All told, from Fayetteville to Fayetteville I drove 5,107.06 miles.

I’ll be honest, typing that number out isn’t as gratifying as I thought it would be. Maybe I was expecting to feel a sense of accomplishment? Some sort of recognition for crossing a finishing line?

Traveling, then writing about my trip has given my outlook an odd consistency. I’m a little ashamed to admit how self-involved I feel knowing that family, friends, strangers even, could be peering into my day-to-day. From that vantage point, every moment along the trip becomes viewed as a potential story, as if an adoring public expects to be entertained with tales from the road. It’s a slippery slope before little memories are given a melodramatic flair, I’m afraid.

So I guess I just wanted you to know I’m aware of that, of myself for being, shall we say, indulgent.

But there’s one more nugget of a moment I need to share. It’s the type of memory you don’t appreciate until you’re back home and left to reflect.

Remember my newly-found friend Alex who I met in Phoenix? He spoke English well, but there were a few phrases he’d muddle.  ”I want to invite you to a beer,” he said, right before paying for the $9 Bud Lite at the Phoenix Suns game.

On the way back to the hostel for the night (it feels so long ago now) he asked,”So where is your next destiny?”

I knew what he meant and answered I’d be off to Tucson and then to Austin.

But now I’m home, and the question seems more prophetic, especially because I don’t know the answer. For more than a month, I carefully planned the places I wanted to visit, one town after the other. I consulted travel guides and, never having gained the habit of saving my entries on Google Maps, I must have calculated my trips about a thousand times.  Now, without the constancy of being on the move, I feel both boxed in and aimless.

My next destiny? In a few months, I’ll be packing up my little apartment in Fayetteville and will stay in Little Rock for the summer. I’ll truck off to grad school this August and start over in Washington, DC. I’ll study hard, but in true melodramatic fashion, I’ll long for the carefree days I spent out West.

None of those responses answer the question, though.

Of course, the only sensible thing to do, I think, is to set the odometer back to zero and go from there.

I got to Little Rock around 2 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon.

To stick to the theme of the trip, I drove straight to the capitol building, and it was the first time in three weeks I haven’t had to put my faith in a borrowed TomTom to get me around town.

That was a good feeling.

It was quiet at my parent’s house when I got there.  Just like normal, I picked up the mail and set it on the counter.  I went in the living room and started watching television.  It was like I had never been gone.

Later that day, I was driving down Highway 107 and I saw that one guy dancing outside of Little Caesar’s holding the Hot n’ Ready sign and listening to his headphones.  Some things, home among them, just stubbornly stay the same. Seriously though, how has that guy not gotten a promotion yet?

It’s so easy to slink back into the normalcy of home. I already feel like I took my road trip out West about a decade ago.

Austin is a hip town. So hip, in fact, that it’s hardly noticeable it’s in Texas.

From my hotel, I walked to the state capitol building, and, as I’m sure you can guess, it was huge. On the inside of the building, a star is painted in the center of the dome with T-E-X-A-S in the five corners. Nice touch.

Across the capitol grounds, the old General Land Office had been turned into the visitor’s center. Here’s a little bit of history I wasn’t counting on: O. Henry, the writer, used to work in that office. He managed to hold down a job there, just before being accused of embezzlement by the First National Bank of Austin, then fleeing to Guatemala, then going to jail, and then becoming a famous writer. Not bad.

From there, I walked over to the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential library, because, well, why not? Presidential libraries are really great at galvanizing their subjects, and I’m now certain Johnson wasn’t to blame for the escalation of the Vietnam War.

On display, they had a letter from Jacqueline Kennedy written to the new president the day after her husband was assassinated. It was eloquent and regal, right down to the penmanship, and after reading it, the stranger standing next to me looked up and said, “Isn’t that just incredible?” It was.

Austin brands itself as the place for live music, and sure enough, walking down 6th Street there was a one-man band playing on the sidewalk. His boots were rigged up to the tambourine, so he kept time by stomping. It took me a while to find a place to eat, so I ended up walking down the same sidewalk and a police officer had put a stop to the music and was writing the guy a ticket.

