Done.

Results of the beard challenge (remember the bet from my very first post?) - Dev clearly has more follicles than I do, but my scruff is longer.

Ugh, the drive from DC to home. This whole summer I sat in very little traffic and paid only a handful of tolls - they are almost exclusively a mid-atlantic concept, it seems. However I sat in plenty of traffic and paid $12 ($12!) in tolls just to get from DC to Hatfield - welcome back, eh.

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The day before, I drove out of Asheville and north through VA. I stopped off in Lynchburg, VA for one last day on the snowboard I had been lugging along all summer. Liberty University in Lynchburg built the nation's only 'dryslope' - basically plastic carpeting on a hill that gets sprayed with a fine mist to keep it slick and rides kind of like snow - turning and edge control are reduced, but you can still hit park features like jumps and rails well enough. So I tried that out for about an hour (no photos because it really wasn't much to look at) and concluded that while it's better than nothing, it excises the soul from snowboarding/skiing, which is being in a somewhat natural environment and ripping some crazy turns on snow. Continuing north and coming off of pleasant central Virginia roads winding past small farms and on to the beltway, I was funneled back into the rivers of traffic pouring haltingly through the mid-atlantic metropolises. I stayed at Chase's house in Potomac that night, the last of my college friends I visited on this trip. We had a good night swapping stories and catching up, and in the morning I drove home.

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But Jessica almost didn't make it. The car's computer had been a bit glitchy for awhile, with various warning lights popping up and disappearing randomly, and the speedometer occasionally dropping to zero while I was driving (they're overrated, anyway). Also the transmission had been slipping and sticking recently. I don't how related the two are, but when I was at a stop light in my home town 2 MILES FROM MY DRIVEWAY and the end of the trip, the tranny wouldn't catch the gear to drive away from the green light. I shifted around a bit, restarted it, and finally crawled out of the intersection as the gear slowly caught. So I nursed it into the driveway and had a good long laugh. I almost broke down 2 miles from the end of this cross-country trip.

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14 weeks and 14,072 miles. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN? I thought I'd do 10,000, tops. Driving on winding state roads will rack up the miles, I guess. But I made it with no accidents, speeding or parking tickets, complete breakdowns, etc. - incredibly fortunate. Jessica made it over numerous mountain passes, two of which went to about 11,000 feet elevation, as well as miles of terrible logging and 'jeep' roads that included the occasional small creek crossing and various other obstructions. I think my roadkill tally was three - I felt really bad about the turtle but hey, what can you do.

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I also gained an appreciation for all the national lands this country has - most of them are out West, of course. It's not hard to understand why early naturalists campaigned for the protection of these beautiful places, but it was a rare bit of brilliance by the politicians who officially set them aside through legislation (probably the only time in my life I'll use those two words in the same sentence). The fact that these places are protected in perpetuity as a birthright for all Americans is an amazing concept. The lands are either free or cheap to see; they are something the government got right and continues to manage reasonably well.

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Okay just a few more cheesy quotes and final thoughts then I'll call this a wrap. The overall cost of the trip wasn't as much as one might think, so if anyone's reading this and thinking they can't afford to do it themselves or I must have spent a ton - that's not really the case. Yeah, I spent a lot on gas because I drove so much and didn't have anyone to split it with, but other than that my expenses were low - I spent time volunteering at places that fed me, and when I wasn't doing that I ate simple cheap food, bummed around on friends' couches, camped, or slept in the back of my car in supermarket parking lots. Not classy, but free. Speaking of friends' couches, I am incredibly grateful and indebted to all my hosts and friendly strangers along the way, without whom this trip would have been lonely and downright boring.

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"Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last, In things best known to you finding the best or as good as the best" (Whitman), and

"The infinite freshness, the spendthrift variety of form and species and foliage... make[s] an Eastern landscape a vision of paradise itself." -Twain

Oh, and this one's mine: gas is always cheaper at the station after the one you decide to fill up at. Thanks for reading.

The Smokies & Asheville

View of the Smoky mountains, Pisgah NF. I took a day hike here and it was great - such a variety of plants and terrain, and lots of water.

Another college friend and teammate, Rachel (who I'm sure is thrilled I chose this photo for the blog - sorry Rachel, the other ones didn't turn out). We were gathering some eggs from the chicken coop for breakfast at her family's pet-friendly resort/farmette near Asheville, NC. I also got to pick organic apples and pears from the fruit trees - delicious. It was a beautiful part of the state, with a balance of small farms and mountainous woodland. Rachel also took me to a local ultimate frisbee pickup game, where I realized that my ankle certainly is not healed from that hockey injury over two months ago. This story may yet take a hilarious turn if I see an orthopedist and find out I've hiked all these hundreds of miles on some sort of serious injury.

Misc. South

I took a tour of a restored plantation house near Houma, LA. It was given by a very knowledgeable tour guide who started off with lots of history about French and Spanish colonialism in the region. Different rooms of the house had been converted into mini-museums displaying local culture. One contained elaborate Mardi Gras costumes, and another was a recreation of former LA senator Allen Ellender's Washington office (below), with all his actual stuff. He had signed photographs of countless heads of state and other US leaders, as well as cabinets containing travel souvenirs and gifts from around the world. The strangest of these were a human scalp and a shrunken head. I didn't take a picture of them because I found it too strange.

Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's estate in Oxford, Mississippi. A literary hero of mine, and a sight worth seeing - I like him even more now because his house wasn't oversized and his property contained woods with a few trails.

