THE FATASS COMETH

So here’s the skinny: I’ve wanted to take a trip across these fine, United, awesomepants states of ours for years.  On several occasions, I’ve almost shoved a few key items in the car and headed for the hills.  Wanderlust is a special species of madness, and I’m giving in to it.  I can live cheaply, either sleeping in my car or a tent, eating my Nutrisystem meals cooked on a camp stove with side food out of a cooler, and bathing at campgrounds and truck stops.  My big expenses will be gas and camp-fees.

Now, I don’t want to do this like most people plan their road trips, looking at maps and guidebooks or watching the travel channel and saying “well, doesn’t that all just sound lovely, I want to go to there” (although that motherfucker on Man Vs Food has placed some devilish thoughts in my head).  No, I want to do things a bit differently, so I’m going to cloud-source my trip.

How do you cloud-source a vacation?  With Craigslist, of course.  I’m going to be putting up Craigslist postings along my route asking for sites to visit, things to eat, and things to do.  I like people not knowing my every move, so I’m going to be slightly obfuscating my immediate location, as well as keeping my route vague.  Keeping the route vague is easy, because I have a number of states I want to visit, along with a couple of specific locations I’d like to see, but I don’t care how I get there.

I’d like to avoid major highways and instead take back roads and scenic routes, since the interstate is so impersonal.  I’m going to try to visit friends and relatives on certain parts of the journey, and any who read this are certainly welcome to provide ideas of places for me to visit.  I’ve got only one or two dates/locations that must be met/visited, so the rest is all up in the air.

Now, I’m not married to any of the locations picked for destinations on this map.  I don’t, in fact, plan on stopping at almost any of them, but I wanted a decent general map to show the states I’d like to visit.  I do want to drive up the Pacific Coast Highway, because that’s the sort of thing that just seems like a good idea to anyone who likes to road trip, and I want to hit a large portion of the coast of Florida, but other than that, these aren’t the roads I’ll actually be taking, but are within a few hundred miles of where I’d like to go.

So if you know something interesting within 10 miles of this route, any direction, I’d love to get a comment or email from you telling me about it.  I’ll be providing links to some of the Craigslist ads and linkbacks from some of them to this post.