To be honest, I should have stayed out and explored more, and if it had been the first day of the trip instead of the last, I would have. But I’m tired. I’m ready to be home.

About a year ago, my mom went down to San Antonio to visit an old college friend. When she came back, she was telling me about the city and the famous river walk in downtown. In my head, I had pictured a river, maybe a little more narrow than the Arkansas River and I imagined the sidewalk was similar to the river trail in North Little Rock except with shops and restaurants attached.

So, when I got to San Antonio just after dark today, and followed the signs to downtown, I was shocked when I walked right up to the edge of the sidewalk and could have dipped my toe in the San Antonio River.

But, I guess I ought to back up and start from the beginning.

I woke up this morning in Tucson, Arizona. I had arrived the afternoon before, but I wasn’t in the mood to explore much. I had stayed out too late the night before in Phoenix beefing up my ping pong street cred. To make matters more cumbersome, the weather wasn’t cooperating. Tucson gets less than an inch of rain a month, and I saw most of it fall in the 18 hours I was in town.

But from what I did see, Tucson is a lively place. If Phoenix has slunk into high-end cookie cutter developments, Tucson is its foil. On 4th Avenue, there were three different costume shops/second-hand clothing stores with outfits from the 1920s on up. The University of Arizona is in the city center, which adds a college town vibe, and even on a Sunday afternoon, the downtown area was hopping with people.

This morning I left early, and by 11 a.m. I was in El Paso. I could see Mexico from my car.

As I worked my way across the south of Texas, the desert landscape dissipated. The dry surroundings and sparsely scattered shrubs were filled in with bigger, greener shrubs, maybe seven feet tall, that had Christmas tree like foliage. And as I got closer to San Antonio, trees, actual trees, which I haven’t laid eyes on in at least a week, started cropping up.

I made a pit-stop in San Antonio and saw the Alamo. For all the hype in grade-school history lessons, to say nothing of the battle cry, it’s just a small mission in the center of town with a bunch of tourists milling around.
It’s still, somehow, impressive. I made my way down to the river walk, but couldn’t stay long. It was dark, by then and I had a hotel waiting for me in Austin.

I’m exhausted. I’ve driven 934 miles today.

On the first Friday of every month, the art galleries in downtown Phoenix stay open late to let the public browse their collections free of charge, but it’s more than just art galleries along the main strip.  The road is blocked off and vendors sell hotdogs and something called “fry bread.”  Street musicians play, hiphop on one corner, guy with a guitar and a harmonica on the other.  Loads and loads of people, mostly young, show up and meander down the street.  

At the hostel where I stayed, I met a girl from Asheville, North Carolina. She was in town for a job interview to be a river guide during the upcoming summer months.   Together, we went out for a bite to eat and then visited the galleries. The type of art varied from 3-D structures, to photography to typical paintings of flowers.

In the morning, Phoenix gave quite a different impression from the invigorated downtown vibe of the night before. Arizona was hit hard with the housing bust and sub-prime mortgages. So, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that just north of Phoenix, in Scottsdale, subdivisions sprawled out empty.  High end retail shops stood in brand-new developments that haven’t been finished.

As I drove, one side of the four-lane road would have the typical desert landscape, but on the other side, with the condominiums, the lawns were neatly manicured with green, green grass.  

Back at the hostel that afternoon, I met another traveler, Alex from Germany. He asked me what my plans were for the evening, and when I said I had a ticket to the Phoenix Suns game, his face lit up and he said he had planned on going to the game as well.  

I’m not a huge professional basketball fan, but to see a game in person, even from the nosebleed section, was a thrill.  Watching a game on television, you miss out on the crowd trying to distract the other team when shooting free throws.  From home, your heart rate doesn’t speed up when Channing Frye and Danny Granger get in a fight on the court.  And, honestly, who doesn’t giggle when the kiss-cam shows off couples in the crowd?

