Yesterday was the completion of an epic 36-day adventure that had me embark on the longest drive of my life at a total of 11,040 miles (17,767 km) across Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Massachusetts, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Over the course of this vacation, I ended up sharing some 63,500 words and 849 photos, though I wouldn’t get caught up until October 21st when the last vacation post was written, and I started this recap.

The highlights and major points along the way were as follows: Caroline at the airport, endless fields of corn, Bocce Club pizza in Buffalo, surprise airshow, Caroline won a huipil, speedboat and boating on the St. Lawrence River, lighthouses, Fort Ticonderoga, Green Mountain Spinnery, lobster rolls, waterways, the seashore, cairns, ferries, friendly Canadians, sunsets, bridges, coffee, rain, roadside fruit and veggies, beachcombing, flying a kite, our pillows, Bay of Fundy, apples, Fritos, sunrise, moss, lichen, islands, fishing villages, trails, Balancing Rock, Kejimkujik National Park, old security guard, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Peggy’s Cove, Damson plums, beef jerky, Cape Breton Highlands National Park, beavers, fens (bogs), soft serve, maple walnut ice cream, waterfalls, rocks, thrombolites, yarn, Tablelands at Gros Morne National Park, caribou, partridgeberries, reflective ponds, the colors of fall, cod tongues and seal meat, causeways, Terra Nova National Park, forest walks, Muskoka chairs, ruffled grouse, butterflies, mushrooms, flowers, foxes, UNESCO Geosites, wild blueberries, fossils, Mistaken Point, oatcakes, Eastern Hyper-Oceanic Barrens, tiny cottages, covered bridges, narrow roads, signs for moose, and more lobster rolls.

After 58 days of traveling and writing, this block of my life dedicated to such an extraordinary experience moves into the past. I’m happy it does, as I’m a bit depleted trying to write anything else describing things encountered in America and Canada. I need a break from all things vacation, so much so that we are canceling a planned Thanksgiving tradition of traveling to Oregon. Now for something completely different.

The exotic and often intriguing nature of uncertainty is partially muted as a slightly greater familiarity with what lies ahead has, to a small degree, already been experienced. I’m referring to the cross-country adventure I’m about to embark upon. When Caroline and I took our first meandering drive over the breadth of the United States, we drove in the astonishment of new sights we’d never experienced. That intensity of discovery wanes with each subsequent encounter with a place, or so my anticipation informs me, seeing my excitement is not ratcheting as high as I might have desired. Maybe my joy has to be tamped down because the first leg of this trip will be solo to better position Caroline and me to maximize the core of our vacation together that starts August 31st in New York.

I feel that this blog post is being written to help form a kind of structural framework that I’ll use while out on my own, or at least will get me thinking of this solitary journey that is just days away from getting going. The truth is that there’s probably nothing that would influence or shape any aspect of those days on the road as the reality of the situation while underway is that I’ll be encountering myself reacting to the stimuli of the moment and any intentionality that might have had an impact was most keen back when I was able to solidify these travel plans. Now, all I can do is wait until I’m in the car and see what the days and miles inspire within me as I move along, wondering how Caroline might see what is ahead and all around us. With that in mind, I hope to write stories where she’ll feel that she was present, at least in my heart.

Caroline’s part of our adventure will include 2,200 miles of driving east from where she lands in Buffalo, New York, and 1,200 miles of traveling west on our return to Maine, from where she’ll fly back to Phoenix, Arizona. Her total land distance will amount to 3,400 miles (5,472 km), equivalent to driving from Frankfurt, Germany, over Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and into Bahrain. The actual route will take us across and down through New York, over to Vermont, across New Hampshire, and into Maine before we move into Canada with visits to New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland.

Meanwhile, my drive is equivalent to driving from Frankfurt, Germany, to Cape Town, South Africa, or 8,053 miles (12,960 km), all of it on backroads across the central United States to the eastern seaboard and Canada beyond that. My route to New York departs Arizona heading for New Mexico, followed by treks through Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and finally New York. As for the drive home, that is tentatively set for a long winding drive out of Maine and into New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, and finally back to Arizona. Twenty-three states in all, not counting our Canadian destinations.

