AF Get-Togethers

[TheRealJoeFish]

Alllllll right everyone, story time (stay with me to the end, as it may involve some audience participation!)

As some of you probably know from my posts, I'm a young lawyer currently working for a judge in Pennsylvania. My clerkship (a common legal job out of law school) is a two-year gig, and I've just over two months left!!! I don't know exactly what job I'm going to do next, but I've got it down to a few choices and I'm not concerned about landing something permanent (I'll be rather competitive for positions in my geographic location). That is not the point of my story, though.

My point is: I hope to take a month or two off between ending this job and starting my next one. During that time, I hope to read, write, rest, and - now we're getting to the pertinent part - travel. I've sketched out a rough plan of a trip I hope to do:

1) From Pennsylvania, drive west to visit friends in Illinois.
2) Head south to friends in St. Louis, Missouri.
3) Keep heading south to my brother in northern Mississippi.
4) Continue southward still to a friend in New Orleans.
5) Turn towards the rising sun and meet a friend in Jacksonville, Florida.
6) Head north to visit a friend in North Carolina.
7) Swing by family in Washington, DC.
8) Return, exhausted, to Pennsylvania.

All in all, that circuit is about 3,000 miles. Of course, the route is malleable and subject to change, but I plan to take about 2 and a half weeks to do the thing (essentially, 9 days of primarily traveling and 9 days of primarily not traveling). I've really wanted to do something like this for a while now, and things seem to be shaping up to make it a possibility. I plan to pack (relatively) light, stay in as few hotels as possible, and ultimately spend my time seeing and doing things.

So: this is where the audience participation comes in!!!!! I plan to be going, at least briefly (and usually not briefly) through: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Mississippi again, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania again. AND I AM LOOKING FOR THINGS TO DO, PLACES TO CRASH (my body against a pillow, not my car), AND - BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT - FRIENDS TO MEET.

So, let this put those of you east of the Mississippi on notice that, sometime in August, I may have occasion to make your acquaintance in person!