperwork) than you’d expect for what is essentially an extended vacation. It’s developing into a system so the time spent to keep track of things will decrease, but right now a surprising amount of effort goes into organizing it all.

Aren’t you glad you read this fascinating blog post about doing paperwork?

The place will get more exciting — a little bit at least — when we’re actually on our way.

I grew up on and spent some of the best and happiest times of my childhood on a small rural river in North Florida. I always like to get back to those sort of places if I can, and this road trip is a good chance for that. My partner has also come to enjoy riparian Florida as well as long as the mosquitoes (her nemesis) are in check.

Luckily we found an absolutely beautiful place right on the St. Marks River in North Florida with a screened-in porch and a small dock for launching our kayak. We plan to spend five nights there as a break from our more-eventful jaunt through Georgia to Savannah and back, and we are quite excited about it.

Here is a photo of the place:

We truly will meander on this trip; we intend to follow the warm weather and go where the winds (and the reservations we’ve made) take us, and will leave Florida behind for more northerly points in late March. This cabin on the river is part of that wandering mindset. I look forward to sitting on the porch and reading or just watching the birds flit by, and thinking long slow thoughts.

We aren’t really that into through-hiking trails or anything like that. We don’t need to complete the entire Appalachian Trail to feel validated. The goal of this and all of our journeys is exploration for us, not completeness.

Too much in my opinion of what people do is about ego. About feeling a sense of accomplishment that matters to someone else and that does not belong to their better self. And part of this adventure — like all adventures — will be the chance to find another version of ourselves. Hopefully a better one.

There are a few ways to truly better one’s self.

The first is reading. Read a lot, and widely, and you are almost sure to emerge a different person at the end.

The second is to travel. It’s almost a shortcut, really, as you can spend a whole lot less time traveling as compared to reading for the benefit gained.

Reading is much cheaper, though.

There might be a third method. If so, I haven’t yet found it. I will keep looking.

Part of reinventing one’s self seems to involve a new appellation. I like the idea of that. Traditionally this name is something given to you externally rather than chosen by one’s self, but what is reconstruction of the self if someone else is in charge of the blueprints?

Hikers often receive or choose trail names. Hobos had road names. CBers had handles. And modern people have screen names.

So what should our road names be?

A word or phrase that captures personality, temperament, proclivities and tendencies. It’s too much to fit into one word, really. And yet it still holds a certain power.

Of course it does. That’s why you’re never supposed to tell a magic practitioner (or the NSA) your real name. I wonder if this still holds if your road name or other secondary sobriquet is more true and more “you” than your given name?

We haven’t found our road names yet. Perhaps they will find us. Or perhaps they will meet us in the middle, on the road.