A Professional Dilettante

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It wasn't really a vacation, in the sense of taking time off work to go somewhere, since I quit my job and gave up my apartment to make that trip. My family called it my midlife crisis (I was forty at the time -- ack, ten years ago now). It was really more the fulfillment of a longheld dream. I always wanted to be William Least Heat Moon (Blue Highways) or John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley in Search of America) when I grew up.

So I did. I put my furniture in storage, left my cats with a friend, packed up my car, and drove away on August 31, 1999. I did not return until November 26th. In between I drove from Seattle to Vermont, down to Florida, and across the South and Southwest to California, where I rolled my car in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I had many adventures, went to places that I'd been as a child and always wanted to go back to, visited new places that I'd never been before and had always wanted to go to, avoided Interstates as much as I could, and only got lost once. Which, I want to note, was the map's fault, not mine. It said there was a road heading east from that junction. It lied.

But, yeah, I totaled the car. But I didn't total me. And I managed to find my way home again.

I would make that trip again in a heartbeat, and plan to again someday -- this time across the middle of the US, north to Prince Edward Island (and maybe Newfoundland) and back across Canada. Except for rolling my car. But not until my cats are gone. I can't leave my two 15-year-old cats with someone else this time, esp. since one of them is in failing health. But when they're gone, well, I hope I'm in a position to do it again. Because it would be wonderful.