USA

When we're not roadtropping across America, Matt works as a web programmer, and I'm a Benjamin Franklin fellow finishing up a Ph.D. in music composition at the University of Pennsylvania. I've blogged about this before: one of the dirty little secrets of being a music Ph.D. is that after a few years of studying music fulltime, most of us find ourselves listening to less and less music outside of school. I got to a point where I couldn't stand listening to music in the background anymore while I worked, did chores, ate, or drove. It's hard to say exactly why this is the case, but it's something to do with losing the ability to turn off the part of the brain that analyzes each piece, and at times being so saturated with music that listening to it feels too much like work. There's also something grating about listening to music when there's a part of your brain that is trying to compose; it's as though a voice in your head is yelling, "Shut up! I'm trying to do complicated math, and listening to these numbers is making me lose count."

The one consistent exception that I didn't mention in the blog entry I linked above is that I love listening to American Routes, a public radio show that is ostensibly about jazz, blues, and roots music, but occasionally branches out into other eclectic genres of American music. It's hosted by Nick Spitzer, who, as I just discovered from the linked bio page, is a Penn alum who used to run WXPN. Although we have Sirius satellite radio, we've listened to more American Routes than anything else while on the road; they have a terrific archive of past shows that you can stream from their website. Matt's iPhone handles the streaming, and it's plugged into the aux input of our car stereo (although it's apparently playing havoc with his "unlimited" AT&T data plan. "Unlimited." Pffft.). It's the perfect Great American Roadtrop Adventure soundtrack. Sometimes I get out my mandolin and jam along for hours while Matt's in the driver's seat.

I was interviewed by a fellow grad student at Penn a few weeks ago for a paper she was writing about the way composers listen to music (she's also a composer and has also experienced the phenomenon I describe). I mentioned the fact that I listen to American Routes, and we were trying to dissect why I can do that. After a couple of moments batting around theories, I suddenly came up with: "It's music without the bullshit." I'm not sure I can define what that means more clearly, but saying it out loud, I realized it felt absolutely right. It's music without the bullshit, and I can listen to it without my brain even trying to find the bullshit. Happiness.

Right now, I'm sitting in Basin Street Station, and since we've listened to so much Amerian Routes, we're trying to figure out if it would be creepy/weird to go to Tulane University and try to find the American Routes office so we can leave a donation and gush at them a bit. Is that weird? It's probably weird.

Here is a small selection of the photos I've taken while in Savannah, Daytona, Key West, Cape Canaveral, the Everglades, and Miami - not in that order. You can now find them as a subset of pix.roadtrop.com.

The last two days' time-lapse videos are a bit different from the previous crop, for rather silly reasons. Two days ago, after we wrapped up lunch in Key West, I turned the GoPro on, and forgot to change it out of it's default startup mode of 'video', so the last half of the day was recorded as full HD 1080p realtime video, which I could probably take the time to cut down to a time-lapse version, but time on this trip is precious, so I'm just excising it. Most of it is us driving around Key West, and these sorts of videos are more interesting (to me) when we're going down long stretches of highway, or if we've planted the car in front of something interesting.

The following morning, while an amazing amount of mosquitos flew around our car and tried in vain to get through the flyscreens we magnetically attached over our sunroof and windows, I sat down with the GoPro manual and had another look at the settings, as I hadn't had much time to get to know it before the trip. I discovered that I could set the camera to record the pictures upside down, saving me from having to rotate the video in Vegas. I also discovered the different exposure modes, notably, the one that's designed for mounting it on your dashboard pointing outward. With the new default mode being set, hopefully I won't miss any more of our travels.

Since the Day 7 video was so short, instead of playing it back at half-speed, it's actually at quarter speed, and if you're one of the 7 or 8 people who watches these things, please comment and let me know if you prefer that to the speed all the other ones play back at, or if it doesn't really matter. And in a break from the musical backgrounds we've been including and composing, the Key West video simply uses field recording from the street where we were parked for a bit in Key West. It'll be interesting to see if YouTube identifies the music in the background and chastises me for it.

Day 8 was long, long slog from our camping spot, located at the end of the one road into the Everglades, stopping at the Robert Is Here Fruit Stand (it's really so much more than a fruit stand) and pausing at Starbucks for our morning upload, then driving up through central Florida, ultimately heading west into Pensacola, where we stayed with an old friend of mine, Jordan. He's stationed there with the Navy, after having spent a while in Gitmo- as medical staff, not as a detainee! The drive was something to the tune of 12 hours long, it was definitely 12 hours boring. The magic of the GoPro intervalometer has transformed that into two short minutes, where even in HD mode, you'd have to strain to see all the bug splats before we hit the storm that helped wash them off our windshield, if not our bumper.

