rompt #1: A while back, you mentioned that you were contemplating a long road trip. Going solo? What do you expect to find?
Sent in by: Henry
Well, this seemed like an easy one to start with. For those of you who don't know, I am leaving April 1 for a three-or-so month trip driving around the country by myself. My evening accommodations will be a combination of camping, hostelling, crashing on couches, the kindness of strangers, etc. It's a sort of epic adventure/investigative journalism/rite of passage/excuse to see my friends kind of journey. Interestingly, I was interviewed by a Scripps-Howard reporter this morning about the whole thing, because a mutual friend (also a Scripps-Howard reporter) had told her about it, and she is doing a piece on the sudden popularity of cross-country trips. Whaddaya know? I'm accidentally fashionable. At any rate, Henry, here is the response I wrote (I feel I should point out that I didn't have the question in front of me when I wrote this and misremembered the question as "What do you hope and what do you expect?"):
I suppose I hope for everything and then very little. I hope I survive. I hope I become irresistibly fabulous. I hope the car doesn't break down or the tire doesn't split apart while traversing some particularly sketchy bridge in the Mississippi backwaters. I hope that when I am camping, I don't wake up with a knife to my throat and I hope I don't spend all my nights in a tent wall-eyed and sweaty, praying that I don't wake up with a knife to my throat. I hope I fall in love with Montana, although I don't know why. I expect to see friends that I miss, and landscapes that completely stun and romance me and landscapes I expected to love but instead found to be rather disappointing (but please not Montana). I expect to regret the trip several times, at least once within the first week, when I will cry really hard and grip the wheel and wipe my eyes dramatically as if someone is watching. I expect that no one will be watching. I expect I will talk to myself, often and without shame. I expect to have car trouble in hot and inconvenient places. I expect I will cave in at least once and book a room at the Days Inn. I expect, that night, to fully enjoy cable television. I expect to write. I expect to discover and invent. I expect to be lonely, too, and I hope that at those times, I read a book.