The Mission: to drive cross-country to deliver a car, a bunch of junk, and two occupants to California

The Secondary Mission: to document typewriters across the US

My Sweet Ride: 2012 Ford Focus with new tires

The Players: a middle aged mother and a teenager with a playlist full of Panic at the Disco

Ports of Call: Maumee, OH! Coralville, IA! Grand Island, NE! Laramie, WY! Salt Lake City, UT! Winnemucca, NV!

My traveling typewriter will be the  Olivetti Lettera 22 – it’s in fine fettle.  I should swap out the ribbon before we leave.

I will begin documenting typewriters here, close to my starting point:

Hospice of Northern Virginia Thrift Store
Falls Church, Virginia

I brought the blue Electra 120 home for $10.  It seems to work fine except the ribbon is a bit faint.

Falls Church Antique Annex
Falls Church, Virginia

This lovely Dreyfuss Royal QDL is $120 in working condition. It has an interesting keyboard with umlat, circumflex, cedilla, tilde, accents grave and acute, and upside down question mark.  I wonder: is this for Catalan?

After getting briefly distracted by local typewriters, I then focused my attention on packing up junk for the trip and making sure that our ship is seaworthy.

Tales from the Typer recently documented the anxious sense of loss when cellular data is not available on a road trip.  I laughed and nodded, but made a mental note to pick up my TripTik at AAA.

Obviously I am leaving my days of young hip badassery behind and have entered full-on Chico’s territory. I got my AAA TripTik.

So we begin our travels. A journey of 42 hours begins with the slam of a car door.  Onward. I don’t know what we’ll see along the way.

We go until we reach our depot.