roadtrip tally

miles on my car: 10,960
photos taken: 5,173
photos uploaded: 1,767
state lines photographed: 30
new flickr contacts: 17

days gone: 65
states visited: 34
other countries visited: 1
cities/towns visited: 31
states visited but not overnight: 12
times i saw the ocean: 6
islands visited: 5

houses slept in: 21
   air mattresses: 3
   guest beds: 3
   couches: 5
   someone’s bed while they slept somewhere else: 6
   futons: 4

motels slept in: 11
   motel 6: 7
   super 8: 2
   days inn: 2

empty apartments slept in: 1
people i stayed with whom i’d never met before: 4

abandoned places: 5
times i got pretty drunk: 4
windshield rock chips: 3
cemeteries: 3
times my car got searched by border patrol or police: 2
prescriptions: 2
doctor visits: 2
illnesses: 1
parking tickets: 1
warnings (for following an 18-wheeler too closely): 1
speeding tickets: 0

nearly finished

i’m in houston now, which doesn’t mean i’m done with my trip quite yet, since i live in austin. but i’m from houston, and i always visit here, so it feels like my trip is over. this upsets me just exactly as much as i thought it would. before i left austin i thought i might be homesick by now. but no. i’m trip-sick.

not to jinx my drive from houston to austin, but i’m really happy nothing bad happened to my car on this trip. i’m also happy nothing bad happened to me or the dog or my suitcase. i thought for sure there’d be some terrible catastrophe. well, i guess there was the strep throat on my birthday, but that only lasted four days.

when i was in boston, jared commented on how fast he thought my trip was going. “it seems like you’re in a new town every few days. i don’t know if i could go that fast. it would take me that long just to get used to being in a place, and then i would have to leave it.”

he’s right about that, but it happened to me with people instead of places. i would show up in a new town and spend enough time with the people i knew there to get used to having them around, and then i would have to leave. what this means is that right now i miss about 50 people.

i feel like a completely different person.