Inspiration
How to make driving across Texas more fun
Our latest road trip required a long drive across Texas, a state I repeatedly wish I didn't have to drive across. But if you live in Phoenix and your intended destinations are in the Southeastern US, then driving through Texas is simply the Price of Admission you pay for your trip.
We ended up staying in hotels more than usual on this trip, and given the shorter winter days, that meant more time in a hotel room. Luckily, we brought our laptops on this trip as part of a new travel journaling practice we are experimenting with.
I thought it would be fun to chart the roads I've driven in the US, but that seems like a nearly impossible task. That's because I routinely veer off the obvious route to drive a road that might be more scenic, or detour for an inconsequential roadside oddity, or to "get lost and ask for directions," or head off to an obscure campground for the night.
In short, I really don't know where all I've been since I haven't really tracked that over all my trips. But I could start doing that now, for this trip at least. So I brought along some AAA state maps and a sharpie to trace our route. And then I promptly forgot those in the car each night.
So, with my laptop in the room, I instead cracked open a website devoted to counting the counties you've visited. I could probably figure out the counties I've visited much more easily than the specific roads I'd traveled anyway. Over the next several nights, I charted out a somewhat complete map of my county visits.
Visiting all 3,143 counties in the US is a more popular quest than you'd imagine. Indeed, thousands and thousands of people are tracking their county visits, and at least 70 people have completed them all! I had no such quest goal. In fact, one of my friends has been working on this quest for two decades now and I've always thought it was a somewhat crazy one. Most counties aren't very interesting. I wasn't adopting the quest, I just wanted to see where I've been—or rather, where I still need to go. I wanted to see what "holes" I still had in my domestic travel.
But, of course, after filling out my county map and realizing that I was already past the 50% mark, I started wondering what a good county quest goal for myself might be. When would I feel like I've closed those holes? Was it 2000 total counties? Or maybe >50% in each state? Or both? Or just when I'd finished the whole damn thing? I'm still not sure, but I think it's clear...I have some sort of county quest now.
And indeed, so does Jen, who filled out her own map during our hotel hours. So, for the last few days of the trip, we made sure to take the longer route to some of our destinations, bypassing the quicker route that we had already done in favor of driving through some new-to-us counties. Every time we passed a little green "Entering So-and-So County" sign along some rural highway, there was now reason to exclaim "YAAAAY!"
This is the main goal of questing—inspiring you to go to more places you haven't yet been.
One of the other big (and unheralded) benefits of questing is that it can make "unfun travel" more...well, fun. Even if your quest objective is less enjoyable than you had anticipated, or maybe the weather was awful, or you broke your expensive new camera, or some other sucky thing happened...well, at least you marked the damn place off! Getting something done makes you feel a bit better about that trip than if you had the same bad experience but hadn't simultaneously completed a goal. Put another way, if you mark off a quest item, you always have a bright spot on the trip. Or, on a smaller level, you have a bright spot in an otherwise lackluster vacation day.
And we re-discovered that on the drive home, when we were faced with driving across Texas. Because now we had a new purpose for the drive: we would mark off some random counties! Texas seems to have eleventy zillion of them, each of which is generally small and thoroughly unremarkable. If we took a slightly longer way home, we'd be able to cross off 15 of them on our drive, and thereby permanently remove them from our list of places we have any reason to visit. We were getting stuff done. And sometimes never having to return to a place is a pretty good travel outcome.
And that's exactly what we did. We actually extended the drive we were dreading because of this new quest, converting a boring and unfun endeavor into a series of small "yays" and some new blue squares on our county map. We traveled through country we hadn't seen before, which resulted in some interesting observations. It didn't magically elevate the trip into one of my all-time favorites, but it did reduce the cost of that Price of Admission rather substantially.
Many people shy away from big quests that have what seems like an unreachable number of objectives. But the benefits of questing are all found in the journey, not in completion. Will I ever finish all the counties? Probably not. But sometimes having a huge quest—even one you don't expect to ever finish—simply gives you more possible ways to make those long drives less boring.
→ Start your own US Counties quest (#GoQuesting1640)
Choose a surprise destination for our upcoming road trip!
We're going to take a surprise destination road trip from April 12-14, 2019.
Wait, what do you mean by surprise?
Jen and I want you (or someone like you) to help choose a surprise destination for our April road trip. We won't know where we are headed until a random number generator chooses a suggestion from the entires you and others have submitted. Having already packed before the selection, we just get in the car and go, planning out the trip as we go.
The process
Use the Google Form below to submit an entry that follows the important rules outlined below before we leave on April 12.
