What exactly does “hitting the road” mean? In our case, it means about 8,500 pounds of vehicle rolling out of our driveway, filled with a closetful of about twenty mini “suitcases” comprised of Eagle Creek packing cubes, a refrigerator full of all the food we couldn’t finish off in this past month when we quit buying any food other than the necessities of milk, orange juice, and eggs, and tanks full of propane, water and diesel fuel. I hate to think of how much all of those weigh. It means carrying a good dozen or so electronics, many of which will lose much of their functionality as soon as we get to the wide open spaces and lose cellular signals, but that doesn’t stop us from bringing them along. Or the myriad cords that, if we tied them all together, would probably encircle the vehicle.

It means a “good” day on the road is one when we accomplish at least 300 miles; a “hard” day is when we need to make 400 or more. For Roger, it means keeping all the GPSes in sync with each other (and hopefully us with them), and for Carol, it means taking the majority of photos from an open window of a moving vehicle. It means searching for a level campsite every night, and finding a small-town grocery that’s big enough to carry what you want, but small enough so it doesn’t eat up a good half hour to negotiate through the store.

And it’s watching the horizon for the mountains that never seem to come soon enough as you’re traveling West and that disappear too quickly as you’re heading East. There’s a huge great plain in the middle of the country that, for me, is one of the best, most relaxing, parts of the trip. As that long, seemingly endless ribbon of road unfolds in front of you, it’s like a story waiting to be discovered, and then told in a blog like this one.