I travel a fair amount. Not as much as some of the extreme road warriors out there, but this year I'll probably book enough miles to circumnavigate the globe. Twice. Suffice to say, United knows my name.
Spending time on airplanes means spending time thinking. Spending time thinking leads to odd places.
During a ground hold on one of my trips this winter, I thought for a while about using my voyages as a topic for blogging. And I do mean specifically the voyage. Traveling via jet is something we frequently take for granted, yet it is an incredibly complex feat of engineering, software development, system integration, business process, and human operation. It also, quite literally, consumes days of our lives.
Most people talk about being places, but not getting there. And who really needs another blog about TSA anyway? That seems a little dull even for my modest readership (Hello Evan!) I mean really, can you imagine, "You should see what these clowns did this time. Har har." Sigh.
Another idea occurred to me. You see, gallivanting around the country and the planet has a strange effect on me and I develop a profound feeling of detachment. I can't communicate with anyone, I don't enjoy talking to people with me on the plane, I wake up one place and go to sleep with the help of a pill in another, I eat six meals in a day, I visit places like Denver, Chicago, Vienna, Frankfurt, London, and Bucharest but don't step out of the airport, I stare out the window, and I wait. And I wait.
I wanted to blog about that feeling. Nothing I'd read or seen really captures it (the montage in Fight Club does the best). But I don't kid myself, I'm not much of a writer (you have no idea how many drafts these blog posts take - ever wonder why they're so infrequent? No? Well...ok). I tried playing around with Twitter, and those that follow my Twitter stream have probably read some of my posts from the road. I did this both on my trip to Purdue and to flying home from Iasi. While staring out the window at the St. Louis Arch it occurred to me: I should document what I see on my trips.
The idea is simple: Every 15 minutes on my trip, door to door, I take a picture of whatever is front of mind for me. No commentary, no thoughts, no special effort to compose the shot. Maybe a description in case it is unclear and probably the song I'm listening to since that is an important part of the experience for me. Staring out the window, eating food, reading or waiting in line, barring concerns for safety and security every 15 minutes I'll take a picture.
The most gruelling voyage is coming home to Seattle from Iasi. Door to door is 25 hours and to help adjust time zones I stay awake the whole time. 1 picture / 15 minutes * 60 minutes / 1 hour * 25 hours = 100 pictures.
With the recent purchase of an iPhone, I now have the perfect tool for this project. I can snap photos and, while not in the air, e-mail them into Flickr to post them immediately. This is the test shot from my last trip:
Tomorrow I'm traveling to San Francisco for my brother's wedding and I'll be doing a full trial run in preparation for my next trip to Romania. If everything goes smoothly, I'll be posting all my pictures here.
Travel begins at 11:45 am PDT and should conclude somewhere around 6 pm. Please follow along and let me know what you think.
Thanks.
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