48 States, 50 Days

ItineraryMap
Hi! My name is Greg Lockwood, and this summer I am driving through all 48 contiguous United States. In an effort to share this journey with the world, I'll be posting daily videos of my travels, and probably some other randoms stuff as well. I hope you'll follow me in this trip to discover America, and maybe even see me on the road.
Nov 8 '10
Short version: I have finally started writing a book about my 50 day road trip across America. I will be posting it chapter-by-chapter on this Tumblr, with the first chapter likely to go up in the next few days. Long version: After driving across all lower 48 United States, I arrived back home in Texas a few days before August. That was over three months ago. Since I’ve been back, I’ve been doing both a lot and at the same time, relatively little, if that makes any sense. For the first month or so, I worked vehemently on a book proposal and researching the right literary agents that I figured would be a good match with my book. The problem is, that you can only query one agent every three weeks, which means that as far as “getting shit done”, you can only move as fast as the process allows you. During this time I didn’t actually work on the travel memoir itself, because that was to come after the book proposal, and I would take care of it when it’s time came. Then, in September, I came to realize that just querying literary agents wasn’t going to pay student loans, so I put the book on hold in favor of a series of other get-rich-slow schemes, none of which panned out either. I still have other non-book things in the works, but let’s talk about that (grainy) picture up there. I received a package from one of my best friends in late September, a late birthday present, and in the package was a copy of Anthony Bourdain’s latest book (he got me turned on to Bourdain while we were in college, and even though Bourdain is supposedly a food writer, I consider him one of the finest living travel writers, and the host of the best travel show on TV). Inside the book were the words written above, which I sat and thought over longer than I probably should have. I hadn’t written word one of my book at that point, and in fact, had barely even shared much about my trip. Of course, family and friends had asked me about it repeatedly since I had returned home, but at most I shared with them two or three choice anecdotes, never even scratching the surface of most of what I had experienced. But I realized that there was a reason for that. A lot of what happened to me on my trip, in and of itself, isn’t very interesting. If I sit here and tell you about the time I accidentally sat in the “Professional Drivers Only” section of a truck stop restaurant, you’d probably say “OK?” or “So?” If I told you about how I drove across the whole of New Mexico in pitch black in the pouring rain, only getting to see Albuquerque by its fluorescent outline, not that exciting. These kinds of stories have to be told in the greater sense of the trip itself to establish the meaning they had to me. So I guess that’s where I’ll start. From the beginning. I’ll be posting the (rough edit of the) book here on Tumblr, probably a chapter every 3-5 days. The first one will go up on Wednesday more than likely. I can already say it feels good to finally get to tell my story.

Short version: I have finally started writing a book about my 50 day road trip across America. I will be posting it chapter-by-chapter on this Tumblr, with the first chapter likely to go up in the next few days.

Long version: After driving across all lower 48 United States, I arrived back home in Texas a few days before August. That was over three months ago. Since I’ve been back, I’ve been doing both a lot and at the same time, relatively little, if that makes any sense. For the first month or so, I worked vehemently on a book proposal and researching the right literary agents that I figured would be a good match with my book. The problem is, that you can only query one agent every three weeks, which means that as far as “getting shit done”, you can only move as fast as the process allows you. During this time I didn’t actually work on the travel memoir itself, because that was to come after the book proposal, and I would take care of it when it’s time came. Then, in September, I came to realize that just querying literary agents wasn’t going to pay student loans, so I put the book on hold in favor of a series of other get-rich-slow schemes, none of which panned out either.

I still have other non-book things in the works, but let’s talk about that (grainy) picture up there. I received a package from one of my best friends in late September, a late birthday present, and in the package was a copy of Anthony Bourdain’s latest book (he got me turned on to Bourdain while we were in college, and even though Bourdain is supposedly a food writer, I consider him one of the finest living travel writers, and the host of the best travel show on TV). Inside the book were the words written above, which I sat and thought over longer than I probably should have. I hadn’t written word one of my book at that point, and in fact, had barely even shared much about my trip. Of course, family and friends had asked me about it repeatedly since I had returned home, but at most I shared with them two or three choice anecdotes, never even scratching the surface of most of what I had experienced. But I realized that there was a reason for that. A lot of what happened to me on my trip, in and of itself, isn’t very interesting. If I sit here and tell you about the time I accidentally sat in the “Professional Drivers Only” section of a truck stop restaurant, you’d probably say “OK?” or “So?” If I told you about how I drove across the whole of New Mexico in pitch black in the pouring rain, only getting to see Albuquerque by its fluorescent outline, not that exciting. These kinds of stories have to be told in the greater sense of the trip itself to establish the meaning they had to me.

So I guess that’s where I’ll start. From the beginning. I’ll be posting the (rough edit of the) book here on Tumblr, probably a chapter every 3-5 days. The first one will go up on Wednesday more than likely. I can already say it feels good to finally get to tell my story.