Why did I decide to tear the seats out of my car and start driving without a destination? To find answers to questions that nobody else could answer!

In the weeks before embarking on my Journey of Fear, it became apparent to me that everybody has a different definition for the term necessities of life. What will you eat? Where will you sleep? How will you earn money? Who will you talk to when you’re lonely? What if a bear attacks? These questions, including the last, are but a few of the multitude that I was asked by those nearest to me once I let others know what I was planning. To be honest, I didn’t have an answer for most of the questions I was asked – and that was the whole point. I left with the…

No goals, and no destinations. This trip was about braving the uncertain, and accepting whatever the open road decided to throw my way.

I can pinpoint the specific moment in which I decided to embark on this trip. I was walking Chookie (the family dog) through the graveyard that lies next door to my parents’ home in Pittsburgh. As I looked at the gravestones that night, I can remember experiencing a very powerful, yet simple, thought: “I will be here soon.” Though to some this may sound like a very dark way to think, I would sincerely have to disagree – mostly because of my next thought. “I will be here soon. So nothing that happens while I’m on this earth actually matters in the least bit.” Again, this might sound utterly depressing,…

Televisions, microwaves, and internet. I think that we can all agree that getting away from luxuries such as these every now and then would do us nothing but good. There was one luxury, however, that I was not prepared to leave behind when I began really thinking about this trip – running water. It was around this desire that I began to design my living space. How does one get a running water system into a Toyota RAV4? I spent hours sitting alone inside my parked car, trying to figure it out. I took every seat out, save for the driver’s seat, and then sat in it some more –…

Photomatt28 / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND Mindsets can change quickly. After a month or so of earning money and working on the RV4, I began to come up with little excuses as to why I couldn’t leave Pittsburgh just yet. I didn’t have enough gas money to make it to Denver and back, I hadn’t finished installing my electrical system, my shower drain wasn’t working quite as well as I wanted it to – the list only continued to grow the longer I looked for reasons to wait. I had fallen far from the point in which I was at as I Walked Through the Graveyard in the month prior.…