We recorded the music for that video a few nights ago while staying in Homestead. I didn't get as much time to work on this. Actually, it's about as raw as you can get - it's just Melissa playing over a beat I wrote. There are more important things to do on this trip than fleshing out musical sketches - but I really like that we're making music as we go. Given how much American Routes we are consuming via streaming audio on the drive (to AT&T's chagrin, according to a text message I got) I wonder how long before what we record starts to sound like rootsy blues/jazz/country/rock. That actually works as a nice wrap to this post, as our next stop is New Orleans! We have to go to Basin Street Station and give them a fat donation for the binge streaming we've done over the past week.

One of the more adventure-y aspects of our roadtrop is the question of where we'll be bedding down each night. While we have a couple of necessary pre-bookings along the way -- such as the hostel in New Orleans where we stayed in 2002, and campsites in the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone -- most of the time, we're effectively winging it. Do we find a campsite for our compact wheeled space capsule, or boondock in a parking lot somewhere? Or do we cave and grab a motel room so we can shower and stretch out? It's actually been pretty fun figuring it out each day, and I'm glad we didn't plan every stop.

The first night, we lived on the edge, and caught some unwanted attention for it. I had originally jotted down the name of an RV park in Cape Hatteras, but, buoyed by the excitement of beginning the trip and turned off by the cost of the RV park, we chose a different route. We knew we wanted to climb the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse early the next morning before heading to Asheville, so we thought, why not just head down and see what was there? We found a large parking lot near the beach that was completely empty, silent but for the crash of waves on the beach, and pitch black -- except for occasional flashes of lightning to the south, and the piercing light of the lighthouse itself, less than half a mile away, spinning its beams into the night sky. It was somehow a bit terrifying, but a stunningly beautiful experience -- if I had that night over, I wouldn't have parked anywhere else.

Unforrrrrtunately, it turned out that the carpark belonged to the surrounding national park, and at 7:30AM, we were awakened by a loud rap on the Magnum window. I startle awake even in the most familiar surroundings, so the sudden knocking immediately sent me into paroxysms of loudly squawking "SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!" that I'm sure made an impression on the park ranger standing outside our car. Matt struggled to pull on some pants and find the car keys so he could open a window (yet another reason I still prefer manual winding windows) and face the music. The music turned out to be a brief lecture from the poor ranger about how trashy the Outer Banks would be if everyone just slept wherever they wanted, and a hilariously cheerful Matt countered by showing him our National Park Service Annual Pass and handing out one of our roadtrop.com business cards so the ranger could learn all about our epic trip which had just begun.

We were let off with a warning, which handily makes a sweet souvenir of our stay:

The second night, we found a Super 8 in Knoxville, TN. We were originally planning to find the hotel we stayed at when we roadtripped to New Orleans in 2002, but as it turns out, A LOT has changed in Knoxville in the last ten years. We had a vague idea that it was the Holiday Inn, but the area has evidently come up, because the Holiday Inn was $150 a night, and we weren't going to pay that much on a hunch. The Super 8 five miles away was all of $40.

Day three, we crashed with Dave and Charlene, but the next night, we had our first legitimate Walmart boondocking experience (we had previously made a hilarious failed illegitimate attempt during one of our pre-roadtrop jaunts). About half of all Walmarts around the country allow overnight parking by RV's and other camper vehicles -- if you google around, you can find a list of which ones do and which don't. The important thing is to always call ahead to check, out of courtesy and because each store has the right to change their rules whenever they want. The Walmart outside of Savannah was super laidback about letting us park -- there was an RV and a truck already in situ when we pulled in at around 1AM -- and they had a security guard patrolling the lot, so we could sleep in complete safety.

We did the same thing a couple of nights ago on the way to Miami, but at a Cracker Barrel in Deerfield Beach. The official Cracker Barrel company policy is that overnight parking isn't allowed, but we already knew from reading blogs that, in practice, most of them are fine with travelers who ask to stay. We waited until after we ate dinner and had a long conversation with our server about gas prices and electric cars before raising the question, and without pause, the friendly manager said, "Sure!" He didn't even need our assurance that we would come in for breakfast in the morning before we trucked (well, station-wagoned) out.

Other nights so far, we've stayed at cheap motels - our only stipulation is that the place we choose should look at least as presentable as motels on the X-Files. Believe it or not, there are many, many motels out there that are so dank and seedy, they make X-Files motels look like resorts. Some of them give me a serious Texas Chainsaw Massacre vibe.

Last night we camped in Everglades National Park. I had done my research, so I knew that our greatest challenge at the park would be biblical plagues of mosquitoes. American mosquitoes provoke some gnarly histamine reactions when they suck my Australian blood, so I had brought defenses: an Off lantern, mosquito coils, and plenty of DEET spray. I had also whipped up some custom-fit flyscreens for the Magnum which attach to the outside of the car with sewn-in neodymium magnets (strong enough that we could drive through the park at 55mph without them blowing off).