This will be a lengthy adventure meant to allow a substantial amount of time lingering on the way out and the way home, fulfilling one of my wishes of experiencing a slower side of America. Caroline would enjoy the same indulgence, but her allocated vacation allowance doesn’t allow that to happen. Yes, we have separation anxiety, yes, she’s a bit envious, and yes, I know that I have a ridiculous amount of privilege. Fortunately, I’m in a situation that allows this extravagance, and for that, I feel a certain obligation to meticulously record my observations to share the experience with Caroline to the extent that she can best feel that she was never far from me and can see that part of the adventure through my eyes.

There are times when a weekend lasts forever; those are likely tied to the amount of novelty crammed into these hours outside of routine. When the objective is to find isolation and relative familiarity to be quiet, explore stillness, and remove one’s self from distractions experienced at home, there is a contraction of time. As the moment of departure approaches for our return to Phoenix, there is a sense that our arrival was only hours ago, yet here we are about to leave. Even if we won’t get in our car for a few hours from now, the sense of things is such that closure is beginning, and the wait is only a reinforced effort to delay the inevitable.

In turn, we attempt to give purpose to the time that is spent lingering in place, and for us, that means heading out for a walk, though breakfast could have been an option at the local diner had we not already made arrangements with our hosts. Instead, we attract the barking of a dozen different dogs who might be sending mixed signals that we should either stay away or maybe come near to give them rubs and scratches. Dogs can be hard to read when teeth are glaring and their barking sounds ferocious, but then there are those wagging tails that suggest friendliness if you can get over the neurotic yammering of excitement. And so it was as a dog offered up its warnings, except this one wasn’t behind a fence. Something inside me said that this dog was all bluster, but inside was pure love, so I harkened for her to come over. Up she ran, dropping right between my legs, rolling over for belly rubs to suck up the attention.

Over at the old cemetery, there was nobody looking for attention, just a bunch of dead people contemplating the weight of earth resting upon their corpses. Many of the gravestones are now missing, the telltale sign of the mound the only reminder that there are bones below. This is Duncan’s oldest cemetery, as far as I know. As I have done at other times, I’m taking this opportunity to note that someone is remembering a person who may be long forgotten. Ida Ann Tipton was born on January 1, 1899, and sadly passed away only 43 days later on February 13, 1899. Her parents had the following engraved on the back of her tombstone: Another little lamb has gone. To dwell with Him who gave another little darling babe is sheltered in the grave. God needed one more angel child amidst his shining band. And so he bent with loving smile and clasped our darling’s hand.

The rocks and tombstones persist, while some random anonymous artifacts of those who’ve lived and died here in the Duncan area are the only tangible memories remaining in the local antique store. Those clues to others’ lives are bartered for cash, so the survivors are able to continue the economic engine that becomes the only threads that signify that they, too, once existed. How long before we become responsible for creating digital memorials of our ancestors? However, I could also see a mass erasure of a majority of those when future generations realize just how insipid their relatives were, and nobody would care that they had existed on propagandistic idiotic television, ate a poor diet, smoked, and drank too much.

It’s probably better that we all turn to dust and that everything decays and disappears. In our own time, the majority of us humans are already archaic, poorly educated cogs in a machine of exploitation that relies on qualities that leave us not as memorable people but easily forgotten fodder whose memory might continue on in the odd person or two though it’s just as likely our demise will simply go unnoticed. From the German brothers from Hanover, Germany, who gave us Clabber Girl Baking Powder seen on this relic of a sign from the 1940s, who nobody remembers anymore to Madam C.J. Walker, who some believe was the first self-made female millionaire in the U.S., making a fortune with her natural hair products for other black women, most contributions to humanity are long forgotten before the ink dries. We are all fading in and out of existence with nary a blink of an eye, but while we are here, we are at the center of a universe that is all about us.