Dear Friends and Family,

So I’m trying to get the blog updated as promised, but due to my continued travels, I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to catch the blog up to my current state of affairs. So this post is a quick update to discuss where I am, what is left in my journey, and what’s happening with the blog.

Where I am: I’m home in Michigan! I left the west more or less definitively when I descended from the Front Range near Denver on 5 August. I got back to my parent’s house in SE Michigan on 9 August and have been traveling through the Midwest since then; I did a loop through the UP (Upper Peninsula) from 14 August to 22 August, then a loop through Ohio from 27 to 30 August.

What’s left in my journey: I am spending Labor Day weekend in the Sleeping Bear Dunes with my best friends from high school and my brother. We’re coming back on 4 September, and I will finally be returning to Virginia on 5 or 6 September. I have very much to say about how it feels for the journey to come to an end, but I am still working through these emotion (it’s fine, it’s just, like, a lot, you know?) and am going to post them in time.

What’s happening with the blog: it’s not over! The blog is currently updated through 17 July, so I am a bit over 6 weeks behind on updates ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. This blog really has reached webcomic proportions of delays, but I REFUSE to go into an indefinite hiatus (looking at you, Camp Weedonwancha, Goodbye to Halos, Stand Still Stay Silent, and Pia and the Little Tiny Things). The blog WILL continue after my adventures end, so that I can get everything on the board and you all can still see where I’ve been. I mean, Jesus, we haven’t even gotten to Grand Teton yet! The best is still to come (@Purnima your day in the sun is coming!)

I plan to have all of the updates done by the end of September at the very latest. Some of these posts will divert from the normal photo album/travelogue/conversational stuff into poetry and essays as I wax philosophical on the meaning of all this to me (because I am feeling a LOT of stuff right now, it’s just hard to say what exactly). I will definitely post on the day I return to VA, so keep your eyes peeled for that 🙂 .

And lastly, after all the updates about the trip are done, I will be doing a miniseries of posts about how I put together the trip itself (cost, itinerary, etc.) and how you can do it too! It will be a sort of a how-to manual for a cross-country road trip of any length, not just a 5-month megajourney like I’ve done. I’m putting it together for posterity, and because I sincerely hope everyone reading this does a similar trip some day.

After that, the blog will be concluded, but I will still keep it up for the foreseeable future. As long as WordPress doesn’t notice the moonlighting I’ve been doing in NFT defrauding and car insurance warranty phone scams through my web address, this website is staying up 🙂

Alright, that’s all for now! Please continue to enjoy all my traipsing across this wide and welcoming continent!

Stay well everyone,

Evan 💙

P.S. I will also be revealing the origin of the name of this website! So don’t touch that dial, okay byeeee.