It was a good thing we prepared. Jesus Christ. I was bitten a couple of times mounting the flyscreens at the visitor center parking lot, which had a low density of mosquitoes; the campground 40 miles deep into the park was so full of clouds of mosquitoes, I didn't dare leave the car. Matt went to use the bathroom (stumbling over a camper who had pitched a tent in the men's bathroom in an attempt to stave off the bloodsuckers), and even he came running back as quickly as he could (Matt barely reacts to insect bites, as proven a few years ago during our Egypt vacation, when I was COVERED in excruciating bedbug bites while he appeared completely untouched).

I'm looking forward to our future overnights. We have some more stays with friends lined up, more national parks, and a log cabin in South Dakota.

Well, well, Florida. Aside from an amazingly run of bad luck trying to find a decent wifi connection (first world problems!), we have had a pretty damned awesome time here so far. Remaining activities: camping in Everglades National Park tonight, and a drive out of the state toward Alabama tomorrow.

On Wednesday night, we found ourselves a surprisingly decent cheap motel right across the street from Daytona Beach - I think it was called Budget Inn Express. The rooms and exterior were newly painted, and it was run by a South Asian woman who had scented the lobby like spicy incense and curry, so I was sold. Oh, and it was only $40 per night. What. I continually find it difficult to accept that RV parking and camping is routinely around the same price as a cheap motel.

Thursday morning, I took my turn in the driver's seat, and the first place I steered the Magnum was out onto the beach. Yes, Daytona is one of the few places in the USA where you can actually drive on the beach itself (for $5 per day). It's not quite the international speedway, but that didn't stop me thinking about all the money I fondly fed into Daytona USA arcade machines back in the days when one would actually leave one's house to play video games in dedicated venues. The beach speed limit was only 10 miles per hour, but that beats standing in front of an arcade game.

Then it was off to our first true nerdgasm of the roadtrop: Kennedy Space Center. I think one of the reasons Matt and I work so well as a couple, especially when traveling, is that we shared the same obsessions as kids; we each went through phases of intense interest in Ancient Egypt, dinosaurs, and space. I was lucky enough for my space fascination to carry me all the way to Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1994, where I spent a week at the NASA Space Academy earning my Level II NASA wings. It was a very cute experience, in retrospect: a kind of crash course in the very, very basics of being an astronaut, full of hilarious cultural clashes and 14-year-old hormones run amok.

So going to the Kennedy Space Center was a bit like being a kid again, especially since the park is kind of geared toward kids. Which is fine; if you want a return to living in a country with a decent space program, you probably have to start by inspiring the next generation to actually give a shit. I found my moment of shivering awe in the Apollo/Saturn V facility, where we were treated to a three-screen documentary about the launch of Apollo 8, ending with a bone-shaking recreation of the actual launch (they had some pretty boss subwoofers in the theater). I was actually choking back tears when it was over, and it only got worse when we exited the theater to find ourselves in an enormous pavilion containing an actual Saturn V rocket.

I don't agree with Ayn Rand's views about nearly everything, but one exception is that I too feel fiercely proud of humankind's greatest achievements. (The difference is that I sort of feel that the greatest achievements of all are the result of many people working together, you know, collectively - a feeling that seems to be shared by all the astronauts in every documentary, who rush to lavish praise on the 100,000 nameless people on the ground who make each mission possible. Sorry, Ayn, this is not really the work of solitary misanthropic geniuses.)

The next day, we finally made it to Miami, a city awash in the colors of the 1980's that I have secretly wanted to visit since Miami Vice (though the pop culture reference we kept making as we were driving around was GTA: Vice City). We swam in South Beach, where the lukewarm and gorgeous waters are so clear that when two $20 bills accidentally floated out of Matt's shorts, he found them both on the sandy sea floor within five minutes. For dinner, we ate delicious Cuban food in Little Havana, and afterward drove around the fairly impressive downtown area.

If I can whinge for a minute, I have to say that Miami's inner-city highways are a confusion of utterly terrifying spaghetti roads, and our Garmin seemed determined to try and kill us. "Take ramp to highway [whichever] on right." OK. Note that the highway is comprised of ten lanes full of Bentleys and Ferraris traveling at 70mph, but our Magnum has a pretty great 0-60, so we make it easily. "In 300ft, take exit on left." WHAT. YOU WANT ME TO VEER THROUGH FIVE LANES OF SPEEDING SUPERCARS AND TAKE A HAIRPIN TURN EXIT IN 300FT. WHAT THE ARRRRRGHH--

Today, after checking in at Everglades National Park to make sure there are available campground spots, we drove through the Florida Keys to Key West.

