2/16/2022

Hello Blog Readers,

For the past few days, I’ve been slowly returning to the rhythms of a boring, non-nomadic life: getting bills paid and finances in order, organizing documents in preparation for taxes, doing chores (especially laundry), getting a haircut, tuning up the Jeep, and setting routines towards getting back in shape. Real boring stuff. But I’m finally starting to get on top of the to-do list, and so I thought I would take a bit of time to debrief from the trip, answer some of the questions that I got asked the most during my trip, and respond to some of the fan mail:

So have you been to every state now? Nope! Believe it or not, as you can see from the map above, I still have eight states to go. There are also a bunch of big cities that I have yet to explore (e.g. Chicago, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia). I feel that Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico, and the Virginia/Washington DC area are all grand enough destinations to where they each deserve their own dedicated trip if-and-when I choose to explore them. I also left Rhode Island and Maine behind to explore in New England, just to give an incentive to plan another New England trip in life seeing as I loved my time up there. And then there’s Minnesota and North Dakota. Well…I’ll get to Minnesota and North Dakota someday. 🙂

That being said, I feel that I now have an excellent sense of America and what it has to offer. I know its history and its different geographies, cultures, subcultures, and dialects at a very deep level. I’ve probably seen more of the country than 95% of the people living in it. It was something that I never could have picked up through books, but only through exploration and experience.

How much did your travels cost? A lot; and I went over my original budget by several thousand dollars (largely due to inflation which I had not anticipated being this bad when I originally created my travel budget). Were there ways that I could have made my travels cheaper? Sure, but I also wanted to really enjoy myself during my travels. I feel satisfied with how I spent my time and money, and in fact I now view my time spent on the road as being such an important time in my life to where I’m now thinking that if I ever have kids and those kids finish their education and are ready to start their career someday, then my gift to them is not going to be to help them pay for a big fancy wedding or help them buy a house. No, it will be to hand them the keys to a vehicle, a map to the country, enough money to travel the country, and the advice to explore all of it until they find a place that they feel they can afford and that speaks to their heart. I will tell them that once they find that place, they should move there, love that place, and invest their time and efforts fully into it and in helping its people. I feel that it’s the best advice and bit of wisdom that I have to offer. So many people are only living in a place to fit a career that they chose; but how much sweeter life becomes when you instead work your talents and career to fit a place that you chose.

Do you really believe that you’re cursed? No, I no longer believe that I am cursed. Quite the opposite, actually! Following my trip, I am feeling pretty blessed and lucky in life, and I am fully ready to get back to using my talents to help and serve others. That being said, there were several years in my life where so much seemed to be going wrong around me to where I felt like I was cursed. And whether you want to attribute it to superstition or coincidence, voodoo or science, I do believe that some people can go through periods in life that look and feel a lot like something bad is upon them. Whether you want to call that bad a curse, bad luck, a spiritual desert, or a sad destiny is up to you. But for some people especially (why it hits some and not others, I do not know), there are times where no matter what you do, no matter what good you try to put into the world or what you feel in your heart, everything around you will still reject you, spit on you, die, whither, fall apart, drown, burn to the ground, and fail. It will literally be that dramatic and that extreme.

I have consulted a lot of people and philosophies from a lot of different backgrounds on this subject, trying to better understand it. I have consulted with the God-fearing and the atheists; the spiritual and the pragmatic; the west and the east; the rural cowboys and the urban executives; the superstitious and the scientific; and all philosophies and walks-of-life in between. I have had some excellent conversations over the years about the nature of good and evil; destiny and choice; curse and blessing; and the meaning of life. And I have reached these conclusions:

First, there is a difference between a trial in life and with what I call a ‘curse.’ We are regularly faced with hardships (i.e. trials), and it is up to us to persevere through them. During these times, it is up to us through faith and perseverance to hold strong through the storm, like a rock. And at some point, just as with a storm, the trial will pass and life will go on.

