Six months after the initial idea, and I’m more excited than ever about this trip. Hard to believe that it’s just nine or so months away!  The more I talk about it, the more I think that my idea of visiting every (continental) American state and Canadian province by car is a great one.  I’m pretty sure that I know how to cover the costs, but that leaves at least three major questions unanswered:

• What should I bring?
• Where should I go?
• How do I make the hockey aspect work?

Let’s take those in reverse order.

A driving force in making this trip is my desire to play hockey in every state and province.  It’s not optional.  That makes the challenge far more difficult, because I also want to see and experience as much of the country as possible, which is most easily done during the warmer months — exactly the opposite of hockey season.  I think that heading north early in the trip and south later will help address this problem, since I believe it’s going to be more likely to find July hockey games in Canada than it will be in, say, Mississippi. (Not like it’s ever going to be “easy” to find hockey games in Mississippi…)

The far bigger concern for my hockey playing will be the logistics of coordinating my arrivals with game schedules.  I plan to fulfill my playing requirement in many cases with pickup games, though I’d really like to play as a sub goalie in at least a few organized, officiated games.  The ideal tool for solving this problem would be a database of all pickup hockey games in the USA and Canada.  I would then be able to write an optimization program and solve for the best route and timing.  Sadly, no such information archive exists.  Not sure what I’m going to do about this yet.

Many people have provided suggestions about places worth seeing and visiting on the trip. Parks, museums, and so on.  The challenge here will be discovering the off-the-beaten-path places that make a trip memorable.  They don’t necessarily need to be in rural areas, and they don’t even need to be the sorts of things that only locals know about — not there’s anything wrong with either of those options.  Two examples from my own experiences are Minnesota’s North Shore and Formal Hall at the University of Cambridge.  Suggestions are welcome!

As for what I should bring, I would like to limit that to what my car can comfortably hold with at most half of its back seat folded down.  I don’t want to stuff my car to the gills, and I don’t want the hassle of a roof-rack-mounted luggage box.  My goal is to bring just four bags: my hockey gear, my backpacking gear, my photography gear, and my computer.  Maybe, possibly, a fifth bag should be included with car-camping/hotel-staying stuff like a full-size pillow.  Maybe.

The first pass through the trip packing list is feeling pretty good.

The danger is not bringing too little.  I’m going to be in the USA and Canada, so I can always acquire any critical thing that is missing.  The danger is bringing too much.  To fight that, I must be willing to cut back to the bare essentials.  Plus some car wax.  Gotta keep the faithful steed looking shiny, ya know.

Last Friday night, I played hockey with my regular pickup group.  I had a stellar night.  It was tremendous fun.  Even better, I learned that my plan to drive long distances for the sake of the greatest sport on Earth may not be crazy.  In fact, there exists something of an existence proof.

Before the game, we were all engaging in the usual dressing-room banter.  It came to light that one of the players, a 20-something guy named Ian, had driven up from Iowa for the game. Yes, Iowa.  Three hours each way between there and Minneapolis.  It wasn’t like he happened to be in town for some other reason; in fact, he planned to head back to Iowa immediately following the game.

This group rents 90 minutes of ice for each of its pickup games.  People commit in advance, so there are always about 20 skaters and 2 goalies.  Thus, each skater gets about 45 minutes of ice time. 

Imagine driving 180 minutes to get to the rink, spending 25 minutes getting ready to play, spending 15 minutes changing after the game, and driving another 180 minutes to get home.  Roughly 400 minutes of overhead.  All for 45 minutes of fun.

The situation reminded me of the beginning of a certain Molson commercial, which explains that if you’re a Canadian, you’ve probably driven an hour for 19 minutes of ice time.  The commercial never clarifies if that means an hour round-trip or an hour each way, but in either case it’s less extreme than Ian’s drive.

Ian’s drive might even be more extreme than my own planned adventure.  Depending on my exact mileage and number of games played, I could easily average less than six hours of driving time per game.  For example, if I play 70 times and drive 23,000 miles at an average of 60 mph — not unreasonable numbers — then I will average just 5.5 driving hours per game. 