I am pretty sure Key West was created to give me somewhere to retire. I am obsessed with cats and chickens. Key West is obsessed with cats and chickens. I hate the cold winters of the North East. Key West is frost-free. I love a city with a huge LGBT scene. Hello, it's Key West. I like to be able to see the ocean now and then. Water, water everywhere. The only sticking points of retiring here one day are the cost of real estate and the unfortunate consequences of hurricanes. This is why I need to become stupendously rich and also learn how to control the weather with my mind.

Oh, once again, we have time-lapse videos from Day 6 and Day 7:

And of course, there are pix aplenty at pix.roadtrop.com.

In planning for this trip, I thought it might be a cool idea to do a timelapse video of our journey. We certainly wouldn't be the only people who've done this, but it would be a great way for us to remember a month-long trip that's so packed with events that a week in, I'm already having trouble remembering just where it was we were three days ago. At first, I thought about getting some older Canon point-n-shoot, installing hacked firmware, and mounting that somewhere, but after doing some research, I discovered that a camera called the GoPro Hero HD has a built-in intervalometer. You can set it up to shoot pictures every 1, 5, 10, 30, or 60 seconds. Maybe even more than that, but that's all I needed to know. So a few weeks before we hit the road, we checked Adorama, and they happened to have a blowout on the previous generation of the camera, to make room for the newer, even flashier cameras.

These little things are amazing machines. I'd seen videos people took with them, but in doing this research, it was the two videos of people dropping their GoPros while skydiving (at 2,000ft and 13,000ft), then finding them (while they were still filming!) that sold me. Or maybe it was the video of a GoPro falling off a surfboard and rolling around in a reef that impressed me (That one was found a few months later, in perfect working condition). I knew that nothing we were doing would be that hardcore, except maybe climbing Half-dome, but that level of engineering really impressed me. What also impressed me was that it was $153 for the camera, with six mounts, a 200mph suction cup mount, and two cases (one waterproof), new in the box.

I tried mounting it to the dashboard, but had I read the instructions I would have known that for as great as the 3M moutning adhesive is, it doesn't work on textured plastic. So, on the glass behind the rear view mirror it went. Through a somewhat archaic process involving the two buttons and cryptic LCD display, I set the camera up to take a photo every 30 seconds. I had to buy a new (third!) case that allowed me to run USB into it so that we could power the camera whenever the car was on.

The case also has a slot on the side for easy removal of the hot-swappable SD card. I can pull the card out, dump the photos onto a hard drive, then pop it back in and it picks up taking photos where it had left off.

Like any other digital camera, it stores the photos using incremental numbers appended to the photo name. This comes very much in handy when its time to turn those photos into a video. For this, I use one of my favorite all-around programs, Sony Vegas. I started out using this for multitrack audio, but it's developed into a phenomenal video editor, and I've learned how to utilize that. In this case, I import the photo sequence, set a framerate, and because the camera is mounted upside down in the car, rotate the video. I play around with the resolution, reducing it for a speedier upload, add audio, render, then whenever we have wifi, upload it to YouTube.

With some downtime in Daytona, Melissa busted out the mandolin she brought with her, and recorded a tune into our Zoom H4n. I put together a beat using Figure on my iPhone, and dubbed in some traffic sounds I recorded outside our hotel. Since I had uploaded the first few videos before having audio, I simply used YouTube's audio replace function to swap in music, but you can hear part of the track we recorded on the Day 4 video. Day 5 features a beat I put together on the Tempest a few months ago as part of Melissa's composition for "Pulse," a dance piece performed in New York earlier this year.

Day 1: Philadelphia to Cape Hatteras

Day 2: From the Outer Banks to Knoxville, TN

Day 3: Knoxville, TN to Atlanta, GA

Day 4: Spending the day in Atlanta, then driving to Savannah

Day 5: Savannah to Daytona Beach via Highway A1A

Also, there are more pictures available at pix.roadtrop.com:

I created the new subdomain pix.roadtrop.com, which redirects to the Flickr set where we'll be uploading photos by both Matt and me. Matt just uploaded some of his, taken by his flashy digital SLR, so you should definitely head over and take a peek.

We're also in the process of adding music to several time lapse videos we've been creating with our GoPro as we drive, so stay tuned.

When we first decided to take this roadtrop, I thought 35 days was a pretty decent length of time to spend on the road. It became clear as I dove into planning, however, that if we really wanted to do it properly, six months might have been more appropriate -- but there was no way we could afford to leave home and jobs for half a year. So it goes that some of the cities we visit are basically pit-stops; we can get out of the car for a few hours and walk around, but we can't really soak it up or take the time to live like a local.

