Disorderly Content

Not sure how I got started, but the last few years I find myself taking on missions. It might have related to all the travel I was doing for work, and the way I'd race around in whatever free time I had (and sometimes I had a lot), photographing and otherwise documenting places for my website and then my blog. At some point I got fascinated with Route 66, and took quite a few trips to explore the remaining bits of the Mother Road in Arizona and California. That led to the first mission I put into words: to visit every town named in Bobby Troup's immortal song. Accomplished that a year ago in January, flying to Oklahoma City and then driving to Joplin, Missouri one day and Amarillo, Texas the next. Which of course left me missionless. But not for long.

My new goal was to visit all fifty states. I'd already been to quite a few: thirty-eight between work and all those endless car trips from New York to Charleston and Savannah to visit family. But now it was a mission, and I had a plan. Phase one got delayed a month, when my mom died the night before I was to set off for Idaho and a bunch of states in the upper middle. But I rescheduled, and I persevered, and I knocked five more states off the list. And then this month I got to four more, leaving only Maine, Vermont and Alaska yet untrod.

So now I'm making plans for New England in the fall, in hope of getting some pretty color pictures. And either before or after, I'll do something about Alaska. Which will leave me sadly missionless once again.

All of which leads me to ask the question: do you go in for missions, or do you think I'm some nutso travel version of a packet? Or both; I suppose both could be true.