All of these estimates are very rough.  Perhaps I should measure some quantities during the trip:

• Total driving distance (Prediction: 24,250 miles)
• Total driving time (Prediction: 440 hours)
• Total sleeping time (Prediction: 1200 hours)
• Total time spent on the ice (Prediction: 82 hours)
• Total time spent in arenas (Prediction: 170 hours)
• Total pucks stopped (Prediction: 2100 shots)
• Total hiking distance (Prediction: 100 miles)

Epic, in many ways.

Adventure knows no age limits.

There is a husband and wife team from Minnesota that plans to walk around Lake Superior this summer.  Their story, on the front page of today’s Variety section in the Star Tribune, relates how the 60-somethings plan to start the clockwise, 1800-mile journey in late April and finish in early September.

Notably, they are attached to a couple of causes.  First, they want to inspire older Americans to be active.  Second, they want to collect data in support of research on the health of the lake.

I wonder: what causes could I support during my journey?  Funding for hockey for underprivileged kids?  Lower-48 awareness of Alaska?  Advocacy for entrepreneurship-friendly tax policies?

There’s an undeniable romanticism in the idea of hitting the open road.  Sunglasses.  Wind in your hair.  Adventures.

It’s no surprise, then, that the road trip serves as the backdrop for so many great works of literature and blogging.  A few of my favorites:

Porsching (or rather, “When You Wish Upon a Star”) by Chris Welty: A humorous, semi-fictional account of a guy’s quest to buy a Porsche 911, including his drive back to New York from the purchase in Los Angeles.  In case you can’t tell from the number of times that I’ve mentioned this series of stories in my blog posts, I’m a big fan.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig: Not really about zen, and not really about motorcycle maintenance.  I would imagine that many a cross-country motorcycle trip can trace its genesis to this book about Quality.

Hitch 50 by Scotty and Fiddy: Two friends, recently graduated from college, decided to hitchhike to all 50 state capitals in just 50 days.  With a pleantiful helping of humor, they made it — even to Hawaii and Alaska.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson: A fictionalized account (“gonzo journalism”) of a pair of real-life, drug-fueled trips to Las Vegas in the early 1970s.  I have seen only the film, but the book by the same name is supposed to be excellent.

And of course, the trips of friends, including those of Ed, Vince, the XUS crew, and others that I’m certainly forgetting.

Trips of the visit-every-state variety are hardly unusual.  Turns out that it’s possible to hitchhike to every state capital in just 50 days, or visit every state in a week’s vacation.  My challenge has a few extra twists.

First, all of the legs are done by car (except for Hawaii).  Flying to Alaska, or limiting oneself to the Lower 48 seems to be more common.

Second, all 10 of the Canadian provinces are included in the challenge.  How many Americans can even locate all 10 on a map, let alone say they’ve visited them?

Third, “visit” consists of more than a touch-and-go for me.  “To have visited” means, for me, “to have played hockey in.”

That last point adds the most severe complication.  It constrains vehicle choice.  It adds more equipment to haul and worry about.  It has the potential to make the car take on the distinct “smell of hockey.” But the most severe constraints are ones of routing and scheduling.

Not every city in North America is like Blaine, Minnesota, where there are at least 10 indoor sheets of ice within a couple miles of each other.  Certain rinks are open only in the winter.  Even where there are indoor rinks open year round, multiple users compete for the ice times.  Hockey and figure skating don’t mix.

For me, playing hockey means playing hockey as a goalie.  On ice.  Against and with other players.  So chalk that up as one more constraint.

It’s a logistical nightmare to find rinks and coordinate schedules.  Open hockey?  Sub for a beer-league game?  Impromptu ice rental?  Outdoor ice game against random Canadians?  Routing for minimal downtime?

Uff-dah.  More challenging than a 2-0 breakaway.