Nashville was one of those towns, but I'm happy we dropped in. We first spent about half an hour walking up and down Music Row, which felt like a soon-to-be-artifact, especially after the classes I took this semester, which focused on new developments in copyright and the cultural changes precipitated by the internet. Maybe twenty years ago, I would have been seriously excited to see the names of the big record labels and their hulking art deco styled studios, but the complete dearth of other passers by and the frequent "For Lease" signs made me think ghost town. Sandwiched between the studios are plenty of lawyer's offices; I predict the whole street will be nothing but law firms eventually -- the lawyers who got fat and rich preying on the companies that preyed on the musicians.

Nashville: Greeted by a pianist near Music Row

Our next unplanned stop was the Frist museum, which we initially entered for the purpose of gulping down some air conditioned climate and to avoid a possible storm (which never appeared *thanks, Inaccuweather*). One of the you-win-some-you-lose-some aspects of living in the NYC-Philly megalopolis is that art museums everywhere else seem so cheap! Wow, are you kidding me, $10.50 for both of us to enter!? AND there was a sweet exhibit on the theme of (extremely creepy) fairy tales, that was not only right up my alley, but contained artworks by some of my creeptastic favorites, like Charlie White and Patricia Piccinini.

We avoided the Country Music Hall of Fame, though I'm sure it would have been kind of interesting if we'd had more downtime, and strolled around the downtown district, with its music-themed everything, and bar stages already alive with various performing country bands at 2PM. It was cool to see. Even though 90% of country music isn't my thing, I wish we could have hung around for night time, when I bet that whole area is popping.

Nashville: Batman

Nashville: A band on every floor of the bar

Nashville: Matt checks out a walking map

Nashville: Matt is surprised that Nashville is actually pretty neat

Other highlights: I found a Goorin hat store - I've been buying their hats online for years (the two hats I've worn so far - see pix - are both by Goorin) but they don't have an outlet near Philly.

This photo is from a shitty tourist store, but I have been thinking of buying a shitty straw cowboy hat. For shits.

We closed out Nashville with a trip to the estate of Great American Brilliant Asshole Andrew Jackson, known as the Hermitage, which is idyllic and gorgeous as long as you don't think about all the slaves.

The Hermitage: Matt in Arcadia

There were neat animals there too.

The Hermitage: Cat and rabbit Mexican standoff

The Hermitage: Cat stares at rabbit

The Hermitage: Rabbit ignores cat

The Hermitage: Turkey and his horse friend

That evening, we hit the road again and made our way back east to Atlanta, Georgia, which Matt had always been interested in visiting. It was a total joy to stay with friends Dave and Charlene, who have known Matt since he was about 15 when they ran an ISP in his hometown of Shrewsbury, PA. They are seriously some of the most awesome people we know (along with their Baltimore-dwelling daughter Melanie, also a friend that we don't see nearly enough). They stuffed us with so much breakfast six hours ago that we haven't eaten since, and they're about to take us out to a barbecue joint that I'm sure will be ridiculously delicious.

Dunphys hanging with Lesters

We weren't too sure what to do in Atlanta at first, because we totally forgot that CNN is based there.

Atlanta: We're at CNN!

Atlanta: Wait a minute, what are we doing at CNN!?

OK, so it's not like we like CNN, at least not the stream of garbage it's sadly become in the last decade or so. But Matt has worked at newspapers, and I worked in TV news for a couple years in both Australia and the US, so there's still something kind of cool to us about going to check out CNN's main studio. We took an hour-long tour by a great guide named Brandon who took one of our Roadtrop business cards and checked out this website on the spot; it was interesting to Matt because he hadn't really seen the inner workings of a TV news studio before, but for me, the interest was in how freaking inflated everything was from the environments in which I used to work. Everything and everyone in it was functionally identical, but BIGGER and MORE and FLASHIER and SUPER-EXPENSIVE. Studio 7, their flagship space, has about $12 million worth of equipment in it, including 100-inch interactive touch screens and five $300,000 robo-cams and a crazy body-mounted steadycam that I honestly thought was a bit pointless -- but it was cool.

Brandon? Brendan? CNN tour guide dude.

Atlanta: Fake master control

Atlanta: Quality journalism from HLN

Atlanta: Fake studio

Atlanta: CNN journalists diligently scour Twitter for breaking news material

Atlanta: CNN courtyard tilt-shift

The tour even included a ride on the longest free standing escalator in the world.

Atlanta: The longest freestanding escalator in the world

Atlanta: View from the escalator

Atlanta: The globe at the top of the giant escalator

But I still think all of that was eclipsed by the sight that greeted us as we first entered the building:

Atlanta: RAINICORN!!!!!

We are so happy for Pendleton Ward and the runaway success of Adventure Time. We were both plugging the hell out of his short online before the series was picked up by Cartoon Network, and whenever we catch episodes (usually in random hotels since we don't have cable), it seems mainstream success hasn't dulled the writing. Super yay.

