Making (a) good time

"How long will you be on the road?"

When I mention Lover's Lanes to people I get this question a lot. And I mean it's a fair question. A month-long trip is subjectively different from a three-months-long trip, or something even longer. It's just that I have no idea how to answer it.

I mean, I estimate I'll need to cover twelve thousand miles if I want to hit all the cities on my dream route. I expect to stay on interstates most of the time, and be speeding for some of that time, so if I'm lucky I'll average 70 mph. In an average day of driving I'll probably drive two hours, take a break, collect a story, then drive another two hours. At that rate it'd take about 43 days of driving to complete my route. If I spend about as many days off the road as on, spending the time collecting stories instead of driving, that's 86 days total, about three months. So that's what I've been telling people. About three months.

But that's conditioned on about a thousand assumptions. What if it turns out that four hours of driving is too much for one person (other than a professional trucker) to do in one day, every other day, for three months? Or what if because of the way towns fall, four hours of driving is an unrealistic average? The run from San Antonio to El Paso, for example, is a very dry zone in every sense of the word; it might be wise to try to drive six hours a day there. While in southern New England you can plop down in a random spot, collect stories, drive half an hour, and be in a completely different town with completely different stories. Or maybe I'll get to Seattle and discover that gosh darn it I like it in Seattle and I want to stay here for a week. So Lover's Lanes is something that can only be "scheduled" in a similar sense to how American business is "regulated;" there will be oversight, but there will be oversights, and the latter will tend to overwhelm the former. In the end, if this is worth doing, it's worth doing with a spontaneous spirit. I just hope I don't lose my chance to stay with friends because I can't give them exact dates of arrival and departure!