On April 12, we'll pack our car for the trip. We'll log into the form, find out how many entries there are, and then use a random number generator to pick a number for us. We'll use that number to select the corresponding entry. If the entry meets the rules listed below, that will be our required destination. If it doesn't meet our rules or is otherwise invalid, we'll simply discard it and pick another random number. Once we learn where our destination is, we'll hop in the car, hit the open road, and plan the trip as we go.
Obviously, we'll likely add some additional stops on our itinerary, based on our prior knowledge and our after-the-surprise trip planning, but we'll make sure to at least visit the selected destination. If the destination is boring or not fun, we won't stay long and will simply move along to find something better. After all, we take road trips to have fun.
Follow #SurpriseUsRoadTrip on twitter or my stories on instagram for more updates, including during the road trip itself.
The rules
We're placing some limitations on the suggestions. If your entry doesn't meet all of these requirements, it'll be disqualified and we will have to randomly select another entry. You can submit multiple entries.
Destinations must:
- be within 6 hours of driving time from Phoenix (calculated by Google Maps)
- be accessible by car (or easily accessible on foot—no submitting destinations that require difficult hikes, paddles, climbs, etc)
- be legally accessible without a permit or reservation
- not be located in Mexico
- be places we can safely drive to (and out of!) in my Subaru Outback without any consternation (in short, don't send us someplace that requires high clearance or 4WD driving skills)
- not be impacted by things like flooding, wildfire, safety concerns, shitty beer, etc. (ok fine, we might go to places with shitty beer, but only because we've already packed our own)
- not be an inappropriate place for us to visit publicly (eg, no underground sex club, random person's house, opium den, MAGA rally, etc)
Why are we doing this?
For fun!
We're also believers in the idea that you can have fun on nearly any trip, and this is a way to test that theory out. Let's see if we do!
And if we do...
If we enjoy this, we'll likely do another one next year that involves flying somewhere and doing a surprise roadtrip from there (maybe we'll have two rounds and even let you choose the city we fly to). After that, we're tentatively planning a "dice" trip, where we fly into some European city, roll some dice, and let it choose our path for us. For instance, first roll of the dice determines which train platform, second roll determines how many stops we'll go before getting off. Or some similarly random way of selecting destinations. We'll continue to repeat this until we have to make our way back to the airport to fly home.
Here's the form to submit for entries.
If you can't see the embedded form below, you can find it here instead.
Thanks for participating! Feel free to submit more entries. :)
How to create a google map of places you want to visit
This post is primarily a screencast tutorial on how to create a custom google map of places you want to visit—or what I like to call an Adventure Map.
An Adventure Map is a handy repository for all of those places on your OMG-I-Want-to-Visit list. It's a place to store those random campsite tips you get from friends, that instagram post about a backcountry waterfall, or that killer hike your friend just posted on facebook. There are plenty of ways to save this information for later, but I find that a custom map is one of the most useful.
The screencast tutorial
In this tutorial, I show you my personal Adventure Map and explain how I use it. I then teach you how to create your own adventure map. The entire screencast lasts about 27 minutes. If you're in a rush, the tutorial itself starts at the 8:30 mark. I've also added some additional notes below that I didn't mention in the screencast, as well as another short tutorial on how to load your new Adventure Map onto your mobile phone.
Even if you've used Google's My Maps before, I hope there some nuggets that can you can put to good use. If you have additional tips, please leave them in the comments.
Thanks for watching. It's quite a bit longer than I would have liked, and I'm not particularly happy with my performance, but I hope you found it useful. Below are some items I didn't mention in the screencast that you might want to know about.
Additional notes not mentioned in the tutorial
Other ways to add pins
You can also add pins by clicking on the pin icon in the toolbar and clicking directly on the map. This is especially useful if you're setting pins to investigate on the ground later, like possible indian ruins or dispersed camping sites. In addition, you can also search for a location by gps coordinates, which makes it easy to add destinations that you might have found from blogs, guide books, or someone else's custom map.
More on driving, biking, and walking directions
Another method to add driving directions is to click the draw a line tool and select the add a driving (or biking or walking) route from the drop-down menu. Then click where you want the route to start and trace the path you want to the directions to follow. Double click to end the route. This will create a new layer containing the directions. Using this tool, Google will calculate a route based on the roads in its database. So if you start your route 1/4 mile from a road, the directions instead start at the nearest point on the nearest road, and only follow roadways. Awkwardly, this is also the case with walking and biking directions, too. Nonetheless, this is still a useful method when you're trying to force Google Maps directions to follow a particular route.