Atlanta: CNN and I are twinsies

Over two years ago, as the concept of this roadtrip became more concrete, we started looking at what sort of vehicle we might take on the road with us during this massive journey. The kinds of vehicles that come to mind when I think "stereotypical road trip" are basically RV, van, or VW minibus. In my own experience, my family made trips to Florida and North Carolina to visit my grandparents several times. At first, we took Dodge Colt Vista - something of a minivan predecessor. After that car kicked the bucket, we replaced it with a Dodge Caravan. Or maybe it was the Plymouth equivalent. It had not occurred to me until typing this paragraph, that I've spent most of my roadtrip miles in Dodge vehicles - even if one of them was basically a rebadged Mitsubishi.

"My Greek father, John, was a mechanic and a general fix-it man. As far back as I can remember, he owned a big, blue Honda station wagon. The back was filled with buckets of tools and hardware, and miscellaneous mechanical parts. It was filthy, and smelled of hot vinyl. He always had it tuned to a radio station that was playing Cliff Richard's "Some People" or Tiffany "I Think We're Alone Now."

"I have many fond memories of that blue station wagon, and when I was in my late teens, I bought a shitty $2000 blue station wagon of my own. Mostly, I used it to transport band gear, for which it was very useful. Being shitty, it developed many problems, most egregiously - the windsheid leaked at the top. My mother, when borrowing it one time, fixed it with silicon caulk, which was obviously slathered across the top of the windshield and onto the roof. The next time my mother borrowed it, I was in the USA on our roadtrip to new orleans that partly inspired this one. When I got home, my mother said, "Your car's been confiscated." I was, naturally, shocked. What on earth happened, I asked her. I thought maybe she had been dealing drugs - anythign is possible with my mother. Turns out that she had simply been driving it on Paramatta Road, where police had 'randomly' pulled it over for a safety points check. It failed spectacularly, and that was the end of my blue station wagon. Until Matt came home with this one.

"I love small cars, but my heart lies with big blue station wagons."

There were two big features that had me eyeing up a Dodge Magnum for the roadtrip. For one - I was pretty sure that if I put down (or took out) the back seats, I could lie flat on my back and still have room to stretch. The other thing that it had going for it was surprisingly good fuel economy for a full-size vehicle. At the time I was looking, we both drove Hyundai Elantras - I could squeeze 450 miles out of a full tank, getting at least 32mpg. The base model Magnum has an advertised fuel economy of 27mpg. That's close to double the economy you'd get out of a van, certainly double the economy of any RV. But some research, combined with some advice from old friends had me doubting the longevity and capabilities of the base model's 2.7l V6 engine. Additionally, if we're going to be on the road for an extended period time, we're going to want something comfortable, and generally, car manufacturers only give you a cozy interior if you take a bigger engine with it.

Now the next step up version of the car was now on my radar. It has a 3.5l V6, 250 horsepower (my 1st car had less than half that at 89hp) - but only gets 23mpg on the highway. That might not seem like such a drop, but that was now almost 10 fewer miles per gallon that our Hyundais got. And when you're planning to drive tens of thousands of miles in a single month - that's several hundreds of dollars of added expense. Some of the niceties that kind of offset that are the fact that the model we eventually found had the 'comfort package' installed - power adjustable everything (you can even reposition the pedals), big comfy leather seats, a sunroof and Sirius radio, and the one we found was low mileage at a great price. But still - 23mpg! And that's what the EPA says we'll get if we're on the highway, I don't even want to know what it got driving the streets of Philadelphia.

One thing it did not get, something only available if you bought even BIGGER engines, was a car computer display. Buy a Magnum with a Hemi, and you get an active readout of your MPG, various fluid temperatures, and other handy diagnostic things. Since we were going a long distance relying on this car not only for travel but for a place to sleep, I'd love to have something like this on our car. Retrofitting it is possible, but I couldn't justify the cost. I did learn about this thing called a Scangauge though - it shows even more information, and works with just about any modern car. Really, the only thing I wanted it for was the fuel economy meter. If we had an idea of what effect our driving techniques had on the gas tank, we could save a few bucks on this trip.

I've already gotten way too wordy, but the long and short of it - through careful driving, and hanging behind tractor trailers when we could, we've been getting around 27mpg. Again - doesn't sound like a big deal. On a 500 mile drive, that's about 3.2 gallons less per day. At four dollars a gallon, that's $13 a day. Being on the road 35 days - that's a savings of $455 over the trip.

And that's cheap. As Mel just added - "Gas costs three times as much in Australia as it costs here."

