I’ve Been Everywhere, Man
With mere days to go until the half-cross-country trip begins, I'm starting to feel the pressure to be completely organized. Granted, I'm probably twenty times more organized than an average person would be at this point, but when has that ever been good enough for me?
I have piles of stuff building up around my apartment right now and a huge security trunk sitting by my front door. The plan is to tether the trunk into my Jeep with braided steel cable and lock valuables inside when away from the car. As you may or may not know, the soft top of a Jeep Wrangler isn't exactly the most secure thing in the world. One knife slash later, I'm spending $80 to replace a rear window. The last thing I need to do is add my precious electronics to that list. Sure, that stuff is covered by insurance, but who wants to go through the trouble of filing claims?
Anyway, you might be wondering if I'm planning anything special while the trip is underway. The answer to that is "probably." I'd like to post a daily image to my blog and maybe a quick blurb along with it. I don't think I'll have time to do much more than that though. A third of my day will be taken up with driving a car, after all.
Also, FYI, I updated my "About" page. If you already know me, there's no new information there, but you can feel free to proofread it!
Time is Money
Few people know this, but I'm going on a trip in early June with my buddy Ryan. There is no destination because the trip is all about touring the United States. I'd love to say that we're going coast-to-coast, but given the time restraints, we're only going to get to Texas before turning around to come home. The current plan is to head out west to Niagara Falls, swing along the southern edge of the Great Lakes, shoot through Chicago, take Route 66 down to Oklahoma, then snag Route 50 all the way back east to Washington DC, before taking a northern turn up through Gettysburg and back home to New York.
That's just over 4,000 miles of wide-open American highway and will take us anywhere from 7-10 days to complete. I can't wait.
The funny thing is that I knew before the plans were made what the costs of this trip would be. No problem. What I didn't plan on was the amount of piddly little things I'd need to pick up in preparation for the trip...
- MinoHD Video Camera? Check.
- Mini Camera Tripod? Check.
- First Aid Kit? Check.
- 500gb External Hard Drive? Check.
- Emergency MRE's? Check.
There's actually more to the list than that, but those are the main things I've had on my mind thus far. I can't drive halfway across the country without getting video of the event, can I? And, sure, I can offload my videos and photos to my laptop each day, but what about backing them up? Got to have a backup hard drive. It would be horrible to lose all those memories to hard drive failure mid-trip. I'm thinking that the MRE's might be overkill, but I'd rather have extra food on hand in case my Jeep breaks down in the middle of the Great Plains. I should probably bring some water too.
So much to think about! Thankfully, most of the planning is done at this point. It's just a matter of letting everything fall into place while hoping for nice weather. Or a tornado. I'd be more than happy to actually chase a storm, rather than just advertise it on my license plate.