Prologue - Part II: What's the point?

In two months I will turn thirty. In my almost thirty years I have never lived further than thirty miles from my childhood home. I lived in a house where both parents and an older sister lived and loved one another. We had pets, I had toys, and I went to a decent public school. Now days I live in a nice little three-bedroom bachelor pad with two unintentionally adopted cats. I have a good paying job, even if I don't like it that much. In short, I live a spectacularly average life. Not fantastic, but far from rock bottom.

Despite supposedly having my shit together, I have no idea who I am as an individual and no clue what I want to do with my life. A walkabout seemed like the perfect answer. While I don't really expect to meet myself somewhere out in the New Mexican desert and have some kind of life altering epiphany, I do expect to do things I've never done and push the limits of my comfort zones. Unlike the aboriginals of Australia, I have absolutely no intention of just walking off one day and trekking across the land. Now days people use cars and I plan on doing the same.

It's more than just a roadtrip though. Especially since roadtrips now days seem to involve an RV and blitzkrieging down the interstate. Instead I want to truly see the world I live in and experience it as authentically as possible. My solution is to rent a car and spend two weeks driving through the rural countryside and desert highways between my home in South Carolina and the quest I've set before me. That quest ends in Truth of Consequences, New Mexico. I chose T or C for a variety of reasons: distance, the appropriateness of its name, and the fact that I arbitrarily chose it as the location of Purgatory in a novel I'm writing.

The trip will snake, meander, and amble its way across SC, FL, GA, AL, MS, LA, TX, and NM. When at all possible I will be avoiding interstates, opting instead for rural and state highways and various arterial roads in between. Every night I will be camping out at a national or state park, wildlife refuge, or in the worst cases my car. I will be hitting up every cheese-ball roadside attraction, greasy diner, and backwoods oddity that my stomach, wallet, and mind can handle. Along the way I will document the journey as much for myself as for friends, family, and others who might be interested.

The launch date for this spiritual journey is June 7th, and although that's two months away there is still plenty to do in the meantime. I'm starting from scratch with this trip. I'm researching places of interest, planning the route, gathering supplies, and so on. The updates leading to launch will be more about the planning process and will cover gear I'll be using, tools I've used to plot the course, resources for points of interest and so on. Feel free to leave comments, suggestions, tips, potential pit-stops or whatever else springs to mind.