The Next Big Adventure!

I am very excited right now. Excited to the point that, even though it's four in the morning, I can't force myself to fall asleep until I actually write all this down. I have just finished planning out my travel plans for Winter Break - and oh, what plans they are! In a total time of only three weeks, I will drive more than 4,000 miles, travel through 11 states, spend time in more than a dozen cities and towns, and visit at least half a dozen great friends!

Throughout all of this, I will not stay in a single hotel, motel, or other "high-class" establishment. My goal with this trip, apart from seeing friends and traveling to distant cities, is to live as frugally as I possibly can. In about half of the cities I sleep in, I will be crashing with a friend, but for the other half, I will just figure out somewhere to sleep when the time comes. In a number of cities, Hostels provide a safe yet affordable way to spend a night, often costing only 20 or 30 dollars a night.

Don't know what a Hostel is? I didn't either. Picture a hotel room, except with anywhere from 2 to 12 complete strangers of either gender sharing it with you. Certainly not the ideal living quarters, but when you consider that I can have a warm, safe place to sleep in New York City for $26 per night (as opposed to the $100+ per night you'd be charged for a hotel), the benefits are obvious. When that fails, I will live even simpler - using a sleeping bag, pillow, and blanket, and curling up in the back seat of my car for the night, sleeping in the parking lot of a 24-hour Walmart, or at a rest stop just off the highway, or even down a lightly traveled road in the middle of a city.

Sounds stupid? Maybe. But, for some reason I can't really explain, this is just something I really want to do. Whenever I travel, and I travel quite often, I try as hard as I can to not see the destination only from the tourist's point of view. Rather than seeing the glamour and history of a city from the safe, upscale window of my 14th floor hotel room, I'd much rather wander the back streets late at night, the areas not included in the guide books, and see people actually interacting with people in the most genuine way.

To be honest, another huge appeal of this trip is the pure spontaneity of it all. While I do have a loose schedule for what I want to do, the schedule stops with days and weeks instead of hours and minutes. All I know for sure is that at some point during those three weeks, I will visit a few specific destinations, but other than that, I will simply drive wherever I feel like going. If I see a destination that looks intriguing while driving west on I-71, then I'm gonna take it and never look back! Rather than focusing on the destination, I'm really excited to be able to look at the journey as a destination of its own. I'm sure I'll end up in some very unexpected places, but I'll undoubtedly return with lots of new experiences, new photographs, and new ideas.

It's gonna be a great winter!

R