I just finished a drive from St. Paul to Seattle. 2.5 days, 1800 miles, lots of fun, 1 perspective shift. I have a new position at the same company, but now it makes more sense for me to work out of our headquarters in Seattle, so here I am. Technically, I could have flown. It would have taken about 6-7 hours total, and would have put me here in time to enjoy a beautiful august weekend. The company is paying for relocation, so whether I drove or had my car shipped was totally up to me and made no financial difference. So why did I drive?

It was a rather an easy decision to make, even though I put on a show of going back and forth about it for a couple weeks. Really though, I knew I wanted to drive the first time I thought of it, but it’s only in doing it, that I understood why. The fact that I hadn’t ever been in Montana, Wyoming, or Idaho was something I thought should change. I’m also planning to sell my car shortly, now that I don’t need it to get to work or the gym, so I thought it would be good to enjoy it while I have it. But the real reason turned out to be perspective. I needed to MOVE, not just pop over to Seattle like I’ve done at least a dozen times before. I wanted to feel the very sobering reality that I was leaving my home state indefinitely for the first time. I wanted to feel the weight of leaving behind friends and family. Not that I’m a masochist, understand; it just seemed like flying here would be like cheating somehow.

The fact is that Seattle IS 1600 miles from St Paul (the extra 200 miles I drove was for a very worthwhile detour to Yellowstone national park), and one tends to underestimate the enormity of that distance when they routinely cover the round trip twice a week and sometimes 10 times in a single month. The incredible speed at which you travel while 30k feet above the earth should evoke its own kind of awe, but for someone who didn’t grow up taking road trips, I suspected these distances were somewhat lost on me. I was right.

For example, yesterday I spent over 11 hours driving; saw the sunrise and the sunset from the car, and stopped only occasionally to stretch my legs and remind my senses that the world isn’t perpetually speeding by at 80 mph. When I started the day I was in Montana and I ended it in….wait for it….Montana! And still a good 150 miles from the western border! Granted, I spent some of the day taking a detour a bit south which took me through a corner of Wyoming, but generally I was heading west the whole day. I averaged 60 miles an hour according to my car’s computer, and filled my tank a couple times. That’s distance!

And here’s the most important thing about it: every mile along the way, every mountain pass or 10 mile straight-away that begs you to see if you can get your car past 130mph, I was aware (at least subconsciously) that it brought me further away from my old home and closer to my new one. That limbo time, during which I thought of myself as a homeless wanderer (I should have learned kung-fu first) was therapy for the mind. Or at least I hope it was, because it didn’t do much for my back.

I will take possession of my new apartment tomorrow, and in so doing, complete a journey. Moving to a new city is not a breakthrough for mankind, I realize, but this is a journey that has been a long time coming for me, and I feel it is (if you’ll permit the cliché) a beginning as much as an end. Only one reader of this will remember directly, but I once stood on a dock in Greece telling someone, who was at the time a relative stranger, about how I wanted my life to be bigger. It was something I hadn’t thought of in those terms before that moment, but it was very true. So what better path to a bigger life than a big city, some big sky, and a big drive?

The Drive's Flickr Set