Observations of America and My Ancestral Past

When you have only one life to live and making a living is a big part of it, you have little time to complete the bucket list most people keep in the back of their minds. I remember in high school, a person named John Goddard used to come to our high school and show films of his adventures. He narrated the adventure as the movie ran, and we sat amazed by his daring exploits. He had made a list of 127 life goals before he passed away. He finished 109 of those goals before he died in 2013 at ninety. Anyone can look him up online and see what he managed to accomplish. My experiences pale by comparison, but the idea was the same. I had my set of preferences to achieve, and so did he. One of those preferences was to set out and see as much of our country as possible and knock off a few bucket-list items. With the encouragement of my brother Gary, who I wanted to go with me but couldn’t, I set out in early May of 2014 to accomplish some of those goals. I also wanted to research my ancestry because the exact origin of my paternal grandfather and grandmother was a mystery. After the research, I wanted to share the findings with many of my first cousins on my father’s side to dispel all the rumors about their mysterious past. So I bought a new car, called it Rocinante, the name of Don Quixote’s horse, and the same name one of my favorite authors, John Steinbeck, gave to his GMC truck that he drove around the country and documented in the book Travels with Charley. I didn't have a dog with me, but I did have my golf clubs. Initially, I wrote the book as a blog on Facebook while I traveled and entertained my Facebook friends with my adventures. I included pictures of my travels and my narration on Facebook to give my readers a vicarious experience. Pictures will not be in this book because the cost is so high it would be impossible to make a profit on the sale of one. If I become rich and famous due to this publication, I will add pictures to a second edition of the book. I have them. When I took the writings from all of my travels, it appeared that I had myself a book-length document. Some liberties were taken in the book's production because these travels occurred in different years. I combined some of my other adventures into this book to include all the travels I did after I retired. I was inspired to write the book when I learned that a diary is a kind of autobiography called an Epistolary Autobiography. This is a small window into what I did with my life. My life is undoubtedly less accomplished than John Goddard's, but it was all I could do in the time that I had.