After briefly showing Tony around the house that he was going to look after for the next month, we took to the road under gray skies that promised our first day would not be without rain. We took quickly drove through Delaware and Maryland via routes 95 and 13. I took the first shift driving - our GPS said that if we continued at pace, we would be in Hatteras by 6pm, although we didn't really have any intention of getting there quite so early. For one, the fog along the Maryland/Delaware peninsula was incredibly dense, even well past noon.

Usually, during long drives, the drive itself takes a back seat to the destination - top priority on day 1 is to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, without attracting attention from law enforcement along the way. A great way to reinforce the less rushed schedule we're on has been to pay attention to our fuel consumption gauge, and actually go the speed limit.

Our car is rated at something like 23mpg, but according to our Scangauge, I was able to push it up past 25. When Melissa took the wheel in Virginia, she was able to eek out 27mpg. Compared to the fuel economy that vans or RVs afford you, and given that we're driving some 15,000 miles in a month, this is a big reason why we chose a station wagon for the trip.

After going a fair way into Virginia, a little bit past the "Isn't Rte 13 boring? We're not. Ahead 5mi" sign (didn't catch the name of the business behind the observant sign) it was time for us to pull off the road for a bite to eat. As we were talking about this, we saw a banner at the edge of a strip mall parking lot, "THAI FOOD". I'll admit, if you asked me what kind of food I might find on the eastern shore of Virginia, Thai wouldn't be my first guess, but it sounded like a great lunch, so we pulled in to what turned out to be one of the sadder strip malls I've been to. That Thai restaurant that had invited us off the highway? "Coming soon." There were folks building the counter inside where residents of this area would soon be eating delicious Thai food, but the only other place in this strip that had food was a standard fare strip-mall Chinese buffet. Outside another store front was structural damage, evidence of an unfortunate high-speed joining of road vehicle and immovable structure. There was a Mexican restaurant - but it was closed. Even the Chinese buffet looked closed. We got back on the road, and followed signs to a cafe - also closed. We were close enough to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel that we decided to just snack at this point, stopping at a local grocery store to pick up some bread to tide us over.

Before long, we had made the bridge-tunnel - a 20 mile engineering expanse featuring a series of bridges and tunnels, with a restaurant in the middle of it all. At a scenic viewpoint just before the bridge, we got out to have a good look at it, curving off into a hazy vanishing point on the horizon. The drive across the bridge reminded me of driving across Lake Ponchatrain a decade ago, when Melissa and I drove to New Orleans. Happily, by this point the clouds had broken off, and as we emerged from one of the tunnels, doing the requisite hairpin turn to get into the restaurant, the sun was beaming down unhindered by clouds, without a drop of rain in our sight. I found the view from this island in the bay stunning - you emerge right alongside what I can only guess is a major shipping route, given the number of enormous vessels we saw cruise past the restaurant in the time we were there.

After a late lunch, we were back on the road south to North Carolina. I took a bunch of photos - they'll come later though.

I am excited beyond belief that we're leaving TOMORROW. I've had my head down for a few weeks finishing out my last semester of coursework, but the weeks (months) of planning I indulged in earlier have me feeling pretty relaxed the night before we head off.

One of the reasons this trip is so awesome is that it marks ten years of Matt and I traveling together - through life, and literally. A decade ago last month, we roadtripped to New Orleans, and on the way, we fell in love. Since then, we've managed to get away as often as we can.

April 2002 New Orleans
The original. It really was the trip itself that convinced us to give in to our attraction and venture into a crazy intercontinental relationship. I'm not one for supernatural beliefs, but it was like the entire universe was telling us, shouting at us, to be together. Photos available on Facebook and Flickr.

December 2002 - January 2003 Australia
The trip during which Matt proposed, and an opportunity for me to show Matt around famous parts of my country I hadn't actually visited myself. We witnessed some crazy bushfires in Canberra, and much else besides.

August 2003 Seattle
An internet meetup!

January 2005 and June 2006 Pittsburgh
I don't think I have any pictures online from our impromptu New Year's Day drive to Pittsburgh from Harrisburg, but the second one was for an epic Nine Inch Nails experience complete with an obese stripper.

May 2005 Coachella
Another internet meetup, and a chance to see Nine Inch Nails at a festival in the desert. Photos aplenty.

August 2006 Australia
Matt and I return to Australia so that I can say goodbye to my (step)dad, and he can meet my father for the first time. Also the first time I chopped all my hair off for a trip.

October 2007 Niagara Falls
I drove Matt there for his birthday to see the Video Game Orchestra (and a great big waterfall).

September 2008 Los Angeles
This was a really special one. We renewed our wedding vows in Malibu on our fifth anniversary after making it through an annus horribilis.

May 2009 Phoenix and Sedona, AZ
Matt scored some super-cheap airfares, and we got away for a weekend.

June 2009 Schuylkill Sojourn
We kayaked down the Schuylkill River for seven days in Matt's new Advanced Elements tandem kayak.

