He had napped with the cats first, and said so plainly — it had helped his mood. Then he came to the desk. It was the first time he had used it, and the surface was still cluttered with things that hadn't found their places yet, so working there was awkward in the way any new station is awkward before it becomes habit. He opened RV Trip Wizard on the laptop and pointed his camera at the screen. He noted the compromise as he made it: he could have screencast this, done a better job of it, and in his everyday life he would have — the technique was not the obstacle, only the setup, which wasn't configured yet. He said he'd do his best and hoped it was good enough, and then he went to the map.
The route was there in fragments. It began at Salt Lake Creek, where he'd be the next day, a week on a beach. From there a hundred and sixty-nine miles to Hurricane Creek. He moved the cursor across the legs, reading mileage and estimated costs aloud, correcting himself as he went — ignore the cost numbers, he said, then checked one and found he had already zeroed the wrong fields and entered the real ones, so the numbers were mostly right after all, except the fuel, which was only an estimate. The three-night minimum at one site was a booking constraint, not a preference; the place required the whole weekend. He noticed the shape these rules were pressing into the route: not a clean westward line but a zigzag, up and back down, because campground availability, not geography, was setting the geometry.
Hurricane Creek put him back in Kentucky, and he named what that meant without dressing it. He would drive the Jeep to his house for the walk-through — not fun, a drive and a hassle — and the day after that, Lexington, to deal with the last of it. He said it would be the last thing he had to do, and then he was done with this part of his life, this chapter. The three-night minimum, he observed, had worked out; the constraint and the obligation happened to fit each other. Then he moved on down the route as if the paragraph had closed behind him: a hundred and twenty-nine miles north to Concrete Campground, then Missouri, then Piedmont Park.
At Piedmont Park the planning stopped. Everything from there to Nevada — the whole long stretch of it — was unbuilt, and he said so without apology. He toggled the campground layer on to show why the route bent the way it did, and the map went instantly messy with markers until he narrowed it to what he actually wanted: National Parks, forests, preserves, Army Corps of Engineers. Still a lot of them. Then he remembered the other setting he had turned off in advance of showing this, and went into map settings for the driving radius overlay, which drew the distance it believed he could safely cover in a day. Mid-demonstration he broke to check his phone — he ought to be watching it to confirm the screen was even in frame — and then found the parameter driving the whole overlay: average hours per day, and he had simply put four.
Four was a guess, and he treated it as one. He didn't know whether he could drive more. He said he'd love to — six or eight or ten would collapse the distance, and it was a long way to Great Basin — but he had no data yet, only a number he had typed into a field. He would find out from the first few trips. He'd get a sense of what it felt like to him, and once he reached Piedmont Park he would know, and that was when he'd plan the rest of the route. The sequence he described ran in exactly that order: drive first, then measure the body's answer, then build the next segment on top of it.
Great Basin itself he held as a destination and a claim to be verified — the best stargazing in the country, he'd read, and he hoped he had read it right. Beyond it, nothing. He'd been in Arizona a month and a half earlier, and it was those mountains that had sparked the whole thing; he hadn't been thinking of living in an RV then, only of getting one, and somehow it had become this. He'd lived in Arizona as a kid, in a lot of places there, been in the Boy Scouts there, and going back the mountains had astonished him. He mentioned that ChatGPT had told him those mountains were nothing compared to the Rockies, and some other range, maybe in California, and that if he loved Arizona he needed to see the rest — so north from Great Basin seemed likely. He'd be nearby anyway. He said he kind of loved that it wasn't planned, that it was a little spontaneous, the same way moving into the RV had been.
He said he couldn't put it into words, and then went at it anyway: he wanted to embrace this life, felt he was doing it, and had fears to get over. He wanted to do this and be comfortable — not be uncomfortable all the time — and then turned the phrase over, the thing they say about embracing the discomfort and living outside your comfort zone, and allowed that this was what he was doing. Definitely doing that. The channel would change once he was out there exploring. And the rule for now was two nights minimum at each stop, which might change after the first four legs; if he found he could stop for one night and keep moving, he would. He was thinking about himself and the cats, and wanting to be cautious until he had a better feel for how it all worked. Then he thanked the people following along, and said he thought that was awesome.