Tuesday, May 11 - D-day minus One

I've been thinking about the nature of a road-trip, how it's always an exploration of both the external world and the one we each carry inside. In the successful ones, the two paths converge periodically, re-provision each other with lessons about the shared experiences and, enriched, continue on. In that model, the postings here are those meeting points where the recounting and reflecting take place. (If the Muse is with me, the good ones will be gourmet picnics. If she is away cavorting, you'll get the literary equivalent of a low-fat meal: a posting nutritious but dull.)

Some of you may want to skip the ruminations and go directly to the pretty pictures when they start appearing in a couple of days. And that's fine...because I won't know who you are. (There are no Cliff Notes, however, and I am sure to give a pop quizz.)

As for my goals for this road-trip. (We HR-types always need goals so that we can measure performance against them......yecch!) For the "outer" trip, cliche-ish as it might be, it's to see the America I've mostly flown over; to gape at vistas that don't stop at the edge of a page in The National Geographic magazine; to experience mile-by- scenic/monotonous/depressing/extraordinary-mile the size of this country (just the out-bound portion of my drive is 4243 miles, according to MapQuest); to discover what I have in common with the strangers with whom I share the designation "American"; and to find if there is a place with my name on it. (Strangely enough, one place I am staying overnight is Ferndale in northern California, a small, coastal town that was used as the set for the Jim Carrey movie "The Majestic", which is about a man with amnesia who is embraced by a town's people as their golden boy who was thought to have died in WW II.....)

Measuring the capacity of my bladder in hours-between-rest-stops is an added bonus. But not a goal.)

As for the goals of the parallel inner trip...in the next posting, which will have the first photos, and which will be written from my first stop, my friends Margie and Grace and their brood, in Raleigh, NC, 408 miles and seven hours from Philadelphia.