It is not Friday when I write this post detailing our Friday departure. I am writing it roughly 48 hours before we depart from Caroline’s office, signaling our leaving Arizona for a drive into Nevada on our way to Oregon. Avoiding major highways means we’ll require almost 24 hours of driving time, which only adds a couple of hours to what would have been needed if we chose to drive up the monotonous Interstate 5 through the middle of California. Instead, our route will bring us to Pahrump, Nevada, about an hour outside of Las Vegas tonight, and if we could give Sin City a wider berth, we’d opt for that, but in this sparsely populated Western United States, they didn’t build roads for old curmudgeons to bypass the places they find abhorrent, maybe even aberrant.

What, you don’t like Vegas, you ask? Nope. Everything about that city feels antiquated, simulated, and lacking in anything that has authenticity. When I required human-made spectacles to inspire me, and I reveled in our extravagance to create the absurd, I too indulged for the sake of my amazement, but I reached a point where I could no longer understand this peculiarity to work so hard against nature to splurge on senses trained to desire more of more. More food, more light, more water, more opportunities to part with money, dignity, and brain cells. This stationary cruise ship in the desert caters to the overly indulgent who desire to feast on excess, and well, that just reminds me of a much younger version of my stupid self who believed at that time that satisfying every whim was some kind of key to enlightenment and unshackling myself from conformity. I was an idiot and likely am still mostly an idiot, but reminders of that are unwelcome, so I steer clear of this outpost in the middle of nowhere.

Sitting here at Starbucks this Wednesday afternoon, wondering what else I can write that will not give away details about Saturday and Sunday when I’m expecting to spend some of our travel time capturing images of our route, I’m mostly looking around at the various people coming and going while my earbuds are in, and I’m listening to the piano of Hania Rani, Jóhann Jóhannsson, and Ólafur Arnalds. I’m trying to avoid just packing up and leaving as I really don’t have anything pressing I need to tend to. Tomorrow, though, is another story, as I’ll be finishing up cleaning, packing, and considering what details were missed, which don’t really matter as I’ll still have Friday until late afternoon to correct anything that requires my attention. After more than 1,480 days of these kinds of travels, you’d think we have it all figured out, and basically, we do.

One other thing to share here, and that’s the reason I’m trying to get this headstart on the writing: we’ll be gone for 30 days, but after we get home, we leave 72 hours later for a visit to the International Folk Art Market (IFAM) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Two and a half weeks after that, we’ll be back out in Duncan, Arizona, and finally, three weeks after that, a quite long trip starts again. What I’m getting at, there will be no time to catch up on writing between these excursions, meaning I’ll be doing my best to remain current documenting our travels while not neglecting that major writing project that must also share my attention. Looking through this filter, I can only wonder if I’m biting off more than I can chew, as 71 days of travel over the next 113 days will likely demand I write about 100,000 words or more to detail our adventures. Heck, that doesn’t even include the more than 20,000 photos I’ll likely take while we explore those corners of the world. Honestly, the crazy demands sound exciting to me, and I look forward to the challenge.