Final Prep for 4,000 Miles in 4 Weeks

In a couple days, I’ll be on my way.  Sure, 4,000 miles in 4 weeks isn’t anything impressive.  That’s a measly 143 miles per day.  If I could morph into the Energizer Bunny – going, and going, and going – Google Maps says I could make my cross-country drive in 2 days 19 hours.  But like the fabled tortoise, “slow and steady” is the key here.  Usually, I find the “slow and steady wins the race” moral to be a whole lot of BS cause if you think about it, clearly “fast and steady” wins the race.  This not being a race though, I’m down with slow and steady.

I’ve bounced around quite a bit in my life, but I still always feel sentimental leaving a place.  It’s only natural.  I’ll certainly miss the beauty of the Bay Area.  It’s not everywhere that I can drive 10 minutes and be standing in the waters of the Pacific, make a day trip and ski at Tahoe, and take off for a weekend to hike Half Dome.

Standing on top of Moro Rock earlier this week at Sequoia National Park with the Sierras around me, I thought to myself, “I’m really going to miss this.”  But, the great part is that there are always more adventures ahead and 4,000 miles in 4 weeks will certainly be full of them.  Who knows what interesting folks I’ll meet and amazing places I’ll see.  While no formally set itinerary is the way I prefer, I’ve definitely got some places on my radar:  Sawtooth Lake (Idaho), Yellowstone and Big Horn Mountains (Wyoming), Crazy Mountains (Montana), and Mt. Rushmore, Wind Cave, and Badlands (South Dakota) to name a few.  Though I’m going with a nature theme, I’m excited for the fun cities I’m sure to pass through as well.

A recent funny story got me thinking that perhaps I should adopt a new identity for this trip much like Chris McCandless became Alex Supertramp in Into the Wild.  The story goes that a project manager with the non-profit I previously worked for had problems with his work cell, so he was given my old cell, which still had my recorded voicemail on it.  When one of his contacts called him on this new number, the contact got my old voicemail and was understandably perplexed.  Later, the contact tried to explain the voicemail to the project manager and said that it was a name like “Fung Lee.”  I understand that Bing Wu is not the most common name, but Fung Lee?  Bing Wu and Fung Lee sound about as similar as Barack Obama and Flavor Flav. . Maybe I need to embrace this alter ego though and retitle this blog The Adventures of Fung Lee!  But, come to think of it, while I love adventure, I’m not quite the wandering romantic McCandless was.  Plus, I rather like my name, so I think I’ll stay with Bing Wu.