In general, when the visiting team has the basketball, a crowd usually chants de-fence, de-fence.  But in Phoenix, the fans chant Steve-Nash (clap, clap) Steve Nash(clap, clap) instead.  The Suns ended up winning 113-105.

Then, as Alex and I were walking back through the downtown area to return to the hostel, I saw the most amazing thing.  

Outside a cafe, a group of college-aged kids were playing my favorite sport: ping pong. I quickly called ups, and for a few games, I ran the table on some street in downtown Phoenix.  The glory was short-lived, though.  A guy named Mike, who at about point three, pulled on a special ping pong glove, beat me 21-19.

Driving away from Joshua Tree, I got on Highway 10.  It’s the first time I have headed east in earnest in two and a half weeks.  

Along the road, cacti, in the most cliche sense of the word, sprung up. 

When I was about 30 minutes away from Phoenix, I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize.  I checked the voicemail, and it was someone from American University who said I had been accepted to the grad program I applied to.  More than that, the voice said I had been chosen for a merit award and that I should check my email for more details.  

That was the longest 23 miles I’ve ever driven.

I dropped Alex off at the airport on Wednesday morning, and I realized it was the first time I’ve really been alone since that first night in Santa Fe. It seemed fitting that I left the palm trees of Los Angeles and headed straight for the seclusion of the Mohave Desert.

The Joshua Tree gets its name from Mormans who wondered through the area in the 1800s. They believed that the trees, with their spindly arms, were a sign from the prophet Joshua that they were going in the right direction.

Once inside the park, the desert becomes heavily populated with Joshua Trees, and boulders form almost a cityscape with enormous rocks taking the place of buildings.

After hiking up Ryan Mountain, the tallest peak in the park, I was anxious to get to the campsite and start to work off a sizable sleep deficit. But setting up camp produced some problems.

The only other time I had set up the tent by myself was in my parent’s living room, nearly a month ago. Here, I was struggling with the wind and I couldn’t exactly remember what was supposed to go where. I strung two of the poles through their slots, but when I tried to lift it up, the tent was incredibly out of proportion. After two more attempts at that, a man came over from two campsites down. “Do you need any help?” I told him I thought I could get it.

“Are you sure? You’ve been rasslin’ with it awhile now,” he said. I was embarrassed someone had noticed. I wasn’t really in a position to turn down the offer, so first Rick, then his buddy Bob, both from Minnesota, helped me get the tent up.

The wind picked up substantially when the sun went down, but I took the heavier things out of my car, my duffel bag and backpack, and set them at the corners. With that, I was certain the tent wouldn’t topple over with me inside, and I was asleep in no time.

I woke up in the middle of the night to the wind screaming outside. The anchors that were supposed to be holding down the corners of the tent had been blown over to where I was sleeping. I got out of the tent, and sure enough, the stakes had been completely yanked out off the ground. I secured them again as deeply as they would fit in the ground and quickly got back in my sleeping bag.

About five minutes passed, and even with my eyes closed, I could tell the tent was swaying again. I got up, unzipped the tent and even in that short time, the stakes were already halfway out of the ground.

I wised up, thankfully. I remember my dad putting rocks over the stakes at the Grand Canyon and followed suit.

Here’s the irony. The wind was incredibly loud against the nylon cover of the tent all night long. For padding, all I had was a thin mat that didn’t span the length of my body, so I was essentially sleeping on gravel. But, it was the soundest night of sleep I’ve had for the entire trip.

The next morning, I saw all sorts of geological wonders. Driving to Keys View, you can spot the San Andreas fault line and the Salton Sea, which is supposed to have water 25 percent saltier than ocean water.

Arch Rock and Hidden Valley are the types of sights you can only explain with pictures.

After exploring all morning, I drove into town and settled down for lunch at a small restaurant right next to the visitor’s center.

