The train (by Anna Pickard)

Union Station, LA (by Anna Pickard)

When not writing postcards, or writing about writing postcards, or writing the wittery bits to go between the postcards, I have been concerning myself with Things To Do.

Seeing as we’ll need to preserve phone batteries for important matters like phoning accommodation between the trains and letting them know by just how many HOURS we’ll be delayed in arrival that particular day, we can’t rely on the games on phones.  

Seeing as we’ll need to preserve laptop batteries for all those writing things, mentioned above, and will (hopefully) have little or no internet between cities we’re stopping in, the usual laptop-based games and distractions are also out.

I may have mentioned the fact that My Partner in Train has bought a kindle for the occasion - he’s doing research for a book himself, which needs a lot of reading of books that would otherwise be a pain to carry, so will mainly be using that, but I’ve got a few books on there for when he’s not using it. Mainly, yes, travelogues and writings from people who wrote long, involved letter-based travel books while exploring on the early American railroads of the west. Which is useful. I’ve also got some books of comic essays. 

Also going into the mix: a bunch of crosswords, printed out from the enormous (free) back catalogue at the Guardian  - a resource I’ve always known about but which I used to have to proof and put online every day. The several years distance from that means I can go back without shivering about how easy it used to be to get things wrong.

I’ve found a printable small version of the <a href=”http://www.daysofwonder.com/tickettoride/en/”>Ticket To Ride</a> board game, which is good, because I wouldn’t go without it as it was the part-cause of this whole adventure in the first place, and otherwise I was going to insist on packing the full sized game, box and all. We’ve also got a pack of cards, <A href=”http://www.amazon.com/Bananagrams-BAN001/dp/1932188126”>Bananagrams</a>, and a travel chess set.

Add to that two digital cameras, three non digital cameras, a flip, and an awful lot of maps, and we are not - mark you, NOT, going to get bored.

Or at least not for the first two days.

A couple of the small stamps I’ll be using to customise the postcards I’m sending were bought from the lovely Blossom Stamps on Etsy. She does very nice stamps. 

Handmade Photopolymer Rubber Stamps by BlossomStamps on Etsy

For the journey, my travelling companion - and, well, general companion really - made the clever decision to buy a magical tiny book that will take the place of the several dozen books we were otherwise thinking of taking for reading and research etc. And one of the funnest jobs on my list for the next week is trying to decide on what I might like to read for fun, and what might help with the project.

I think it’s the first time that we’ve been able to  - as two people without a commute, or much reason to read a not-book when a normal boring ordinary book-book would suffice - justify having a book-gizbot. I’m trying not to get addicted to it.

Some people who emailed requesting postcard updates expressed an interest in helping out with the costs of postage etc, and while this is absolutely not a requirement, or ever part of the initial plan, it was something people mentioned, so it is now there. Yay for the niceness of people  for asking, whatever happens to it.

Plain postcard stock, ready for customising (by Anna Pickard)

I got my stock of postcards printed from these people - they’re a local (to me) company with a good reputation and who offered a good quality matte finish postcard made from part-recycled stock. They were fast, they were cheap, they were easy to use. Hurray for PS printers.

Why print them up rather than buy postcards as I go? Partly because I’m not sure I’m going to be able to buy as many as I need of the specific places I need - sure, I could buy a stack in New Orleans, but they’ll all be of New Orleans, which isn’t much use when you’re on a train in Buttfucknowhere, MN and get an inspiration to send a mini-travel-story to someone. 

Also, I’m really hoping I can collect the images of them together and print them up somewhere as a whole, and didn’t want to worry about copyright issues with any photos on the front of store-bought postcards.

So what I’ve ended up with is a very plain map outline, with the route mapped out and the name of the project, so I can easily mark exact where I am along the route (with gps data, possibly) and lots of white space to draw pictures or stick bits of ticket or other light memorabilia to the front of the card.  Shoudl work out ok, I think.  Lovely quality on the printing, anyway. And LOTS.

Yay!

A longer explanation of the shorter explanation below. This is getting a bit meta.

Basic Premise: 

So much of the early evolution of travel writing was in the form of collected letters home to family or loved ones. We now communicate in shorter, punchier ways, and the idea of the travelogue or documenting a journey is affected by that. I like the idea of taking the idea of describing what you’re seeing directly to one other person, and combining it with the idea of social media - of firing missives and messages and status updates out  around the globe to random strangers and whoever elects to receive them.

The plan

So the trip is 15 days in duration - 14 days on the actual road - and I announced on my blog (and here) that if people want a postcard, they should let me know, and send their postal address to me by email (update: email address rescinded due to more than enough - thank you! - snailr sign ups. Snign ups? No, that’s awful) - I won’t do anything with it apart from one postcard, I’ll then shred all the addresses. Obviously I can only afford so many stamps, so I’ll cap it at about 10/15 a day. I’ve printed enough customisable postcards for just over that.

I’ll use the postcards to capture a single vignette, overheard snatch of conversation, observation or thing that I’ve noted along the way. And then I’ll post them off to people as I go along. I’ll keep a photograph of the card, and a typed transcript of whatever I wrote on it.

The idea is that, when pieced together, the messages would form an overall picture of the journey, and have some kind of travel narrative - in actuality, they’d just be spread across the globe. Short pieces of a longer journey - updates and glimpses like you would get from twitter, but personal, and tangible, an individually just a snatched moment out of context.

I’m certainly not claiming to be more interesting than anyone else: we all dip into and out of each others lives this way all the time. I’m just offering to send you a postcard.

That’s it, really.  I’ll be explaining other bits of the whys and wherefores on this tumblr as we approach the trip.

• San Francisco - Los Angeles; 
• Los Angeles - New Orleans; 
• New Orleans - Memphis; 
• Memphis - Chicago; 
• Chicago - East Glacier Lake; 
• East Glacier Lake - Seattle; 
• Seattle - Portland; 
• Portland - San Francisco

So why this route? Well, the middle-sized Amtrak pass has eight allowable segments and fifteen days to use them in. There’s generally only one train a day on most of the very long distance routes, so there were always going to be some places that we had to stay the night just to get up the next morning and get on the next train. We decided to break it for two nights in New Orleans, and then, due to a full train, ended up having to stay there for three. We wanted to have at least one stretch long enough to make it worth shelling out for a roomette (the LA-NOLA leg), but also wanted to get off the train somewhere beautiful and national-park-esque as well as just cities (Glacier Park, then).

It does mean missing out on a couple of routes I would like to do across the west - especially the one that goes through the sierra nevada mountains, up through Denver and all the way to Chicago - but I couldn’t make it work with the other routes and the other places I wanted to go without doubling back.

And I HATE doubling back. Which is why, really, a long circular route was the only way forward. Because a coast-to-coast route makes it, somehow, about the destination. This way, it’s all about the journey.

The brilliant plan takes form. You’ll notice it is also called “My Brilliant Plan”.  No holds barred here.

The route as laid out on a Ticket to Ride board. It took up exactly the amount of carriages one starts a usual game with. As a person with a current mania for the game, you can’t imagine how happy this made me. Really. Don’t try and imagine it. It’s not pretty.

Nothing more fun than wrangling train timetables