Astonished Head: Remember that "Crazy Stunt" I Mentioned?

In passing, about a month ago? No?

Oh.

Anway, here are the procedural elements of said Crazy Stunt:

Sell house.
Put worldly possessions in storage.
Stash Bob the Cat in friend's apartment.
Pedal tricycle across America.

No, really. I'm serious. I put a down payment on the trike on Saturday

Here...maybe a diagram will help get the drift of my gist across to you, the reader:

OK? No?

All right then. You and your damnable word-style explanations.

My girlfriend and I are selling Peapod, and, alas, parting ways. This means that I will be without mortgage or rent, and will have a small wad of cash.

I am going to take part of that small wad of cash and use it to purchase a Greenspeed GTO and a Windwrap fairing to go with it. The GTO is a recumbent touring trike designed for long-distance trips, and it will tow my Burley Nomad trailer containing (hopefully) all of the gear I will need.

I will be cycling the TransAmerica trail, a 4,247-mile route mapped out by the good folks at Adventure Cycling. I'll be leaving from Yorktown, Virginia, and with luck and unexploded knees I'll dip my front wheels in the Pacific when I reach Astoria, Oregon. Then, I will head south from Oregon to Santa Barbara, California, traveling along part of the Pacific Coast Route. The total journey will be a bit over five thousand miles, and I'm going to give myself about five months to do it.

The plan is to find shelter where I can, "diving in" to set up camp in unfenced, unposted areas, using the occasional bona-fide campground for when I can't manage that and, when I need a shower and a night indoors, staying at hostels or motels. You can read more about this sort of thing at the late Ken Kifer's site.

What will happen to this site? I'm glad you asked.

I will be carrying two folding 32-watt solar panels, designed and built by Connecticut Solar. When in use, these panels will deploy across the top of the Burley trailer, and will provide power and charging capacity for the following devices:

Dell Inspiron 700m laptop
iRiver iFP-799 MP3 player/recorder
Apple 60GB iPod
Samsung SPH-i700 cellphone/PDA
A yet-to-be-purchased digital camera
A similarly unpurchased GPS unit

While I am crossing the country, I will be updating this site on a regular basis. My laptop is equipped with a Kyocera KPC650 cellular EVDO modem that will provide at least a 14.4 kbps connection across large swatches of the United States, and when I can't get a cell signal, the laptop has an ordinary 56K modem.

I will be creating and uploading podcasts using the iRiver recorder and Giant Squid Audio Lab's omnidirectional stereo microphone. I'll edit and produce the podcasts on the laptop using Audacity.

Visitors will be able to find out where I am by clicking a link on the site and opening a Google Map populated with my latest GPS data.

So...that's the what and the how, with a generous dollop of the old techy-geeky.

And here's the why, or as much of it as I can figure out at the moment.

To begin with: I've been thinking about doing something like this for five years. I'm at a point in my life where I'm more than a little fed up with my own neuroses, my own continual sense of "not fitting in," square peg, round hole, so on and so forth blah blah that's our fifty minutes. Despite Buckaroo Banzai's sage observation, it is my opinion that becoming a technological pedal-powered vagrant will yield the kind of self-knowledge that will allow me to relate to the world with a bit more grace and a lot less nonsense.

Second: for the past several years, I've been listening to various pundits, loudmouths, and idiots both domestic and foreign expound at great lengths and with enormous conviction about what America is, who Americans are, and what we all think about everything. I'm tired of listening to these people. So, I'm going to find out for myself. I'll be crossing eleven of these United States, and I'll be listening, watching, and learning as I go. Hopefully, you will, too.

When I'm done with all of this, there will be a book.

And I will look fabulous.

The plan is to leave sometime around May of 2006. Until then, I've got a house to sell, physical training to do, and a life to "unplug" from all of the things that come with having a fixed address. I'll be posting about these activities occasionally, because getting ready for the journey is as much a part of the process as pedaling.

There you have it: Astonished Head Does America.