40 days before my trip to Savannah!

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I want to write a book on the American dream.  Has it been downscaled?  Or has it died completely?  Or been substantially revised?

I’m also open to absolutely any other theme arising.

I’ve been longing for a camper to drive around America for 20 years.   When I pass them on I-95 to Mystic, Connecticut, to see my parents, I study them and dream about the layout inside.  But I’ve always worried about pumping out the tanks and hooking up electricity and being safe overnight as a woman alone and being too lonely for hours on the road alone every day.  Steinbeck camped beside rivers, and people drove up and talked to him wherever he stopped.  Personally, I would not like to be approached by male strangers.  It wouldn’t make my day.  So I wondered how I was going to do my road trip.

I got laid off in September 2010.  I was enrolled in night school at the time, and I decided to finish my degree by December.  After my last final exam, a few students hung out with the professor, enjoying a conversation.   I said I finally had the time, I had some money, I was thinking of a trip around America, did anyone have any ideas for me? 

“Take the bus,” my professor said.  Being with people on a bus would solve the loneliness problem, hopefully; being contrary, I checked into taking Amtrak.  A train ticket is more expensive than the bus, but you don’t need motel rooms.  The problem is I would miss huge expanses of the landscape while the train rocketed through the night.  So I checked out the bus, recognizing there was probably a difference between bus and train travelers.

Forty days before departure, I bought the tickets, from New York City’s Port Authority Bus Terminal on 8^th Avenue and 42^nd Street, to Washington DC in one day, and from there to Savannah, GA, the deepest South I’ve ever been.  I’ll see Savannah and Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home for two days, and then head home in two legs, stopping in DC overnight again.

I’d like to do the whole country by bus.  Greyhound has a $535 hop-on hop-off 30-day pass, go anywhere in the country.  I’d rent a car and see Yosemite and Grand Canyon.  I want to drive the length of Route 2 in Montana.

To write a great story about my travels, I have to have history, humor, philosophy, theology, personal sketches and anecdotes.  That’s all.