July 2011
1 post
“After scanning the rows of museums, I entered the Smithsonian Institution...”
– Greg Lockwood
May 2011
3 posts
2 tags
Concerning Tourist Destinations
(This obviously isn’t an entire chapter. I think I’m going to try posting bite-size quips several times a week instead of one entire chapter at a time.)
“As soon as I had planned out the route for the trip, until I was just a few states away from Minneapolis, I had been having a constant inner debate about what to do about the Mall of America. I was going to be in Minneapolis...
The Best Meal
(Here’s the majority of the second New York essay. Yes, there are two New York essays. No, this is not a book exclusively about New York. These are the only two. Also, I say “the majority” because this isn’t the whole thing, because I haven’t quite finished it yet, but I wanted to get something out today. Again, this is a rough draft, so, parts of it are, admittedly,...
Lost in New York
(Hello! It’s me. I’m still writing. I had about 8000 words in the bank of the travelogue in its original, straightforward narrative form, but there was a problem. While I definitely have enough material to write a book about, writing the “state 1, state 2, state 3” just wasn’t working out. There was a lot of…empty spaces, just as there were on the trip. Which...
March 2011
5 posts
4 tags
Chapter 3 Part 1
I hadn’t gotten to see much of Jackson the night before, so I set about it in the morning. The capitol building was less than a mile away from my motel, so it seemed like an obvious destination. While I say the capitol building was less than a mile from my motel, there were actually two capitol buildings less than a mile away from my motel. The Old Capitol is now a museum of state history,...
4 tags
Chapter 2 Part 3
I hit the road early and departed Texarkana, this time for good. I drove back down to Shreveport to meet another cousin, this time on my mother’s side, for lunch. By pure coincidence, the restaurant we were meeting at was located on the boardwalk I had just been the previous afternoon. Cousin George had been not just my mom’s cousin but her best friend growing up, and after we had...
Chapter 2 Part 2
[Author’s Note: Before this post, I had not been using “Read More” links in these posts. Mainly because I didn’t want it to seem like I was trying to drive pageviews to the actual website at the expense of the people who like to stay on the Tumblr Dashboard. But this post is ~1800 words, and the rest of the posts aren’t going to get much shorter, so I am putting a...
4 tags
Chapter 2 Part 1
My great road trip, my vision quest on wheels aimed to take me places I’d never been to, places no one I knew had ever been to. Because what is self-progression if not confronting the unfamiliar? But first, I had to go somewhere very familiar. I had to go in reverse, taking the same route out of Dallas in the opposite way my parents arrived. I had to go back to the family history.
Five...
3 tags
Chapter 1
{Author’s Note: Hey everyone. It’s been over 7 months since I got back from the road trip that this blog is about. I’ve done a lot of things (well, not that much) in that time, but putting fingers to keyboard about the trip has not really been one of them. And in that time, I’ve only lost about 200 followers from when my blog was in peak readership. I’m not sure why...
November 2010
1 post
August 2010
6 posts
4 tags
Recommend it Travel →
Hey everyone, it’s been a while since I made a post for Tumblr Tuesday, but this Tuesday is special. Beginning yesterday I started posting on it Travel, a comedy travel blog which is part of the it Comedy network.
Basically, it Travel highlights real places, and offers both factual and unfactual information about those places. It’s goofy, it’s a fun time, and you might just...
Three Guys Heading West →
Hey everyone, I’m still alive and kicking, working on my book and trying to get picked up, along with 3 or 4 more projects, basically doing whatever I can to keep myself occupied. But that’s not the reason for this post.
A few days ago, some fine gentlemen from Europe contacted me through Tumblr asking me if I could give them a shout-out on here. They are going to be flying into NYC...
blair-the-amazing asked: Is it weird for me to say that I'm proud of you? Obviously, we've never met, nor will we ever meet in the future, but upon reading through this blog and just imagining what you've accomplished, I'm elated to see that somebody else shares my obsession with GOING somewhere. Its a goal of mine to have "The great american roadtrip" before i'm forced to setttle down...
Hey everyone, still waiting to hear from my first literary agency, it’s about halfway through the three week wait period, so I haven’t gotten my hopes up yet!
But the real reason I’m making this post is to tease a project that I have been working on the last few days. I don’t want to say too much just yet, but if you’re a fellow traveler and I am aware of your work...
Briton first known man to walk Amazon River →
Over 2 and a half years (!!!) this dude walked more than 4,000 miles along the entire length of the Amazon River, and went through hardships such as being taken prisoner by a local native tribe.
Whenever this dude writes/publishes the memoir for this, assuming he is a decent writer, it will be one of the most interesting pieces of narrative in the upcoming years.
Query Letter
After a week of being back from my trip, and being extremely lazy while recovering from my trip, I knew that it was about time to get on top of things and start on the next step of this project of mine. So today I refined my query letter, which I wrote the first draft of before I left for the trip.
Touching up the query letter actually took the majority of my day, which you wouldn’t expect...
July 2010
30 posts
Home
Hey everyone! As some of you may or may not know, yesterday was Day #50, which means I arrived back at home in Texas yesterday. I know I failed big time at updating this thing during the last leg of the trip. It was mainly due to the fact that I had so much driving since the states are so big in the West, but that’s still not a very good excuse. I have a backlog of pictures and stories, so I...
Anonymous asked: Am I allowed to say hi when you're in Los Angeles?
Hey everyone. I know it’s been a week, and I really don’t have any excuses for my absence. The last you heard from me I was in Chicago shortly after the 4th of July. After I left Chicago I started my descent into the true Midwest. I spent the night (the 6th) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (which apparently against some force of physics has five seasons) and visited the college town of Madison,...
Going to Chicago today
And I’m not very familiar with it. It’s huge, and I know there’s a lot of things I should see there, but I also know I won’t be able to see all or even a majority of them, so if I can only see one or two things in Chicago, what should they be?
So at the races today, inside Churchill Downs itself, is the Kentucky Derby Museum. That makes no sense to me. It’s like, here, you can go inside this museum and look at pictures of horses and people racing horses, or you can step outside and actually watch people racing horses. It makes about as much sense as an American Revolutionary War museum in Massachusetts in 1780.
Lemondrop.com Interview →
Hey guys, the other day Paula from Lemondrop.com contacted me, asking me to do an interview for their site. I was more than happy to, and today the feature went up. I think it went really well, so everyone should check it out!
Halfway
Well, today is day number 25 out of 50. In less than a month, I have driven 6000 miles across 26 states, been from the beaches of Florida to the mountains of New England, the most populated city in the country and the smallest state, the nation’s capital and villages that aren’t even on the map. And yet, I still have a long way to go.
The most frequent question I get from friends is...
June 2010
69 posts
Moose Crossing
The idea behind this post came from yesterday as I was driving through the mountains of Vermont, but I didn’t think of posting it until today when some deer crossing signs made my little light bulb go off.
So, yesterday on the two-lane mountain highway through Vermont, every few miles there would be moose crossing signs up, and one of them warned “Caution, hundreds of collisions every...
