Well, in good ol' Dave fashion I forgot about my blog while I was traveling. Hopefully those that are following my travels realize than I am home safe and didn't die on the road or get stuck in Chicago. That said I'll quickly sum up the rest of my journey back to CT:

Clubbing, walking tours, lounging, family dinners, Second City, and a Segway tour of downtown Chicago. That is the two bit summary of Chicago. It's amazing who you meet on the road though. I now have friends to call when I return to the Windy City.

I drove from Chicago to Greensboro straight on the 3rd of October. It took 12 hours, after stopping at the grandparents for a goodbye brunch of course. As I drove south the crops went from corn to wheat to horse farms. It was a very interesting transition. Then night set in and I found myself driving up and down huge black inclines. I was driving into the void and it seemed like I would never reach the other side. However I finally reached Greensboro and the haven of Cheryl's apartment.

Staying with her at the American Hebrew Academy, the only pluralistic Jewish boarding school in the country was an experience into itself. Spending Simchat Torah there and seeing a Jewish community in a new light allowed me to look at my own Judaism in a new light.

I left on the 9th of October, driving to D.C. to visit my wonderful friend Gwen David. I did stop to visit one of Frank Lloyd Wright's early creations on the way: the Pope-Leighey House. Planned and built between 1938-1939, the home was constructed of Tidewater red cypress, brick, and glass, with a flat-roof that was created as a prototype of well-designed space for middle-income people. I got stuck in D.C. traffic afterwards. However, I had a wonderful view of the capital as I drove in, making it all worth it. My friend's cooking was a pleasing respite from a long day on the road. Chicken noodle soup from scratch!!! Of course, like good graduate students with a wandering soul at the table, we played scrabble after dinner, and I held my ground!

The next day I went to two museums in D.C. as well as walking around the Mall. The first was the International Spy Museum. That place has so much packed into it it's amazing. I felt like 007 halfway through. I highly recommend it. The second was the United States Holocaust museum. That place does justice to the remembrance of those that lost their lives in one of the worst events in human history. Needless to say, I was drained. After returning to my friend's apartment using the Circular, she treated me to pasta and chicken and we said our farewells. I left for home at 7 PM that night. Amazingly, by the time I hit NYC, there was no one on the road. I hit no traffic, drove straight across the island in less than 10 minutes, and made it home to my bed six hours after I left D.C. (I never said I was driving the speed limit on my trip).

I returned to work on the 12th of October to find that I was actually missed. It's a good feeling to know that people need you. I realized that driving 3000 miles over the course of 17 days wouldn't make my problems go away. They were all there when I got back. I also realized that the journey characterized by Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man wasn't a journey at all, just a detour. I went on this trip to escape. In the words of the Great Bob Dylan:

Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

I wanted to forget my life and escape.But I couldn't forget my life, because it was there with me.Life is a journey.It's a car without brakes.You can't stop the ride, you can only go forward.You can choose which exits you take, when to turn left and when to go right, but you can't stop.Time never stops.You will always wake up the next day, and move forward.There's no way to see where the road will ultimately take you.You just have to make each decision on a leap of faith that it's the right one and it will take you to on a path that's worth traveling.Sometimes those decisions lead to smooth highways, freshly paved the night before.Other times, and quite often, it leads down roads in disrepair, maybe nothing more than two worn tracks through a field of grass.Life is unpredictable, just like the journey it takes you on.

When I was in Art School I picked up Jack Kerouac's classic On the Road.He ends with a thought that rings just as true today as it did in 1955:

"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long, skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and fold the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."

None of us has a damn clue what will happen to us next.Life has so many possibilities.They are too numerous to count, just like the routes from New York to San Francisco.Nobody knows what's going to happen.We all are swimming in a sea of darkness, trying to find the light to lead us on.Hopefully I will find that light soon.I hope you all find the light, and if you found it, hold on to it for dear life.I had it once, and it's damn hard to find once you've lost it.

These are my musings.The musings of a lost soul yearning for direction.The musings of someone yearning for a purpose.The musings of someone who wants to enjoy life as much as possible before his car breaks down at the end of the road…