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.