Day's anatomy

It's not clear how much you can "plan" a trip like this one. You can prepare for it, at least to a certain extent; you can buy provisions, chart a course; but if I tried to make a day-to-day itinerary I'd be off it by day three. So much is unknown -- not just because I've never done this before, but because, if nothing is certain but death and taxes, nothing is uncertain like travel and people. Want to know where I'll be on a given day? I'll let you know when I flip over the calendar page. Okay, maybe I can do a little better than that... but not by much.

What I can do is think about what I'll do within a day. That begins with figuring out what proportion of my time I want to spend on the highway as opposed to in a city. I have a few philosophical options here. I could stay as long as I feel like in a town, collecting stories until I feel the urge to move on. But this is a little too sedentary an option for me; Lover's Lanes is about motion and emotion, and staying in each town indefinitely doesn't put quite enough emphasis on the first. In fact, when I first conceived of Lover's Lanes I thought I'd keep moving whenever possible, never staying in the same town twice except perhaps in allied ports where I have a friend to stay with, stopping only for necessities like food and rest and love stories. This is still tempting in some ways -- constant motion! -- but logistically it may be unwise, unfun, or impossible. Navigating within towns will probably take more attention than navigating between them. It takes some time to figure out where the love stories are, after all, not to mention the challenges of stocking up on supplies and doing laundry in a town you've never been to before with enough time left over to get to the next port of call. I'd be more comfortable with a local base of operations outside my car, and that will usually mean a hotel room I leave in the morning and come back to in the evening.

Which means that I'll be better off adopting Kino's rule: don't stay in one place longer than three days. That seems more resonant anyway given the influence of Kino's Journey on how I'm thinking about the trip. I can cheat on the rule when I have a (broadly defined) good reason -- I don't have Kino's phobia of attachments -- but the three-day rule seems to give me enough time, if not to get to know a city, then at least to take what I need from it and be ready to move on, and keep me from getting too seasick. At the same time it will keep me moving at a good clip and ensure that the scenery of the trip changes often enough to keep things interesting without being my own personal Bataan Death March. The rule also gives me a very approximate way of making a calendar -- or at least it will, just as soon as I get a route planned out and ascend to infallibility.