Home today after five days on the road and three days with Heather. So did we find Concord? Well, as you can see Liz and I are still together despite the 1000 mile days and the hotel coffee with powdered milk.

Everywhere we went I greeted people with the request, "So tell me about Concord" We were met with skepticism, that cracked into a smile and then usually extended to kindness. Somehow the idea of chasing a place name around the country appealed to folks' sense of whimsy. 

Starting day three, we listened to Sissy Spacek narrate To Kill a Mockingbird. As we traveled through the south, I was reminded that Harper Lee's classic is, at one level, the story of "How my brother Jem broke his arm." Well, our quest for Concord is really the story of “How we delivered Heather's car to Arizona.” But what did we learn along the way?

1) My wife is a patient saint.

2) Creativity was the first causality of exhaustion. I had imagined driving four or five hours, then passing the wheel to Liz so I could leisurely gaze at the countryside and write my stirring reflections during her stint. After day two, when I wasn't driving, I was either navigating or planning where to stop for lunch or calling around for a hotel. Most of the time I caught desperate naps. My vow to write an hour a night evaporated.

3) Hotel chains, no matter how well rated they are on TripAdvisor, all are pretty soulless. Our three nights in B and B's were so much more interesting.

4) How does America mow all the grass along the sides of the interstates? Like the hotel chains, the interstates were well-maintained, but they all looked the same: pavement, guardrail, acres of mowed grass, a high chain-link fence and then woods or fields. With a bit more time, we'd take more of the blue highways.

5) In the future, I'll try to establish a contact in the Concord I am visiting beforehand.  We were fortunate to meet so many interesting people, but that was due to dumb luck.

6) Time was a constant concern. Every minute at the gas pump was a minute not spent in a Concord or not spent sleeping. It was impossible to get more than a taste of any of the Concords we visited, but that was part of the challenge too. A lack of time forced me to walk up and confront strangers and then to listen carefully to them because I knew we didn't have time to talk to anyone else in town, and we wouldn't be coming back for a long time. We had very full days. Despite the hardships, I gotta say that was fun!