I had no idea armadillos lived in the US, much less MS. I was so confused when I saw the first one. They are weird-looking and seem pretty stupid.

New Orleans

I made it into New Orleans on a friday evening excited to see the historic French quarter and get a feel for how the city has bounced back after Katrina (conclusion: mixed results. more on that later). I parked in a less crowded area of downtown and tried to navigate to the Mississippi/French quarter and ended up walking a half hour the wrong way before figuring it out. So after about 90 min. I made it to that area - live music filling the streets, bars and restaurants everywhere, and general revelry. I walked around more, got a drink and listened to some live jazz, and ate some overpriced street food. I didn't know where the night was going to take me - I had been trying to reach my college friend David Sugg who has a teaching job in New Orleans, but he had been busy with work and I'd been out of cell service in the bayou, so we hadn't yet connected. I would usually just hit the highway and pull off and sleep in the car at a trucker stop somewhere, but it was just too stinking hot and humid to do that, but motels aren't really in my budget. So as the night was getting long, I was walking back to my car and wondering where to go, and lo and behold Sugg calls. So it was easy going from there - we met up, got my car parked by his apartment, and then it was round two out on the town. We walked allll the way across a portion of the downtown (a couple of hours walking), checking out different nightlife neighborhoods. We found our way back to Sugg's apartment via trolley car at dawn. I'm not sure what exactly I was thinking - I was up for about 24 hrs. straight. But hey, I certainly got a feel for downtown New Orleans.

Sugg's place, and below, part of the lower 9th ward - Sugg took me on a driving tour of both the recovered and not-so-recovered areas of the city. Five years later, lots of condemned houses still stand waiting to be torn down, next to houses that have been rebuilt (or people simply painted over the Katrina "X" on the front implying that it was condemned) and re-inhabited. It was hard to imagine that the streets we were driving down had once been under 12+ ft. of water. Also, the day before when I had first walked to the French quarter, I just happened to walk by the fenced-off, abandoned Charity Hospital. I didn't connect at the time this particular building to the infamous news reports following Katrina, but I had a feeling, which Sugg later confirmed. A sad chapter in our country's history. Speaking of Sugg, he is a teacher at a high school in New Orleans. When he was grading a stack of his students' essays while I was visiting, he showed me one that was immediately burned into my memory. It was written by a ninth grader with terrible grammar and little command of punctuation (if I didn't know beforehand I might have guessed it was by an elementary-schooler) who explained why he loved football (main reason: it kept him off the streets). Maybe I was just projecting onto the essay what I expected to see, but I thought that the half-page of partially legible writing said volumes about the world he's growing up in.

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So, maybe this chapter on my time in New Orleans comes across as a little hypocritical or immature - presuming that I got a taste for the difficulties that city has and continues to face, while spending part of my time out on the town. But I instead think that we celebrated some of the culture that makes New Orleans great, giving local businesses some tourism dollars in the process, and I now find myself rooting for the people making it happen there rather than just feeling sorry for them.

Down on the Bayou

I left Houston and drove down along the wetlands of Louisiana, close to the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. It was stinking hot, with thick humid air and lots of bugs. I took a short hike in a wetland wildlife refuge (you need a boat to really see much of these places, as there's almost as much land covered with water as not when you start getting way down near the gulf). I saw the first good long downpour since June, which made me happy. However, despite the rain, the ferocious bugs were still biting me! I saw a wild boar, crickets the size of mice, and live oaks draped in Spanish moss. Lots of nice Southern sights - no gators, though.

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On a side note, it's about time to get home - while all the freedom is great, since the MDS project in N.O. I was trying to do didn't work out, I haven't done a service project in a month now, and I don't really like having no purpose for too long. I'd like to be productive again instead of freeloading off friends and spending my savings.

I spent a night camping on a boat dock in the bayou. I didn't really sleep much - it was too hot and humid. Throughout the night, small-time commercial shrimpers and fishermen launched their boats. It was great to see that they are able to run their businesses and put seafood on our plates as the gulf oil spill (theoretically) subsides. I heard a man speaking in a thick Creole accent which blew my mind with its rich deep blend of French and Southern tones.

Home (but not done)

So I made it home today, Aug. 27th, about 14 weeks after I left. I had wanted to keep the trip going another week or so, but the real world simply would not wait any longer, in the form of an immunization follow-up that I needed to get for Drexel's clinical rotations and was already long past due. But I still have lots of stuff I'm going to add to this blog within the next few days - pictures from down on the bayou and up in the Smokies, some stories, and thoughts on the whole thing. And I think I'm going to get away one last time to central PA for a building project and to visit Dickinson friends, which would have been the last leg of the trip if I didn't need to get this shot earlier today. Feels like fall...

Texas

So I finally got around to adding stories and captions to all the pictures I put up a few days ago. I'm just wrapping up a few days here in Houston with my friend Jay. Good times have been had going to a Mets-Astros game (with free tickets from Jay's job- woohoo), sampling some tasty local brews, figuring out weird Texas road systems, and enjoying his apartment's A/C (its wicked hot and humid outside all the time). Houston is a huge city that appears to be growing rapidly and has a crazy network of highway overpasses. Also, as I finished my drive across Texas, coming from San Antonio out to Houston, I could tell that I'd entered the South and more specifically the gulf coast area - the flat landscape, the short trees, the broad town streets the humidity the place. Well, next is New Orleans and then that final drive northeast to home, with one more stint of camping in the Smokies.