So, I have made it this far. My car is still in working order and it’s not even that hot. My little civic kicks but. It gets something like 40 miles per gallon on the freeway and with current gas prices as they are this is a good thing. But when I am not thinking about how good my car is doing, I am listening to one of my two long books on CD.

Scranton was small and set in the low tree-covered hills of Appalachia. Above the down town rose the huge sign of the town’s paper, The Scranton Times. I spent a couple days there and met some of the paper’s reporters. It was a pretty sleepy town. That said, a triple homicide happened the day before I arrived. Some guy took out three people with a hammer.

Crossing PA was a long monotonous drive. I was surprised at how few towns filled in the rocky forest land that is most of the state. It really felt untouched in a way. But once I crossed into Ohio, farms and fields filled much of the flat lands. Here only patches of wood sat alongside the farmland. Indiana kept on in pretty much the same way as Ohio.

I made it in a day from Scranton to Chicago. By the time the skyline of down town Chicago was looming over some rusty bridge, the sun was all in my face. I maneuvered my way through town as my friend Alex tried to direct me to his house in Lincoln Park. I passed a ball park and down town and then came into a neighborhood along the lake.

One more day and then I am heading west.

WEST

It only took three more days to cross Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah and then Nevada. But first Iowa. Iowa was all hills and bucolic farmland, in an English-countryside kind of way. But then came the razor edged flatness that is Nebraska. So flat it hurt. It wasn’t until the eastern parts of the state that the high plains of our imaginations emerged. But then came the crisp blue skies above Wyoming and the yellowing grass lands. Utah was a couple mountains that soon dropped into the seemingly unstoppable desert of Nevada. And then the Sierra Nevada of teh Golden State.