a roadtrip

I'm on the verge of a road trip. I even have a copy of Dharma Bums in my bag as if to validate the journey as a bonafide American pilgrimage, nothing short of any other planned and unrehearsed adventure on the table for 2009. Yet this road trip has been overshadowed by the other more ambitious and exotic travels planned for the spring into the summer. That worries me. Am I taking a trip of some magnitude too lightly? Will Los Cruces be a spectacle, Austin a debacle, and New Orleans reduce me to savagery?

I have an atlas. The maps detailed enough to show me not only the blue highways of American automobile myth, but those even more illusory roads that might lead me to huckleberry patches, moonshine, or Pepsi machines in long forgotten gas stations.

I haven't forgotten my playground conversation. I promise.