The map page is working now.  We (the we that means quoderat by far) have been researching places to visit for months, saving off descriptions and gps coordinates, hunting for parking areas and trail heads with street view and satellite. (How did anyone travel before Google?)

We’ve focused on the outer thirds of the country. There are over 8,800 points now. We’re using a clustering library for the actual map, but below is a screen shot without the clustering. You can see the mountain ranges in the density of the points.

Here is a topo map scaled down from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission for comparison.

A trip that is measured in months seems like such a long time, surely there must be time for everything, but there is so much to see. We always intended to collect more points than we’d actually end up visiting to give us flexibility, but as we’re starting to make reservations, we’re beginning to have to make those choices of what to leave out in order to keep a pace that balances getting to see new places and staying long enough to experience them.

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.

It takes about 5 hours to fly across the US, which is a long time to be strapped into a cramped and poorly padded domestic economy seat.  It takes 7 days to drive the southern route from Seattle to Tampa, leaving time for sleeping and such and 8 hours of driving each day.  You see a lot more of the country driving than from a plane window, but mostly what you see is the other cars on the freeway.

We would like to see the rest of the countryside, the forests and mountains and shorelines, and the resident birds and bugs and frogs and snakes and such.

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.