Drawing lines and shapes
You can also add lines and free-form shapes (using straight lines only) to your map. I find this to be useful when there's an entire area I want to save for future investigation, such as a long wall of petroglyphs, or what appears from satellite view to be a complex of pueblo ruins. Select the draw a line tool, click to add the starting anchor point for the line, then move to where you want the second anchor point to be and click again. You can continue to add anchor points, creating a multiple angled line. When you're done, double-click to lock it in.
Or, if you're adding a shape, follow this same procedure around the edge of the area you want, being sure to end back at the first anchor point. Once you've saved your shape, you can go back and adjust the location of the corners or create a new corner by dragging the dimmed circle that's midpoint on each line. Once you've saved your area, Google will calculate the perimeter distance and area for you.
If you're trying to undo a line or shape, you can easily abort by clicking ESC on your keyboard. If you click ESC again, you'll be returning to the default select mode where you can click to select items or drag to pan the map.
Measuring distances and areas
This tool functions similar to the one used to add line and shapes, except that it doesn't add any permanent items to your map. Instead, it simply shows you the distance of the line, or the perimeter and area of a shape. One useful feature of this tool is that when you're measuring distances, it keeps a running total using "mile markers" along the line path.
How to load your Adventure Map onto your phone
As mentioned in the screencast, one of the benefits of using a custom google map is that you can load it as the base map on Google Maps on your phone. Below is a brief tutorial on how that in iOS.
Here's how to do the same thing on Android. Even better, the My Maps app for Android allows you to create and modify your custom maps directly from your device [edit: the app is no longer available in the play store, perhaps the functionality has been included in the Google Maps app?].
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A moment of serenity at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore
Sometimes, you just need a minute or two away—to recollect, to destress, to center yourself. To forget about the annoyances of the moment.
Here's an opportunity to do just that.
So sit back, put in your headphones, click the fullscreen button, and enjoy the late afternoon shoreline of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.
Always remember the path back to the important places
Child of mine
come as you grow
in youth you will learn the secret places
the cave behind the waterfall
the arms of the oak that hold you high
the stars so near on a desert ledge
the important places
and as with age you choose your own way
among the many faces of a busy world
may you always remember the path that leads back
back to the important places.— Dad for Forest, 1986
This short poem inspired the excellent short film above. It's a poignant re-telling of how the poem inspired a return trip, and it highlights the role that our public lands play in our collective lives. Of how those shared experiences—even ones separated by decades—can help make us feel at home and connected to the ones we care most about. Our important places help us create, and later relive, our cherished memories.
If you haven't made it back to the important places of your life recently, maybe it's time to change that.
Words of Wilderness
The Wilderness Act turns 50 this year and this short video is a visually stunning way to celebrate some of our most treasured landscapes. We're truly indebted to John Muir, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, Also Leopold, and the countless other unsung advocates who fought tirelessly to preserve Wilderness for us all. What an amazing legacy to leave.
...on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam—our pale blue dot.
It's hard to find a more eloquent, humbling, and ultimately empowering statement than the inspired words of Carl Sagan. If you've had a bad day recently or need some perspective on your life, here it is. Watch. Listen.
In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, revel in the joy of sharing a planet and an epoch with your friends and family, with neighbors and strangers. With wistful clouds and chirping birds; with streams and rock and dirt.
Because with great fortune, you have the serendipitous opportunity of inhabiting, for a brief moment, a tiny fraction of a speck on our insignificant pale blue dot—a faint pinprick of reflected light suspended in an incalculable vastness. Cherish it. Hold dear the only home we've ever known, that solitary mote of dust.
The background
The first two minutes of this video explains how and why this photo was taken.
The photo
OUR pale blue dot.
The text
Steve Jobs has some advice for you
Steve Jobs died today.
I'm not usually a fan of corporate behemoths, but there was always something special about the way Apple—no, make that Steve Jobs—went about changing the world. You don't need much more proof of the impact he had on the tech industry, or the last generation or two, or the world today than the overwhelming outpouring of emotion after his death. If you were online, you knew. He was the entrepreneur of our generation, and one of the all-time great innovators and visionaries. The 60s/70s had NASA, and the 80s/90s/00s had Steve Jobs.
No matter whether you're a fanboy or a hater, it's hard not to argue that Steve's passing leaves a huge hole in our culture's soul. Steve and Apple certainly left an indelible mark on my life. He will be missed.
Perhaps one of his more poignant moments came during his Stanford commencement address. I've watched this video at least a dozen times over the years. The advice he gives is even more moving today than when I heard it last.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Watch the entire speech above (or read the transcript). Either way, I promise that it will be well worth your time.
So let's go make sure we all have our "one more thing" moment. There's no sense in waiting.
Bad day? Always look on the bright side...
Hard to argue with this.