HowToWalkAcrossTheCountry.com

On the plane, think about something a pretty girl told you about yourself before you left: that maybe your obsessive-compulsive disorder is behind more of your social foibles than you thought.

You’ve always had a need for stable relationships. For rules. You don’t do well when relationships slide from one category to another. You are transfixed by rules and cues about what sort of relationship is being transacted. You hate the awkward moment at the end of a movie in a theater — should we leave? — how about now? — so you make it a rule to stay through the credits. You draw a line.

This isn’t all bad.

You thrive at coloring within the lines in part because you thrive at seeing the lines. You can diagnose a relationship — see a line — from a mile away.

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Also on the plane, you’ll meet a polite and personable young man who’s even shorter than you are. Turns out he’s a physical therapist on staff for the Kansas City Chiefs. Ask him to give you a locker-room tidbit that will impress your sports friends. He’ll report that Tony Gonzalez is “not just a great athlete but a great person.”

Tell him that as locker-room tidbits go, that one is pathetic.

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You didn’t talk about your OCD reflections with anyone. but two weeks later, your friend Jeremy will be having a rough time coming back from reunion, and he’ll write something that you’ll remember:

“last night i dreamt that i couldn’t remember the lines”

It’s T minus 1,049 days, and you’re overdue for a trial run. Here’s your plan:

- Fly to Minneapolis to see your dear friends Erik and Ann get married.

- Sleep for a few nights in Erik’s dad’s sailboat. Don’t worry, you shouldn’t need a bag. How cold can it be during mid-May in southeast Minnesota?

- Take a three-day kayak trip down the Mississippi. Camp wherever you can find a spot.

- Take a few days off while staying with your friend Andy in Red Wing. Andy’s the one who sometimes calls you to announce that he’s just purchased a ten-pound cube of dangerously potent cheese. You’ll enjoy hanging out with Andy.

- Get Andy to drive you to Waterloo, Iowa, then walk from there to Grinnell, Iowa, where you went to college. That’s 68 miles — five days, at a nice, easy 14 miles a day. After all, Iowa’s flat as a pancake, right? Hey, you lived there for five years. Of course it is. Shouldn’t be a problem. So don’t bother swinging by the REI or anything. You won’t need expensive socks for this light jaunt.

- Keep a journal. When you get back, use the notes to keep a running set of blog posts in more-or-less real-time, three weeks after the actual events.

Before you start walking, set up a Google News Alert for the phrases “walk across the country” and “walking across the country.” Use that little vertical line above the backslash (|) as an “or” operator.

“walk across the country”|”walking across the country”

Right. Like that.

This will lead you to Armand Young. Armand Young has it figured out. Somewhere on the way from Los Angeles to New York, he found a formula: in each town, find someone who needs help and persuade people to give it.

In Marshalltown, he persuaded “the Marshalltown community” to rent an apartment for a homeless woman. In Dubuque, he talked a business owner into donating two months’ rent for a family of four.

Read the rest of this entry »

• what people say about your plan
• your estimates of travel speed
• your budget methods
• your early research on equipment
• seasonal weather along your route and others’
• your interviews with other walkers, past and present
• your observations about backpacking culture
• your first warm-up walk, in Iowa next month
• how similar trips (see the left-hand links) are going right and wrong

Stay loose, though. You’re sure other things will come up.

Hey, you’ve been around the block. You’ve launched a blog or two. But you haven’t yet decided what sort of update schedule to use for the blog you’re writing about your trip. In the past, you’ve found two ways to fight blogger’s block:

1. post in accordance with harshly self-enforced deadlines (i.e. Tuesday and Thursday)
2. post with no standards at all (i.e. in clumps, in droughts, whenever you please)

Option 1 is obviously more reader-friendly. But your goal at this point is more to collect content than to collect readers. For now, go with option 2.

So: for the moment, you’ll be posting sporadically, as you think of things to say. In general, though, if people want to visit your site once a week, that’ll probably keep them from missing much.

If your readers are determined to keep up with every post despite this irregular schedule, suggest that they subscribe to your blog’s feed using Google Reader or Bloglines. Or add have them add you to their Google homepages. These free programs don’t need to be downloaded, because they’re actually just pages on the Web itself. Using one of them to subscribe to a feed is like signing up for TiVo — they’ll grab your posts as they shoot past, keep them for your readers and keep track of which ones they’ve read.

If any of your readers are interested in figuring this out (they should! once they do, they can use the same programs to keep track of all sorts of blogs, news sites and other things) and need any help, suggest that they leave a comment below saying “help!” You’ll be happy to walk them through the process. It’s the least you can do.

The first thing you need to do is win.

Win friends. Win love. Win a degree. Win a profession. Win dreams. Win a job that shoots sugar through your veins every morning and sets your ambition on a sprint.

The second thing you need to do is fail. Fail at love. Stop writing friends. Overreach at work. Realize that you hate the way your apartment building smells when it’s been cleaned. Despair over your profession. Illegally download every episode of Seinfeld and watch them on your computer while you eat dinner each night.

Your boss’s name is Cal. Say, “Cal, sometimes I can feel the fat congealing around my synapses.” It’s the truth.

Try another job. Try another place. Win new friends. Get new skills. Compromise. Relish.

Itch.

Then, after completing this AND NO OTHER sequence of events, you’ll be ready.