December 2009 - January 2010 Egypt
Our last really big trip, and our most exciting so far! I'm glad we were there before Arab Spring, but I yearn to go back one day. Although I could do without the female genital mutilation and the bedbugs.

April 2010 Red Hook, NY
The Gonzales Cantata was performed at Bard (photos by Kendall Whitehouse).

April 2010 Minnesota
We attended the SEAMUS conference (Society for Electro-Acoustic Music of the United States, or as I affectionately refer to it, the Beardo Conference) and hung out in Minneapolis for a weekend.

May 2010 Kansas City
My choral work "What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach?" was performed by the Simon Carrington Chamber Singers, but it was also an excuse for yet another internet meetup.

June 2010 and June 2011 Waterford, CT
Two years in a row, we attended the O'Neill National Puppetry Conference. This year we have to miss out because of the roadtrop, but hopefully we'll be back in the future.

June 2010 Asheville, NC
A spontaneous drive to see Matt's grandpa. We'll be swinging by again in a couple of days!

January 2011 San Antonio, TX
Another Gonzales Cantata performance which we turned into our first trip to Texas.

January 2011 Boston
Puppet Pandemic!

April 2012 San Francisco
We really only just returned from this trip, but I've written so many papers since I returned, it feels like a lifetime ago. Yet another trip for a performance (of "Omaha Beach" by Chanticleer). I kind of love turning performances of my compositions into excuses for hopping on planes - since I'm not even the one performing, it's so low pressure!

This list by necessity only contains trips for which we had to drive more than three hours or fly. It would be impossible to tally up all the daytrips and vacations we've taken to New York, Baltimore/DC, Gettysburg, Philly (when we didn't live here), Delaware Water Gap, Appalachian Trail, etc., etc. If you notice a big gap between dates, it's likely we went to a bunch of those places.

Anyway, that's all behind us. This roadtrop has been on the cards since at least 2004, so I have years of anticipation to fulfill. Right now, I'm just kind of thrilled that Matt's home from work, and I'm home from school, and we're going to be in the same space 24/7 for 35 days.

So, craziness. A couple of months ago, I reported that we were lucky enough to snag a campsite in Yosemite for Memorial Day weekend in the few short minutes before they sold out completely. Shortly afterward, we also entered the Half Dome lottery.

Half Dome is a great big rock. Maybe it's the most famous large rock in America? I come from a land often defined by a very large rock in the center that I've never actually seen in person and certainly never climbed, but for some reason I decided that perhaps we should try climbing Half Dome, despite the fact that it kills people. Like, holy shit, quite a few people. Enough people that I started to have second thoughts, and then figured I should let fortune decide; because Half Dome was becoming (even more) dangerously crowded, the park service recently implemented a lottery system for permits to climb it.

So, we put in an application and waited. And on Friday, we were told that our application was granted.

Oh, man.

Since I am a giant scaredycat whose mild vertigo seems to grow a little stronger the older I get (this happens to a lot of people, I've heard), I have ordered us some climbing harnesses and via ferrata sets, and damnit, we are going to use them. I don't care if we look ridiculous. I grew up wearing an oversized orange stackhat while riding my bicycle; I can take it.

I thought at first that we could invite friends along with us, but no, it turns out the permit is for just the two of us.

Wow, I listened to all the lyrics in this song for the first time, and damned if it isn't about this very roadtrop. Obviously, Bill Withers is (a fabulously wealthy) clairvoyant and is speaking directly to me.

Less than four weeks to go now until we leave for the big journey. The end of my semester is approaching, with its requisite deadlines and procrastinated workload, so this may be the last time we do a sleepover test run in the Magnum.

On Saturday, we were in Central PA for our friend Tony's birthday, and since there are far more state parks out that way than there are closer to Philly, we decided we wanted to stay overnight. Unfortunately, all of their campgrounds aren't open until the second weekend of April, so we had to seek other options. Was it finally time to try boondocking in a Walmart parking lot?

Also unfortunate: neither of the York Walmarts allow overnight parking. But we decided to try and see what happened. Worst case scenario, they would just kick us out, right?

They did. After about two hours, at one in the morning, we heard a sharp rap on the window, and a mall cop told us to clear out. ("There's a Holiday Inn around the corner." Uh, yeah, not really the point.) I suppose she was alerted to our unconscious presence, despite the sun shades we use to block the windows, by the rivers of condensation on the panes. We finally found a spot in another strip mall where a few other cars and at least one truck were also boondocking, and slept undisturbed until daybreak.

We spent most of Easter Sunday at Gifford Pinchot. It's quite pretty.

Other things we tested out:

The Cooking Rig

The MiFi wireless internet. Hooray, I can surf the web on my laptop in a forest.