Boy howdy, reader. It’s been what, like, weeks? Yeah. Weeks. It’s been so long I could scarcely remember how to log into the back end of this site. Silly, that is.
I should say that I’ve actually rather enjoyed this little break. I mean, it’s been fun blogging at you for these past ten months and all. And I was thoroughly heartened when I learned yesterday via Sitemeter that you are one of several dozen readers who still check in daily despite my long absence. Thank you, thank you, reader, for your continued interest in what has been, let’s be honest, a dead site for nearly a month. But as I said, the break has been enjoyable. Productive, too. By freeing up the couple of hours of time I used to spend on writing semi-interesting blog posts, I’ve managed to complete huge swaths of new material for What We’ve Got, the book — and that’s what this whole ordeal’s been mostly about from the beginning, after all.
While I’m on the subject of what this whole ordeal’s been mostly about, let’s talk for a minute about the other thing that kept me walking: The Fundraiser. If you follow that link, you’ll see that I’m still hovering at $1,330 (which is a remarkably coincidental number, as I’ll discuss in a moment). You might look at that number and think, man, dude fell way short of his goal. Not so, reader. Not so. In fact, I’m happy to announce that between online donations, old-fashioned check donations, and the pledge donations yet to come, I have reached my $3,000 goal! Thank you (so much) to all who donated. It warms my heart to know that even in this horrendous economy, people are still so willing to give.
Now, onto the subject of pledging. If you were a pledger, you’re likely familiar with the list below:
$__.__ Per mile walked
$__.__ Per road with an accompanying sidewalk
$__.__ Per road without an accompanying sidewalk
$__.__ Per night slept in a tent
$__.__ Per night spent in a parking lot
$__.__ Per night spent on someone’s yard or farmland
$__.__ Per unnecessary stops to urinate (on the part of Adama)
$__.__ Per inedible roadside item Adama attempts to eat
$__.__ Per item of hiking gear Adama destroys with his teeth
$__.__ Per strange conversation with a local
$__.__ Per off-putting comment made by a local
$__.__ Per [insert your own pledge idea here]
If you’re not familiar with the list above, let me just say that I had a fair number of people who preferred to donate based on a per-something basis, rather than offer up a straight check or credit card donation. These people were adventurous enough to trust their checkbooks to the fates. Well, if you’re a pledger, consider your fate rendered on this day, the First of September, Twenty-Ten.
First things first. I’ve finally finished my last wrestling match with Google Maps and come up with a concrete number (or at least a number as concrete as it’s going to get) of total miles walked. Reader, dear reader, I officially walked 1,332 miles. So you’ll see now the significance of that $1,330 of donations gathered at my donation site. Funny how things work out.
Now, onto the pledge list:
Nobody pledged on the sidewalk bit, so I didn’t keep those records. On a strictly percentage basis, I would estimate that only 30% of the roads I encountered had sidewalks (almost all of them in Florida).
I slept in a tent 50 out of 92 nights, so not exactly the two out of every three I was hoping for.
Parking lots accounted for a small number of tent-nights. Only six nights were spent in parking lots (counting the behind-the-storage-unit experience on my first night in Florida)
Yards and farmland also accounted for a smaller-than-expected number. I put that count at five. Most tent-nights were spent on undeveloped real estate or government forest land.
Adama stopped to urinate unnecessarily only eight times per day, on average. Times the 63 days he spent with me, that’s 504 unnecessary stops. Fortunately for my pledgers, nobody pledged a whole dollar per unnecessary urination.
Adama officially attempted to eat zero roadside items. My mind is still boggled by that one.
If you count my Cubs hat (and you should), Adama destroyed exactly one piece of hiking gear on the trip.
I had nineteen strange conversations with locals, ten of them in Florida alone.
Three off-putting comments from locals, all of them in Florida.
Jeanette and Amanda were the only pledgers brave enough to post their own pledge ideas. In addition to pledging per mile, Amanda pledged per blister developed on my feet. Well, Amanda, I developed 23 blisters over the course of the trip (including a one-time high of nine blisters at once).
Jeanette pledged one dollar per picture I could take of a sign that made her laugh and another dollar for each time I used the pocket knife she got me for Christmas. The knife I used only five times, and none of those times were rugged experiences. Mostly, I used that knife to remove threads from my clothing or tent. As for the signs, road signs, business signs, hand-written signs, everything was fair game. Unfortunately, despite taking more than two-hundred sign-pictures, only 104 of them made our lovely Jeanette laugh. I guess we have differing senses of humor. I’ll post those signs on this site soon so you can see which side of the humor spectrum you fall on.
So I guess this is the part where I wrap up the post. It’s strange to put real numbers on that 92-day trip I called the Walk. Now more than six weeks out, the whole thing hardly seems real. I accrued a load of memories that I won’t soon forget, and yet the memories are all so similar as to render them less holistic. Put another way, while I was doing the actual walking, those three months between April and July felt like the longest of my life. But now that I look back on my year, it feels like the first two-thirds of 2010 passed in the blink of an eye. It’s a strange feeling.
Anyway, this is the part where I leave you with something internet-related to help you waste some time at work. Well, reader, let me just say that my mind has never been blown by the internet to the degree that it was blown by this. If that’s the future of internet browsing, sign me up.
Oh, and one last site note: I’m going on ‘cation starting tomorrow, so it’s unlikely that I’ll be posting a thousand words on Friday. I know it’s been a while since I posted any words at all, but I promise to get back into that habit as soon as I return next week. Enjoy the long weekend, reader. Picture me on the white sands of Key West, my skin pasty pale as the day is long.
