Find a City, Find Yourself a City to Live In

Tomorrow I move to Portland, Oregon. It's going to be a long trip from Hartford, Connecticut all the way west, and there are a lot of stops in between to commune with many of my scattered cohorts, comrades, and colleagues. Here is the list of scheduled stops:

Philadelphia
Baltimore
Cincinnati
Chicago
Grinnell (Iowa)
Omaha
Denver
Pocatello (Idaho)
Portland.

It's gonna be good to get back on the road. I'm glad that I'm going to be stopping in so many places. Often a long distance trip will encourage the intrepid traveller to speed through on interstate lane; unfortunately this takes you through the gutter of america. Truck stops, billboards, and interchanges hardly a country make. This way I'll get a good sample of living locales across the country before arriving at my own choice. Pictures and blog posts will follow as internet access allows.

I've collected a good number of cassette tapes for the journey. My own installed CD player fried many a year ago, after my brother spilled a hot chocolate inside of it (he denies this version of events). A '95 Plymouth Voyager has no factory installed CD player. I'd say the best of the bunch is Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet. I've even got a tape of whale songs though, because its a pretty big continent on which we live. Where can you even buy new cassettes these days? Other than the ubiquitous truck stop, I think Wal-Mart may be the only location. I'll find out though, and report back.

A '95 Plymouth Voyager also has a lot of other things that are not factory installed. Or, at this point, need to be installed again. I'm hoping to make it across the country without too many automobile mishaps. I'll probably need a new fuel filter at some point, but that is standard with this many miles on old Vee-ger. Maybe a flat tire too, though the ones I have aren't too old. Let's hope for the best.

So I'll be in touch over the next two weeks with regular reports about people seen, highways conquered, national historic sites observed and liquors imbibed. It will almost be like the entire internet is going with me in the car. And then, when I finally run out of road and reach the Pacific Ocean, we will begin a whole new chapter of my life. Kind of sobering. Or intoxicating, depending on which way you look at it.