Lost Theologian

My day had begun with much more luck . I had woken up under the impression that I would have to postpone the whole idea of hitchhiking. My GPS tracker wasn't cooperating, and without that, my folks would be worried sick about me while I was out. But, to my surprise, when I had checked my phone, I had found a message from my father telling me to leave without the GPS, to have fun, and to check in regularly. My sister drove me to the intersection of US rt. 45 and I-80, as she questioned what exactly I was doing and why. " Where will you sleep? ", " What if you get hurt? ", " What if you don't come back? ". All questions I had asked myself several times in the week before. I told her I would camp outdoors, and that where there is a road, there is a hospital. As for the last question, I didn't really know what to say. What if  I didn't come back? What if I became a statistic? What if I became another story on the news? These were questi...

Stranded. I knew I shouldn't have taken that last ride from Iowa 80, the world's largest truck stop. I made the terrible mistake of getting too sick of standing on-ramp way too quickly. So when my fourth and final ride of the day came around, I was eager to go wherever it was that she was going. The woman I ended up taking a ride from was going some 60 miles to Iowa City, which I figured would be populated enough to keep me going on my merry way. But in hindsight, I know now that if I had waited outside Iowa 80 until I could catch that one golden ride, I probably could have been in Oregon by now... And well, now here I am in the middle of nowhere, Oxford Iowa. Although I had ought to count my blessings, traveling 221 miles in one day, all while only spending two bucks on lunch is not too shabby for a first-time hitchhiker. Her name was Jen. She was a nurse from Iowa who lived just outside of Iowa City who decided to give me a life because I looked like her son-in-law ...

"Maybe we should just wait here."  My dad and I had just finished our small weekend hike of twenty-something miles on the Appalachian trail between West Virginia and Maryland. What we had expected to be a two day trip through about 26 miles or mountain ridge hiking ended up being a one say trip with some time to spare. So we stayed at our destination to take a break, then later doubled back some 5 miles to find a nice place to set up camp before it got dark, only to return to our destination in the morning. We stood around for some time weighing out the pros and cons of waiting. We had arranged for one of the locals nicknamed "Strings" to take us back to Harper's Ferry for a small fee. But we were way ahead of schedule, and Strings wasn't answering his phone this morning. To be honest, I was against the idea of waiting around and hoping Strings would pick up the phone, but I suppose my Dad has a lot more confidence in people named "Strings". ...

It's been a long two months of almost zero contact with the outside world, but I'm finally back and ready to begin writing about my experience over the next several blog posts. As for right now, I'm going to focus in on what a solid chunk of my previous blog posts have been centered around, the backpacking trip I had gone on, and all that had transpired over those three days. Perhaps now is the time for me to reiterate that I had never done something like this before. I haven't even gone camping in a tent over night, prior to this experience. Surprisingly, despite the paradigm shift of going from  an upper middle class citizen of suburbia to becoming a tent dweller in the wilderness who made the world his bathroom, I feel as though I made the adjustment fairly well. I don't think there was a single moment where I even did so much as to think "I wish I had my laptop right now" or "I really could use my phone right now" (with the exception of k...