About

I'm Chris. Rhea is my dog: 70 pounds, opinions about squirrels, the reason for most of the stops on this route. On Thu Oct 1 we leave Long Island's East End in a Tacoma with a tent on top, and drive a loop of the country for 82 days and about 14,100 miles.

Why Steinbeck

In September 1960, John Steinbeck left Sag Harbor, on the same end of Long Island, in a camper truck he named Rocinante, with his standard poodle, Charley. He went up into Maine, across the northern states to Seattle, down the coast to Salinas where he grew up, across the desert and Texas to New Orleans, and home. He wrote it up as Travels with Charley.

We follow the same loop, sixty-six years later, with a different dog and more rules about where she's allowed. The dashed purple line on the map is Steinbeck's route, rebuilt from the book and from Bill Steigerwald's research into where he actually slept. Treat it as approximate. It's a literary route, and Steinbeck wasn't always strict about the facts either.

The dog rules

National parks are mostly hard on dogs. At Glacier she can't set foot on a trail; at Zion she gets one paved path. National forests, state parks and BLM land next door are usually wide open. So the route leans on the places she can actually walk, and the dog page lists every park on the trip, with what's allowed and what we do instead.

Rhea is never boarded or left in a kennel, including the day kennels some parks run. If a place needs her to be somewhere else, a person watches her or we skip it.

What you're seeing, and what you're not

The map shows where we are, on purpose, roughly: the dot sits on a 10 km grid, names the nearest town, and moves at most once an hour. You'll see the town, never the campsite. The roads we drove appear a day later. Days ahead show a region and a rough window, and the campground shows up once the night is over.

When the dot says "out of signal," that's normal. Big Bend, the Lost Coast and the Montana Hi-Line don't do cell service, and the truck only gets online when the sky cooperates. The dot catches up when we do.

Say something

Every stop on the map and every day in the journal takes comments. Suggestions for places ahead are the most useful thing you can send: a trail that allows dogs, a diner with a patio, a road I'd regret skipping. Your first note waits for me to read it; after that you post straight through. Links always wait.

Photos and journal entries are mine. Videos live on Instagram and TikTok, both @rhearunswild: Instagram, TikTok.