Taking A Walk

by Dwayne Phillips

A common question concerned where I slept every night.

No, I didn’t sleep in the woods.

No, I didn’t carry a tent.

No, I wasn’t walking on the Appalachian Trail (you might be surprised how many people asked me if I was on Route 11 on the Appalachian Trail).

I slept in a motel every night. There were several reasons. First, people live up and down Route 11. If I were to sleep on the side of the road, I would probably be sleeping in someone front yard. That could be irritating.

Second, have you ever slept on the side of the road for four or five weeks in a row? I haven’t and I suspect it isn’t much fun. Perhaps out in the wilds of Alaska or Wyoming or something like that, but on the side of the road? You are likely to be run over or something. Anyway, it wouldn’t be quiet and restful.

Third (or is it fourth? No, it is third.) I wanted Internet access and preferred to have it every night. That would allow me to blog and such. The vast majority of motels on the way had WiFi access in all rooms. There were only a couple of motels where the WiFi didn’t work well. The rest were quite satisfactory.

Fourth,  I didn’t want to sleep on the side of the road.

Finally, my wife wanted a motel room with a shower and bed every night. She was my support team for the first half of the walk, so that pretty much settled it.

Then there was the task of finding a motel. In the Shenandoah Valley, there were towns every five miles and towns with good motels every ten miles. It was easy to find the next motel. That brought a problem – loading and unloading the motel room every night. We learned to stay in a motel two nights in a row and reduce the hastle of the pack, unpack, and so on chores.

The situation changed the farther south we went. The towns were farther apart, and the motels were still farther apart. In some places in Alabama and Mississippi the motels were 50 and 60 miles apart. This meant driving back and forth. The procedure was something like:

1. Day One: stop walking ten miles short of  Motel A
2. Day Two: walk ten miles past Motel A
3. Day Three: walk to 25 miles past Motel A
4. Day Four: walk 40 miles past Motel A, which is ten miles shy of Motel B, so switch to Motel B
5. Repeat the four-day cycle

This was a pain at times. The time-consuming task was finding the next motel or two or three. As an engineer, I tend to try for optimal this and optimal that. This included finding the optimal number of motels with the optimal features per dollar and the optimal miles driven between motels and the optimal free breakfast and the optimal…can you see my frustration in all this?

I used Google Maps and would search on “motel the-name-of-the-town.” This is a good tool for finding motels and other such businesses. A problem was that it was too good. I had to look through a handful of motels in order to find the optimal – well, you know like above.

Every couple of nights I spent about an hour looking at the maps, looking at the motels, looking at the mileage, looking at the terrain, looking at the weather forecast, and trying to optimize the situation.

Plenty of motels was a good thing. The optimizing and fretting about optimizing was a bad thing. It all worked out well enough.