As I sat waiting for my food, the owner of the cafe was talking with some other customers from Tennessee. Without much prodding, he told them he had come to Joshua Tree to get under the radar of Big Brother. Apparently, he had begun a multi-million dollar off-shore company, but he had lost it all, and the government was to blame.

After eating, I drove down the highway to check out an Oasis. On the hike, desert spread out across the mountains, but after an hour of walking, quite suddenly actually, palm trees started peaking over a ridge.

It’s such a gratifying feeling to see life persist in hidden places.

We’ll pick the story up where we left off, but first, just a quick note about Los Angeles. It’s such an intense place, where people come with high hopes for stardom and ideas of fame, so much, in fact, that it gives off the impression of being over-used. I guess because of that overworked vibe, Alex and I didn’t have much planned other than the game show.

Nevertheless, we had just walked off the CBS lot and the only other to-do item on my L.A. list was to visit the wall where Elliott Smith is pictured on his Figure 8 album. After his death in 2003, the wall became a makeshift memorial, where fans brought flowers and wrote notes and song lyrics.

The wall is in a nondescript neighborhood; in fact, it’s next door to a McDonalds. Adding insult to injury, graffiti covers a good portion of the original art, including the writings by his fans. It’s not even the artistic type of graffiti, or the social message kind. It’s the meaningless, stupid stuff. Disappointing for sure, but just the same, I posed in front of it like Elliott did on the album.

At that point, Alex and I were both so tired. It was the type of sleepy where your eyes burn from the sheer effort it takes to keep your eyelids open. We still had six hours to go.

Earlier in the week, a friend from home had texted me suggesting we check out the Upright Citizens Brigade for Doug Benson’s “I Love Movies” show where he records his podcast. Doug Benson, who is most recognizable for being a commentator on VH1’s Best Week Ever, was a big enough draw for Alex and I to go, but better still, it was free.

Going somewhere without knowing what to expect brings all kinds of surprises. A few moments after the show started, Doug Benson brought out three guests, including Craig Robinson, Daryl from The Office. They sat behind a table talking about recent movies and cracking jokes. It was an incredible way to pass the time, but wait! That’s not all. Directly after that show, Comedy Death Ray, a stand-up show featuring several comics, was slated. Still not knowing what to expect, I elbowed Alex in the ribs every time someone took the stage that I recognized. Charlyn Yi from Paper Hearts did a bit, and to close the show, the Sklar brothers showed up. I was more star-struck to see them than I was to see Drew Carey.

It’s still a little hard to wrap my head around the idea that famous people actually live and work here. In L.A. you aren’t waiting for comedians to go on tour to catch a show. They show up at a comedy club on Franklin Avenue on a Tuesday night.

And, I think, that’s the key to the relationship Los Angeles strikes. Yes, it has a detracting sense of being overworked. But attempting to compensate for that impression is the shimmering sheen of studio lights and famous people. People are willing to overlook the withered streets to catch a glimpse of Hollywood sign.

After the show, we met Sean at his apartment. He had a couch and futon ready for us, but because I haven’t seen my old friend in years, we spent the next hour talking and reminiscing.

I don’t remember falling asleep exactly. I do know that by the time my head hit the pillow, I had been awake for about 22 hours straight.

I hate to dwell on a theme, but it’s worth mentioning again that when I have a big day coming up, or I’m nervous about something, a wake up in the middle of the night, unable to think of anything else. It seems to be a sliding scale, too. The more anxious, the earlier I’m staring at the ceiling.

This morning, I woke up at 2:30 a.m.

I must credit Alex here for being such a good sport about my ridiculousness, because I woke him up, we got ready, and by 4:45 a.m., we were in line to see longest running game show in history, The Price is Right.

We waited there for close to an hour and a half, when a CBS page in a red sports coat gave us an order of arrival slip and told us to return at 8:30. We were numbers 68 and 69. That’s to say that, 67 people were crazier than us and had been waiting for much longer for a chance to be on the show.

