Planning to Go...

I skip town in about 12 days for an adventure I've been concretely planning for the last 7 months and talking about for years prior. It seemed so far away but now that its here, I don't feel totally ready. I debated about the openness of this blog but I want to share my adventures. This will be mainly for semantics, maps, impressions, and photos. Most of the personal and gory details will be spared to you, the general audience, unless relevant and will be kept in my personal paper journal. At the end of the trip if I feel like going back through and adding insight with the clarity of hindsight, I will.

My adventure starts slowly with a week in Philly visiting some of my best friends. Since I moved away in late summer of '08, my visits have been sporadic and hectic. It will be nice to just hangout and see all the people I want to see in a relaxed manner.

From Philly I'm going to meet my traveling partner Julia in Chicago and from there the adventure begins and we take trains through to the West Coast. My final destination by train is Vancouver, BC where I will meet my biking partner Sarah and we will travel down the coast together as far as San Francisco following the Pacific Coast Trail. San Francisco will be a great break in the middle to see good friends and relax. I'm looking forward to Ryan and the other bay Crucifixed to show me around and also to eat delicious treats with other great friends. Hopefully another friend will be hopping on the voyage around this point as Sarah leaves me. I'll ride the rest of the way from San Francisco to Mexico, though the final destination has become a little hazy due to unrest at the border.

This is where the trip gets a little fuzzier. Ideally Julia and some other friends will have a house in Mexico that I can stay in and brush up on my Spanish. From there I might hopefully getting my job back and getting transfer to the San Francisco office. If that doesn't work out I'll probably go to beet harvest in Minnesota. If I have enough money from there, I will go to Thailand and Southeast Asia with Julia and Amelia, two of the best ladies in the world. The latter part of the trip depends a lot on funds so we'll see. I might actually add a donation link to this blog if anyone reads a post that inspires them or makes them feel bad for me haha. I've been saving for a long time, but you never know what's going to come up.

You might wonder why I'm taking such an epic voyage. Its basically that I reached ground zero as one friend put it. I graduated college with my B.A. in English after 7 years of back and forth, I broke up with my long-term partner, my job wasn't a career and basically, I had been stuck. Things have become a little bit more complicated and further removed from ground zero since I made this decision, but I want to stick with it. Its an exercise in letting go of the world and letting go of control. Its also an opportunity for me to be in my own head and my own body, completely alone and free of the pressures of the day to day. I also just want to see and do and experience and I don't know when I'll have another opportunity to just take off like this again. Its definitely a growing trip and just a flat out fun trip, not that it will always be easy. I've got nothing to prove, but I want to prove to myself that I can do it. Epic adventures, here I come....

I'll be posting maps and lists in the next few days. Wish me luck!