Pre-departure Checklist

Whelp, after dropping about $250 into my car for a road trip inspection offered by the local gas station, I now have fresh oil, a new A/C belt, a new motor belt, and I’m almost ready to hit the road. The last pieces of my room are beginning to get packed up (nothing like taking apart and putting away your workspace to reenforce you’re actually moving somewhere new) and I’m finally, yet again, consolidating my life into a few brown boxes and getting ready to take it all across the country. There are a few final last minute preparations I’m making before I take off

Sync new music to my iPod (mostly hip-hop and drum n bass, need something to keep me motivated on the road)

• Upload audiobooks to my new phone (might as well get some reading done while I’m driving!), including:
  • Anathem - Neil Stephenson
  • 70 Minutes in Hell - Charles Bukowski
  • Freakonomics - Steven D Levitt
  • Gang Leader for a Day - Sudhir Venkatesh (Freakonomics had a great series about Sudhir talking to these same gangsters about The Wire. Excellent read and excellent show)
  • I Am America and So Can You - Stephen Colbert
  • Too Fat To Fish - Artie Lange
• Buy some road food (2 lbs of peanuts, 5 bags of beef jerky, and a pallet of bottled water)
• Pack the car up (though not quite to the gills. I’m only traveling with the basics since I’ll be taking most of this into my room at night)
• Breakdown and map my route (I’ll be putting my Blackberry’s GPS to the test on this trip, but it’ll also be smart to take printed directions with)
• Wire my car stereo for external audio (this shouldn’t be as hard as it sounds, I only need to hook up one cable in the back of the unit and then I should be good to go)
• Prep digital camera with new batteries and clear the memory card
• Mentally prepare to experience the greatest degree of freedom I’ve ever encountered (here’s to the open road!)

As I’ve mentioned before, I also want to keep this blog updated with my status, pictures, and thoughts from the road. For the minor stream-of-consciousness musings I think I’m going to use Twitter, which I can easily update using my Blackberry. I’m going to test out a piece of voice transcribing software and see if I can’t dictate my tweets and have them automatically post online, maybe even display those tweets here on my blog (if I can get my Wordpress Twitter plugin to work, that is). Depending on wireless coverage I might also be uploading photos and small updates here nightly. It all sounds so simple on paper, but I guess we will see how it turns out. Either way, I will most likely write a long entry here about the trip and what I learned along the way.

Adios, East Coast.