The Travel Writer Blues

The Human Experience

So, I’ve had this fanciful vision. It started as just an opaque notion long before I leapt off the cliff into starting this Substack. It has slowly come into focus in the 9 months since. In it, there’s me behind the wheel of some campy vehicle acquired for the purpose. Off behind me is a landscape blurred by motion. I’m en route somewhere. That’s the image.

There’s an alternative version too. In that one, it’s just the campy vehicle lit by the neon of some roadside motel. The ‘show, don’t tell’ is that I’m presumably inside the aforementioned motel – presumably for the night – and the whole scene is, again, presumably, representative of a whole bunch of scenes.

They’re still shots from a little half-baked mental picture of a future me:

Mike, The Travel Writer.

In my head, I could totally pull off the lifestyle. I wander well. I’m less anchored than most. Were it not for my son, I’d probably be somewhere half a country away moteling it up while my beat-up van sat out in the lot looked resplendent in the neon.

I’m not sure if it is a fantasy or a reality early in its coming to be. My son is entering his sophomore year of high school. Once he graduates, there isn’t much to tether me in place – and the cost of living all but begs for a departure. When he heads off to college, I will likely bolt town. The only question is whether it will be to merely somewhere else or a long run of somewheres.

If I were a betting person, I’d put a few chips on a run of somewheres. I just can’t see me moving from Place A to Place B solely because Place A is too expensive. I can like just about any Place B for an indeterminate stretch which might be just hours or days or weeks but it likely ain’t forever. There aren’t a lot of Place B’s I’d like more on a daily basis in perpetuity though.

So, I may have some itinerant roaming ahead… and that’s an idea I’ve been coming to think about as more ‘early plan’ than ‘idle fantasy’. It has evolved to the point of now having some specific details which I will admit, I may or may not have concocted solely for the purpose of making my son roll his eyes.

Among them: I’d retrofit some van or something so that I could occasionally sleep in it if needed. The ideal would be some cool-ass pimped out van with modern accoutrements but a 1970’s airbrushed screaming eagle or some shit on the side. The more likely scenario is a Honda Odyssey with some cheap tints and a row of seats pulled out.

I served up that idea to my son for maximum teen cringe:

“I’m gonna buy, like, an old Dodge Caravan and kit it out so I can travel around the country in it and sleep in it and stuff. I’m gonna call it my ‘Manny Van’. Get it? It’ll be a mini-van… but for a man to live out of on the road. A Manny Van. And then I’ll write about traveling around in it and people will hear about my Manny Van and then they’ll see it and want to take pictures with it and then Manny Vans will become a whole thing and the media will pick up the story and want to do interviews and your friends will be like ‘Wow, your dad is the Manny Van dude? He seems cool as shit.’ And you will begrudgingly have to admit that I am, in fact, cool as shit. And so is my van.”

Some of that is, perhaps, somewhat aspirational. As they say though ‘Dreams are merely ideas awaiting a plan’. Actually, no one says that. I just made it up. It sounds like the kind of thing people could very easily say though, right? I mean, I would absolutely wear a t-shirt that said that on it. And I would absolutely buy said t-shirt from some dude on the internet who might use the proceeds to purchase a used Dodge Caravan with the intention of someday converting it into a Manny Van.

Wow, this is really coming together.

There’s only one little fly in the ointment:

I have no idea how to ‘travel write’. It isn’t that I don’t know how to write about travel or experiences had while traveling. It is that I don’t know how to both travel and write at the same time.

This entire post is a result of that little outage. I went away with my son for a few days fully intending to write both from the road and then today now that we are back. I had the same intentions when the two of us went to California earlier this summer… and when I went to New Orleans by myself in April.

The problem is that I get caught up in being present on the trips… and then I get behind… and then time passes… and the stream-of-consciousness in-the-moment passion and energy fades and it’s hard to get back… and then the story of the place on Day 1 or meal on Day 3 just seem so… boring as stories go.

I think the issue is that writing requires emotion – or my writing does – and when emotion cools, so does the energy in the writing and the energy to do the writing.

The remedy to date has been to tell myself that I would simply find time in the moment next time around and it would all work itself out. And then I don’t and it doesn’t.

That’s a problem I need to solve if I ever want to find myself somewhere just outside of nowhere living large in an old Dodge Caravan.

I have one post in me about this past week’s quick 1,000-miler with my son. It has been slow in coming because of all of the above. I think in writing this, I might have figured out a replicable approach on how to break through that roadblock. If you see a post from me tomorrow and it un-sucks, you’ll know that I have…

Who knows, maybe the missing key was just… a process.

Maybe that was all I needed to fire up the ignition of a golden Manny Van just waiting to be made manifest.

It’s possible.

After all, dreams… they’re just ideas awaiting a plan.

That would be a cool quote to put on the side of a sweet-ass van.