Wilderness as far as the eye can see � that�s what America was, and that�s why I�m on this trip, to see it today but realize its yesterday. ��July 14, 1998, Silver City, N.M.

There is nothing quite like finding yourself in a place completely foreign to everything you grew up knowing. Such an experience is as much mental and emotional as it is physical, and depending on how you approach it, can be an exhilarating and liberating journey of self-discovery.

Growing up a product of the suburbs, most of my life was spent living in one quintessential bedroom community and visiting places that didn't quite stray far from the norm which I knew. With family in Maine and close family friends from Washington, D.C., to Boston, 98 percent of my time on Earth from birth through the end of high school was spent north of Virginia and east of Philadelphia. The two notable exceptions were a week in Florida (pre-Epcot, mind you) during a winter break in second grade (1982 or 83, I believe) and a two-week family escapade to California in 1990, when I was 13 and about to enter high school.

I was too young to remember much from the Florida trip, other than that the February Florida air was warm and soft, and Disney World was big. And we got to stay in a hotel. California, though, I considered my first real trip. Although we spent at least a week each summer visiting my uncle (and later aunt and cousins, when they came into the picture) in Maine, the Pine Tree State felt like a second home to me. I loved the remote houses and tiny towns of New England's most unique state, but they became familiar to me. It's as if the hills and small "mountains" of New Jersey and western New England are precursors to what a visitor will find on a larger scale in Maine.

But California was something completely different. Flying into LAX, I remember looking out the window and noticing all the blue dots stretching out across Orange County: backyard swimming pools adjacent to nine out of every 10 homes. Our two weeks there were spent under brilliantly blue skies (for the most part) and I remember little of any L.A. smog, so maybe it was a low-smog week while we were in SoCal. I may have been too young to comprehend the concept of humidity, but I can remember feeling it ��for the first time, I recognized that I was in a climate unlike that with which I was so familiar.

That two-week visit to California (the second week was spent driving north along the coast, visiting San Simeon and Monterrey on our way to the final three days in the Bay Area) was also my first venture into writing. When I told my mom my plans to remember as many details as I could and to write an account of the trip to show all my friends, she suggested I bring a notebook and write down my thoughts each day (or every other day) on the trip so that I'd remember everything that I wanted. I diligently recorded the adventures (which now, I fear, are lost on some computer disk only compatible with an ancient Tandy anyway) and shared them upon our return East.

Three years later, I found myself staring out the window of a family friend's Saturn as she, Jaime my mom and I drove out to South Bend to visit Notre Dame on our first official college visit. We passed through the hills of Pennsylvania, the plains of Ohio and the cornfields of Indiana. From South Bend, we drove south and then east to Oxford, Ohio, to Miami University, and then back home along a more southern route through PA. The scenery outside the car window captivated me. I'd never seen anything like it. It was one thing to fly over the Grand Canyon on that flight to California; it was another to drive along the crest of the Allegheny Mountians and see a sign on I-80 designating the "highest point on I-80 east of the Mississippi." Of course, to anyone who has driven across Pennsylvania and visited the Grand Canyon in person, as I have, there is no comparison. The point is, the only way to truly see a place is to plop yourself smack dab in the middle of it, right in the Middle of Nowhere.

It was that college visit, that drive across Pennsylvania, that inspired my post-graduate cross-country odyssey in 1998. (And yes, I realize that on some Mac and/or IE browsers, my older links show up white on a white background, essentially invisible. I will amend the problem 'ere long.) I am convinced I will one day reprise my journeys, revisiting some places, rolling along unknown roadways to new ones. I know this because when I read of adventures like Alexandra Fuller's along The Outlaw Trail, I want to make plans immediately to do the same. The American West is the land of legends, from Billy the Kid and Butch and Sundance to Sacajawea and Sitting Bull. Somewhere out there, Edward Abbey had his closest friends bury his body in the desert and Charles Manson gathered his closest followers in a remote cabin. Just the thought of wide open slickrock and endless blue skies makes me wonder. Its pull on me is matched by that of few other places.

During my travels in the Southwest, particularly New Mexico, I loved cruising down endless two-lane highways with no other cars in sight. I reveled in the solitude and reflected upon the landscape. I was, in a sense, lost. I had with me a map and a sense of north and south, but if my car died or the roads took me too deep into the Gila National Forest or my feet carried me too far into a canyon, I might find myself not just lost, but also stranded. A part of me wanted to experience that kind of solitude, to test myself. I believed then, and do now, that in that situation I would learn who I truly am.

That said, I do feel I know my true self. However, that does not mean I can answer the question if it were posed to me by another: "Who are you?" I feel, as part of my own definition of "knowing" myself, that particular question cannot be adequately answered to anyone but myself.

O highway I travel, do you say to me Do not leave me?
Do you say Venture not-if you leave me you are lost?
Do you say I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied, adhere to me?

O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you,
You express me better than I can express myself,
You shall be more to me than my poem

� Walt Whitman, "Song of the Open Road"

I'm anxious to embark on another journey after reading Alexandra Fuller's account because I visited some of the towns she passed through in her search of the outlaws' hideouts. In Mogollon, I felt the glare of invisible eyes watching me from behind shimmering curtains and in Silver City I frowned at the lack of interest for Billy the Kid's hometown (her entries from days eight and nine). And while one of the great things about travel experiences and new destinations is that one place can have different effects on each person who visits, it can also have the same effect on several visitors, even those who experience it with the separation of years.

It is an old and overused adage that it's the journey that matters, not the destination. I think that's why I enjoy traveling so much, whether it's on a flight to Florida for work covering baseball or a drive to Boston in which I'm never more than a few miles from I-95. I do believe, after all, that such adages hold true � and grow old ��for a reason: If there wasn't at least some truth to them, nobody would bother to write them down.