The genesis of the trip was in literature.  I had been doing a lot of reading of travel and hockey books in the winter of 2009-2010, and those stories inspired me to plan this adventure.

Travel and Adventure:

• Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
• Porsching by Chris Welty
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
• Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
• Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• The Best American Travel Writing 2006 edited by Tim Cahill
• A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins
• Looking for Alaska by Peter Jenkins
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

Hockey:

• The Game by Ken Dryden
• They Don’t Play Hockey in Heaven by Ken Baker
• Open Net by George Plimpton

Over the course of the trip, people recommended other related books to me.  I can’t say these inspired the trip, but they are in the same spectrum:

• A Few Seconds of Panic by Stefan Fatsis
• Blue Highways by William Least-Heat Moon
• Tropic of Hockey by Dave Bidini
• The 4-hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss