It's sitting out there, all 30,000 miles of it. Eighteen countries, two continents, two hemispheres, one impassable gap halfway through.
If you're an ambitious overlander, it's definitely at or near the top of your expedition dreams. It's the Pan-American Highway, and I'm planning on driving it.
But not tomorrow - this takes time and planning, ideas and collaboration.
Timeline: Early summer of 2018. But it pays to get started early, and I hope to document a lot of what I do to prepare for this trek right here on Overland & Expedition, so long as it exists (Thanks HammerheadFistpunch for the authorship invite!).
The Pan-American has been narrated and blogged about ad nauseam on many different platforms in the last decade or so, with little cottage industries cropping up around it. I don't really want to turn the Pan-American into a commodity, and I don't want go on the lecture circuit, and I don't want to provoke Guatemalan highway bandits simply for the sake of having a good story to tell in a badly-written self-published travel book in five years.
I'm not interested in Kickstarter. I don't want to develop a life philosophy, or save the orphans by driving on some roads. I don't want to preach. I don't want to presume.
I just want to do it.
But, because we don't live in a vacuum, and the world of Jalopnik has proven in my experience to be a pretty chill virtual place to hang out with (mostly) thoughtful people, and I like to write, I thought I'd start a little sub-blog on the sub-blog.
Behold, then: Pan-American Dreams
I make no guarantees. This may not even happen in the end (2018 seems like a long, long ways away, but not really). I might lose my job. I might get a nice shiny new job in New Zealand. My determination could waver or collapse. The Russians might nuke Peru. I might win the lottery. But I'm going to try as hard as I can to put the rubber to the road. In some ways, these posts and my fellow Jalops from O&E will keep me accountable.
A final few thoughts:
- By most standards I'm kind of a regular dude with a (mostly) regular job, a regular income, a regular house, and, as a lot of us can attest, a regular amount of debt. However, I am very, very lucky, because I both live a regular life, and I get the opportunity to travel (mostly professionally) extensively both at home and abroad. I feel fortunate.
- My wife LOVES to travel. If she could, she'd walk away from her job and be on the road the rest of her life. This little project is basically her idea. This is a good thing. She is, also, the most consistent and primary breadwinner in the family. We have precisely zero kids (with no plans for any), and this certainly helps. There also are some other structural advantages in our life and livelihoods that I'll explain later that even make considering this trip possible.
- I don't want to turn this into a "lifestyle" sermon. I'm not interested in selling my house to live in a shed so I can kill and eat my own chickens, and abandon all I love and know in order to save money for this trip. I like my house. On the flip side, I don't have unlimited resources, either. Let's call this the "Regular Guy's Guide to the Pan-American Highway". (Is it even possible? I guess we'll see.)
- I'm no expert, and I don't think I'll ever claim to be one. I know how to use a Hi-Lift and a winch. I can fix my own cars. I've driven off-road and "overlanded" (whatever that might mean) in many different contexts. But, a long distance, self-supported, vehicle-based trip to strange foreign lands like this is new to me. We gotta start somewhere, so I'm sure there will be mistakes and missteps and dumb fuck-ups. Let us learn from them.
- I'm going to lean on my fellow O&E followers and the Jalopnik community at large to help me with advice, ideas, ridicule, and encouragement. I'm a serial lurker over at Expedition Portal - but that place is a rabbit hole that only leads to 10,000 other rabbit holes. I choose y'all.
Share the dream with me - I hope it's worthwhile.