But if the nature of the hardship is not temporary; if you are feeling perpetually down-trodden in life even though you know that you are doing the right thing and living a morally upright life, then the universe (I call Him God) is likely trying to tell you something. God is telling you to move on and that He has something else prepared for you in life. During those times, it is up to you to listen to that whisper in your heart even though it may be incredibly hard to do so. In fact, it may feel impossible at first. It might feel economically infeasible, or like it’s career suicide, or like you don’t even know what you’re doing or where you’re going, or whatever. But it is during those times that it is time for you to detach from whatever it is you are trying to hold onto, to reconcile and seek forgiveness with everyone and everything in your past, and to then let yourself free into the world. Follow those steps, and in time you will find yourself in a land of milk-and-honey. You will see that something more was promised for your life. Trust me, I’m experiencing that feeling right now! Which brings me to:

So what was the point of your travels? A long time ago, when I first started this blog, I said that traveling should not be done frivolously, but should have a purpose. You should always be trying to discover, resolve, or unlock something about yourself in your travels. For me, I have been on the road trying to re-discover happiness in my life – i.e. trying to resolve the pain of the past few years while unlocking a new stage and chapter for my life moving forward. On the trail to finding happiness, I made a sort of philosophy for myself, deciding that you need at least two of the following three things to truly feel happy in life:

A place that speaks to your heart; a career that fulfills you; and a person that you love and who loves you back.

If you have all three of the above in your life, then consider yourself truly blessed. If you only have one, then you can get by through faith but should seek to change something in your life. If, as I was feeling towards the end of my time in Red Bluff, you have none, then it is definitely time for a change.

Above all else, my travels had me stumbling upon places that I never knew existed but that nevertheless spoke to my heart. Oddly, it was the first and last stops of my trip that spoke the most to me: my time up in Michigan at the start of my trip, and my time down in Texas at the end of my trip. Marquette, Michigan is the place that spoke to me the most though (I am literally feeling drawn to the place in a way that I can’t really explain – it feels like I’m destined to go there, almost like coming home for the first time to a place that you always knew existed in your heart but had never actually seen). Following a lot of prayer and discernment over the subject, I can now definitively say that that is where I am going. It feels like the sort of place where I have always dreamed of living in life, and I am so excited to blog and share it with you once I make it up there!

The really crazy thing is how quickly things have been falling into place career-wise once I committed to Marquette. In the fall there, I will be starting work on a Master’s degree in Mathematics and will otherwise be teaching at Northern Michigan University. And (exciting news), I may even have found legal work to keep the bills paid! A law firm up there does work that is very similar to the sort of legal work that I was doing in the North State. Two of the attorneys at the firm have roots to Nebraska and even to Creighton where I went to law school, and the partners at the firm are ex-military and very interested in my teaching days where I prepared so many students for service in the military and for prestigious posts at places like West Point and the USAF Academy. Yesterday, a partner at the firm got a hold of me and said that he would like to meet with me next time I am up in Marquette. From there, I got a hold of the Michigan State Bar and learned that I may be able to obtain admission to the Michigan Bar without needing to take a bar exam. I’m keeping my fingers crossed! It may not be long before I am back to a happy life of lawyering and educating in a small town that I love. In fact, the small town lawyering especially will resonate this time around because I will be carrying on in the footsteps of the country lawyer that Jimmy Stewart played in the 1959 movie, Anatomy of a Murder: a famous, old film about a small town trial lawyer defending a man accused of murder. The movie was actually set in the Michigan Upper Peninsula, and it was filmed right there in Marquette!

I love reading your blog! Thank you so much. You must like it if you’ve read this far! And you’re not alone. As you can see, my blog viewership has been booming since I started this trip last October. I used to be lucky to get a few hundred, maybe 1000 views a year on this blog, but lately I’ve been averaging 1000 views per month.

Honestly, even though it is a bit of work, I enjoy updating and putting this blog together as much as you enjoy reading it. In the least, even though it’s a travel blog and only focuses on my travels, this blog has still given me a great journal and window into my life. I can see how my abilities as a travel writer have improved since my blog’s ‘early days’ of traveling Canada back in 2015; I can see how I have grown and changed as a person, through both the good times and the bad times; and sometimes I can just go back and reminisce on old trips, old friends, and old adventures. Yup, starting this travel blog was one of the best decisions I’ve made in life (and once again, was a decision that piggybacked on something my friend Anton had already done; you can see his blog here https://antoninchina.wordpress.com – he’s a wise soul that Anton). It is my genuine hope that reading this blog has also inspired you to embark on your own adventures in life, and maybe to start your own travel blog.

That’s a wrap. Here’s hoping that my next post will be in a few months from my newfound home of Marquette!

Cheers,

-Rob