Apologies for the sporadic posting. I’m frantically trying to gather some last pieces of data for a paper. Once that’s submitted, I’m going on vacation. It’s been over a year since I’ve taken any significant amount of time off, and almost two years since my last major trip, which was to Europe. Although I briefly entertained the idea of going to Italy, I don’t have a travel buddy, so I’m going to go for the cheap and relatively unplanned option, a road trip.

Where, and why, you ask. Points east, to begin with. I’ve lived in California for over four years now, and I’m a little sick of it. It’s easy when you live in the Bay area, and especially in Berkeley, to conclude that the rest of America is a hostile, nasty place full of right-wing nut jobs and mindless sheep. I disagree with this attitude on principle, but it seeps in nonetheless, and it doesn’t help that the rest of California is actually a pretty nasty place. A drive out to Yosemite and back feels like a voyage through hostile territory, an alternating patchwork of meth-addled white trash towns and soulless exurbs.

Which brings me to (one of) the reasons for going. Locked in this perceptual box for so long, I really have no idea how Americans live outside of California. What kind of people still live in small towns? Are there still strong communities, or has the anonymity of cities and suburbia invaded the country too? What’s the economy really like? Are people generally materially comfortable, or are they struggling to make ends meet? To answer these questions I have to get off the interstates, out of the big cities.

Now it must be admitted that when I travel I tend to get lost in my thoughts; the further I go the less engaged I become. So this trip is also an attempt to improve my Terkelness, which is pathetically low these days—a somewhat inevitable consequence of graduate school, I suspect. So rather than bring a copy of Augustine, who was my only companion on my bike trip through Montana, I’ll bring a notebook, my minidisc recorder, and a camera. My planning time will go into working up a syllabus of questions and topics and reading Hard Times, rather than staring at maps and trying to work out the shortest route. And I’m sorry to disappoint the hordes of people reading this, but you’ll have to wait until I get back to see what happened.

The one thing I do need to consider is which of my two unreliable vehicles to take. The options are (1) a 1975 BMW R60/6 or (2) a 1991 Mazda Navajo (sorry, no pictures, it’s just a Ford Explorer with a different name). The motorbike is sexy, stylish, cheap on the gas, and tons of fun. It’s also miserable in a rainstorm, not equipped with a CD player, and it will almost certainly either require some kind of repairs on the trip or die altogether. The Navajo is comfy, spacious, and far less likely to kill me. It also gets horrible gas mileage, and will almost certainly have a transmission failure at some point. I’m actually quite fond of it, in spite of the occasional bittersweet memories it evokes, so the question is whether I should keep it for driving around town, or run it into the ground and then go into debt to buy a turbo diesel Jetta. Of course, I could also run the bike into the ground and then buy an early 90’s R-series. Choices, choices.

Finally, if you or anyone you know lives out in fly-over country and wouldn’t mind a house guest, I promise to arrive with good stories and a wicked recipie for waffles.