The next few hours went by in a blur. Much of it was spent sitting outside under an awning at the CBS studios, waiting. More waiting and waiting. Then, as expected, we were called by groups of 12 to be interviewed by a producer, to determine which audience members would get called down to contestant’s row. The producer was a charismatic guy, smiling and using lots of gestures as he went down the line and asked each of us what we did.

When he got to me, he asked, and I said I wrote for a Web site. Joking, he said, are you going to say something nice about the show? Quick laugh, and just like that, he moved on. It was over so fast, and as soon as it was over, I knew we wouldn’t be called down.

After another hour of waiting, we were led up a flight of stairs, we rounded the corner, and all of a sudden, we were in the studio audience.

Sometimes, I think describing something as surreal is an easy pass out of accurately describing a situation. But, when you’re working with four hours of sleep, you’ve been shuffled from waiting area to waiting area for five hours and suddenly, you’re on a set with incredibly bright colors, about to watch a game show you’ve watched since you were two, it’s surreal in a pretty accurate sense of the word.

Tired as we were, we were instructed to clap furiously and yell out advice for the contestants. I can say with some confidence that Alex and I will be on national television on April 2nd, because we had great seats right behind contestant’s row. During the commercial breaks, Drew Carey and Rich Fields, the announcer, answered questions from the audience, most of which were in the form of a shaking voice, asking, “Can I give you a hug?”

As anticipated, neither of our names were called. Actually, the girl who we had waited beside all day not only was called, she got on stage and proceeded to win a car. Then she spun the wheel and won, and finally, at the showcase showdown, she blew it.

By the time we left the CBS lot, it was 2:30 in the afternoon. I had been awake for 12 hours already, and it wasn’t over yet. After the show taping, we still had to bide our time until 10:30 p.m. when my friend who we were staying the night with got off work.

When exploring a place using public transportation, the only hard part is to figure out is which stop is yours. Navigating a city behind the steering wheel, on the other hand, is a whole different ball game.

On our way to Coit Tower in North Beach, Alex and I were passing though a residential neighborhood. I saw signs that warned of a steep hill ahead, advising big trucks to use an alternate route, but I didn’t think much of it. That is, until we got to the crest of the hill and my car was pointed straight downward.

Now, I don’t care for roller coasters, and the worst part of those rides, I think, is the anticipation in the ever-so-slow climb up to the first major drop off. Even when I was young, on family vacations to Six Flags, I would avoid the major rides at all costs.

But there I was, on a residential, public street about to lose my lunch.

Of course, there’s an explanation for the steepness. In 1848, gold was discovered in the San Francisco area, so in about two years, the population of the city grew by 24,000 people. Two years. 24,000 people. Leave it to gold to motivate someone to build on hills that were never meant to be habitable.

I crept down the street, and we made it through fine.

Of all the touristy things I did, Alcatraz, Pier 39, Coit Tower, that’s probably going to be the one memory that stands out. Actually, that one might be tied with driving through Chinatown.

Outside of New York City, San Francisco has the largest Chinatown district, but it wasn’t necessarily the size of it that was so striking.

What really took me back was how stark the boundaries were drawn. We took a right turn and bam. It seemed we were right in the middle of Chinese markets and shops and crowded sidewalks. Then, after driving on the main road for maybe seven minutes we went under a tunnel, and when we came through to the other side, there wasn’t a trace of it.

I asked Chris, Alex’s friend who put us up for the weekend, why there was such a remarkable difference. He said because the city was built so vertical, so condensed, that whole neighborhoods fit succinctly into a few city blocks. There’s no time for a gradual entry process.

Oh yes, did I mention that Chris lives about a five minute’s walk away from the beach? Come to think of it, that should be in the running for most memorable San Fran moment.

We had unbelievable weather during our stay. At a time of year when it is mostly rainy, or at least dark and cloudy, we got three days of partly cloudy with a strong mix of sunshine. On Saturday afternoon, all I had to do was walk two blocks, cross one major street and I was at the beach at sunset.

It’s incredible how we lucked out.