Article 3 - “PLANNING THE ROAD AHEAD” April 2006 edition of First Church of The Streets

    One of the biggest challenges in preparing for a trip is planning what you're going to do. All other factors, such as lodging, transportation, and cost, somewhat hinge against your itinerary. If you run out of money, for instance, you're not going to be going to a five-star hotel, unless you're planning to panhandle or come up with some other creative design. Plans for a trip are also the soul of the trip: what you do there sort of dictates why you're there to begin with, and what you will take home with you.

    Scheduling stuff has a lot to do with what kind of transportation you're using. If you're relying on a plane, a train, a cruise ship, or some other mode that doesn't involve you, plans will more accordingly have to fit into someone else's schedule. It doesn't mean there isn't any spontaneity, just that when you come up with an idea, figuring out when the bus or plane will show up has to be considered. New stuff has to be configured in when the bus or plane is late, or doesn't arrive at all. Maybe that creates the most spontaneity.

    When you have your own transportation, whether it is a vehicle, a motorbike, a boat, a bicycle, horse, or your own two feet, the illusion of control is with you. More correctly, all the decisions reside with you: if your car breaks down, you have to figure out what to do with it, not wait for the bus company to come up with a solution. You can make plans accordingly, change at will, without having to pay a lot of money to refund a ticket. With your own "wheels", however that may be defined, you get to decide what's going to happen in your trip, and more or less, when.

    Such was the case with our cross-country trip: by driving, we could change plans whenever we wanted, or not have them at all. To that end, we didn't have an itinerary where everything was planned out to the last detail. That didn't mean that there was no planning involved at all, or no general outline. This was, of course, the United States, and that was a lot of country to get lost in. We really didn't want to wind up at some tourist trap where you could get your own piece of authentic Tennessee glass for twenty dollars, and meanwhile it was nothing more than glass from a broken beer bottle.

    So we came up with a compromise between complete slavery to a map and random trips that led to country roads with dead ends. We decided to get out to the West Coast using highways, and along the way, we'd go to as many National Parks as we could. It wasn't the most original plan. I already knew a few people who had done it, and that was most of the people I'd encountered who'd gone cross-country driving to begin with. But it was the most convenient and sensible idea, seeing that we both liked nature and the outdoors.

    Realistically, I knew that the parks could be their own kind of tourist trap. And it would be more about the scenery than the people taking that route, I guessed. It would make sense that the national park system would be less about the local people and more about people like us. But we'd be going to restaurants and other places. We'd meet who were supposed to meet. That was the fun part of not making concrete plans: you didn't really know what would happen. The road was wide open, and it was waiting for us.