Mission

“These are the voyages of the traveler Steven. Its five-year mission: to explore the strange world, to seek out life and civilizations, to boldly go where few men have gone before.”

When I set out to see the world, my goal was to check off a bunch of boxes. I set some goals, got a full-time job, added some more goals, learned that taking 50 vacation days a year was not considered acceptable, figured out how to incorporate all of the goals I set, and had at it. My goal was never to explore new cultures, yet that is what these voyages have become. I have started to understand foreign cultures, but I have learned one fundamental truth. Human beings are, for the most part, the same.

Monday, March 27, 2017

North Carolina - Day 3 - The Return Journey

3/27/17, “The Return Journey”

Raleigh-Durham International Airport, North Carolina (RDU)


As I mentioned the other night, these weekend trips have become a linchpin of my domestic travels.  It baffles my mind to think of our Interstate system and that, excepting a few islands, the entirety of the lower 48 states is connected by roads and tunnels and bridges, that almost every NPS unit in the lower 48 could be visited over the course of a few months or so in a well-planned road trip.  That is what makes these trips both extreme and remarkable.

It is extreme, since, due to what I have just mentioned, there is a near constant string of NPS units to visit during any trip to any spot in the country, and the number of sites I can visit in a trip depends only on the length of the trip.  If this trip was 3 days, there would have been another day of NPS units to visit, and so on until I have visited every unit in the lower 48.  It is extreme because these collections of weekend trips could be combined into fewer, longer trips, with a lot less air miles logged, but vacation time doesn’t allow it.  It is remarkable because I have never run out of destinations, because, every time I get away for a weekend, I become immersed in a different region of the country, because the planning and execution of these trips demand perfection, and I always rise to the challenge.

These trips are mostly designed around checking another item off my list towards accomplishing my 30 Goals, but that only provides the destination.  Once there, it is pointless to spend a whole weekend just to visit one site, so the trips become designed to see what else I can pack in to those weekends, to combine Cape Hatteras with the Wright Brothers National Memorial, to combine Point Reyes with Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial.

These trips usually have an elegant design, and I will accept nothing but the utmost in elegance in planning my trips.  These trips have rounded out light months or even months where I’ve had nothing else planned, such as March 2016 when I went to South Carolina.  As I said earlier, they have helped me run up my NPS unit count, now at 271, and they will continue until I have been able to say, “NPS Compete.”  Okay, this will be a short entry, since I have nothing much to report.

After I closed last night, I drove back to the hotel, parked my car, and went to my room.  I packed and set my alarm so that I could get exactly 3 hours of sleep, and, next thing I knew, it was time to wake up.  I got dressed, and went to the car.  It was a short and entirely unadventurous drive to the airport.  I returned my car, and the shuttle to the terminal was right there.  That was also unadventurous.  I got my boarding pass and breezed through security thanks to my TSA PreCheck.  I then went to my gate and sat down, where I proceeded to write this entry, which I will now close, as it is almost time to board, along with closing out this trip.  Next stop: the American Caribbean (US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico).
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)