Road Diaries: Prologue

August Seventh.
Last year, on August Seventh I woke up while it was still dark, did my last minute packing, and hopped in the blue van to the airport. I was Dublin-bound, and sixteen hours later I stumbled off a bus in the middle of Ireland's capitol city at about half-seven in the morning. So began a five-and-a-half month frolic through Ireland's hills and cliffs and coasts, punctuated by days full of walking around Europe's most famous cities and trying to speak French or German or Italian. My best luck was with French. My German garners giggles.
This year, August Seventh brings another early departure of a similar but not identical kind- a different breed of the same species, perhaps.
Tomorrow, I am getting into a car with a friend of mine, and for three weeks (engine willing) it will carry us around the network of friends and family who have spread out over the great expansive country that is the USA. If I geographically plotted the locations of people dear to me, and transferred it from this continent over to Europe, they'd probably be in over a half-dozen different countries, with a few more in between each of them.
What does all this American land look like? How much corn really IS in Iowa? And do New Yorkers really walk as fast as people say? How's the Mexican food in New Mexico? Heck, I'm seeing every extreme from Nebraska to Manhattan. Pacific to Atlantic and back again.
I don't know why the idea came to me this year. It just settled into my head in the calm way that most reality does, like noticing that there's a grocery store down the road. Oh hey, there's a Safeway. A fact learned. And oh, looks like I'm driving across the country this August. Just a fact that settled itself into my brain as nonchalantly as the most mundane of observations.
I intend to document all of my destinations, and hopefully some of what happens in between. Much of the next three weeks will be spent in between. In places in between places. But they all are places, destinations or not. Strange how simple a realization that is, and yet it only came to me today.
I remember that Dublin even felt to me like an in between place. I knew I would be elsewhere at some point in the future, and it somehow kept me from experiencing the place completely. And it was an in-between place where I lingered for almost half a year. Experiencing the in-between fully, as a real place, will be even more of a challenge when I am moving constantly, in my own little bubble of metal doors and glass windows and radio music. And yet I am excited about it.
Tomorrow, August Seventh, the journey begins