When one heads east from Portland, the vast belly of America stretches out before them, three million square miles of freedom. A freedom founded, at least in word or in the Declaration of Independence, on the belief that all people are created equal and endowed with fundamental rights.  A freedom not just to think or dream, but to act, to take freedom from the abstract abyss and put it into practice, into motion, to hammer it into the material world with a calloused hand and a shot of whiskey.  Freedom to invent, to rebel, to shit your pants at 30,000 feet and let is fester as you watch with a stoic face and a pair of aviators your fellow seatmates squirm and wrinkle their nose from L.A. to JFK.  

America is a playground for evolution, both messy and magnificent, touted with imperfections and disagreements.  A place for ideas; brilliant, absurd and sometime catastrophic, to be conceived, born and nurtured for however long and through whichever path, until they are brought to fruition and set loose upon the world.  Ideas that have, (for better or worse) propelled humanity in the direction it is destined for.  Ideas such as the Lightbulb, the telephone, the airplane, the internet, each an invisible seed that took root in somebodies big head as a thought, a thought turned to action, and action still flowing with momentum today.  

And then there’s the final, most American idea of all:

The idea to leave.    

After we said goodbye to my brother and girlfriend, we hit the open road, the road to freedom…