The Snailr Project: participating in a meta journey

I'm incredibly envious of the brain that concocted this massive and BRILLIANT plan: for two weeks blogger/writer Anna and her Beloved took a train journey circling over half the United States.  British (or English, I'm going to get it wrong one way of the other), but residents of San Francisco, they took the opportunity to see A LOT of this country in a fairly short amount of time.  The brilliant part, though, was to break away from the immediacy of techno-dependancy and instead document the trip old-school with a modern twist.  Whatever may have been twittered or blogged or emailed got written on postcards and mailed to the individuals who signed up to recieve them.  We, in turn, get a taste of the journey's variable emotional quality; reading some of the other cards that have been posted on the internets there's an interesting mix of adventure, insight, excitement, overwhelmedness, mundacity, confusion and trial.  Which is generally typical of any trip.  Anna's documentation, however, takes the journey beyond the train tracks and into the lives of friends and strangers alike. 

"After being struck down by food poisoning for the entire third day of the trip, I swear of eating anything, ANYTHING, even coffee, that has passed through the bowels of an Amtrak dining car kitchen (a horrible turn of phrase, sorry), instead relying on trail mix and energy bars picked up at our city stops along the way.  And when I discoverd horrendously overpriced cup-o-noodles from the lounge car cafe, those became a staple.  You'd think, then, I might come back from this trip thinner.  But the amount of fried chicken + bbq, montana steak and [other] regional specialties I stuff in my face everytime we 'detrain' says not so."

(Maybe a little product placement to rake in the advertisting shekels?)

This came at the very tail end of the trip all the way from Portland OR!  It's too bad we can't undergo a trip with a prescient knowledge of unpleasant food poisoning, often the bane of traveler, and then avoid the perilous bacteria....that's a certain type of adventure I think we could all do without.  But this sort of experience is EXACTLY what this project details...taking the moment, the thought, the experience and sending it out. By way of the venues throughout the blog community, then, the trip gets reassembled, reassessed, reevaluated not just from the memory and perception of the travelers, but by the receivers, who in turn have the opportunity to report and consider the message sent. 

I know that when I've been on a trip I always am most homesick on the way back; at some point your mind is just finished with the constant new stimuli and ready to be on familiar turf. 

Welcome home, Anna!