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Erik Trautman

“Everything you can imagine is real.”
-- Pablo Picasso

West Virginia White Water (Not Backwater)

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West Virginia suffers from a bad reputation. Upon being informed of my choice to visit the "Wild and Wonderful" state, almost everyone had some form of snarky comment or cautionary advice to offer. It seems that folk have collectively forgotten that Deliverance (based on a fictional book, I might add) occurred in Georgia and that hillbillies with shotguns harass travelers with surprising irregularity. I guess it's just easy to write off a state without a major city as just an uncivilized country backwater.

My actual impression of the state was nowhere near to the stereotyping I'd endured for weeks before and I rank it as one of my favorites so far. To begin our experience there, my girlfriend and I woke up very early in the morning so we could drive 3 hours south from Morgantown to go white water rafting. The rainy AM drive through the Appalachian mountains was a rollercoaster of twists and turns that I longed to be able to ride (we took the car for safety and practicality reasons).

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Midnight Mists

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Riding is all about tactile sensations and smells. Those are two things that you just don't get the same any other way. You become far more conscious of the subtle changes in temperature and pressure as you move from hills to valleys, sun to clouds, or even one type of asphalt to another. You begin to understand the pattern in the eddies that swirl around trucks and the weight transfers necessary to navigate overpasses in strong winds.

They say that smells are the strongest triggers of memory and that's just another reason this is the best way to see the country. It makes you feel a lot more connected to the land than you would by breathing a bunch of recirculated air conditioning. I've already got some sort of inherent bias towards farmland but I can't keep a smile from my face as I roll past the smells of fresh cut hay, new fertilizer, and grazing livestock (not everyone's favorite). It's like a window to another life where I was clearly a farmer.

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A Slight Hiccup

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Wednesday morning's ride was the kind that makes it all worth it. I knew there was a chance of thunderstorms (in the 10-30% range) during the afternoon so I wanted to bite off as much as I could in the morning. The countryside didn't disappoint -- I can recall few places except Hill Country in Texas that are quite as idyllic as the gentle rolling hills dotted with farmsteads that I passed on my way south toward Gettysburg. In the early afternoon, though, it became apparent that the storms were coming and a quick radar check showed them strengthening in excess of previous forecasts. I could see the tendrils of the anvil-like cumulonimbus clouds reaching out from the West, piercing the valleys below with bursts of lightening.

The ride became a race. I thought that I could out-ride the storms to the south on the highways but they were scattered and stronger than expected. I gambled that I'd be able to make it on the farm roads -- there are few things so beautiful as rolling acres of farmland in the shadows before a storm. To the east, blue skies and sun kissed the landscape while the west was dark with rain. I punched south on I-74, chasing the gaps between storms and racing them to the hills, where the pressure changes seemed to cause the rain to cut out. The wind kicked up little swirls of leaves over the road, giving the air a charge and energy that only fueled the excitement of the ride. I remember tearing down the side of a steep hill, high on the thrill of at last reaching clean skies, and looking in the mirror to see nothing but dark sheets of rain behind me.

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The Journey Begins Again

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The night before I left Newport, we had a real ripper of a thunderstorm pass through. By morning, all that was left to recall the violence of the previous evening were downed leaves and tree limbs beneath a gorgeous blue sky. It was the first sign of poor weather in almost a month - a fickle sort of omen before a long journey.

My first leg west included precious little of value"¦ Connecticut is a pass-through state whether you're taking 95 or not and you can't drive within 100 miles of New York City without suffering through the echoes of its crowding. It wasn't until I rolled into the Catskills that the pace of life seemed to settle a bit and the freedom of the road felt more real. The local accent is interesting and takes a minute to figure out; it sounds a bit like they've got a mouthful of bubblegum.

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Two Cylinders, Two Wheels and the Double Yellow Line

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I:
I think I caught my first whiff of the romance of travel during a family road trip through the Southwest from which I can remember little but the hot dusty smell of desert air and a sense of the vastness of the world beyond the comforting woods of New England. It was an early memory in a growing chain that would eventually stretch from the glowing volcanoes of Hawaii to the old world restaurants of Italy to the gentle midnight sun above Sweden's northern horizon. I got comfortable living small in a foreign land and it became a hunger that followed me as I came of age and began to travel on my own.

When I finished college, I celebrated by organizing a sailing trip through the Saronic Islands in Greece for myself and about a dozen others. A couple of my future roommates and I parlayed that into a three week Euro-trek where we managed to absorb a surprising amount of local culture in between run-ins with random acquaintances from back in the States.

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Beyond Version 1.0

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Despite all the forward progress I've made so far, there are plenty of other items on my to-do list. One of the hardest parts of this blog project was actually to say, "screw it, just launch" despite all the little things I hate and immediately want to change about it. I assume much of the site will look pretty different as the weeks progress and I begin adding features and tweaking design elements.

The next steps will involve things both on the front end and behind the scenes. What you won't see are my attempts to improve security and search engine optimization or to provide RSS compatibility. I'll also be deploying Google Analytics and looking into other options to try and regain some of the valuable analytics information that Wordpress had been providing.

On the front end, my next project is to put together a way of tracking progress during my trip (I'm in the midst of a 12,000 mile motorcycle journey through the CONUS). A lot of people have asked me how to follow along and so I will be building the ability to track that and integrate it with the rest of the blog (pictures and posts). I will also set up Disqus to power my comments and will implement various social sharing widgets. Stay tuned.

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The Blog Has Finally Landed

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I built this website myself. To all you designers and developers out there, that's hardly an accomplishment but for someone who had never heard of style sheets until a few months ago and hadn't seen an HTML tag since a high school 101 course, that feels pretty okay. From the day of my initial launch using Wordpress, I knew that I wanted to take control and eventually build the site from the bottom up. Today is version 1.0 of that vision.

I believe it's important to be a details person. When I tackle a problem, I want to know it from the bottom up. I want to know how every link in the chain is put together before I zoom out and start solving the overarching task. It doesn't mean that I need to drown in the minutia of things, but I'd like to be able to picture it in my head before manipulating it. Since I'm interested in putting together web-based products, it was a given that I'd need to build my own site.

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It’s All About the Little Things

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I've spent the past week or so more or less getting back into a coding routine. I've finally managed to bite off a good chunk of my blog project and I feel like I am hitting my stride with PHP and SQL after scratching my head and dealing with stupid errors for a frustrating couple of days. It feels really good to have momentum building again after all the moving and traveling.

The blog project (to produce the production version of this blog) comes both from a desire to have full creative control of my website and as a way to practice building a web application from the ground up. It's a front-to-back journey through creating something from nothing and it has been incredibly useful as a learning tool.

In order to really milk the experience for all the learning I can get, I am doing as much of it from scratch as possible. Often that is a license to take a few hours aside and learn a new skill or function because it came up in a YouTube video I was referencing or was mentioned in a Stack Overflow help article. Yesterday, though, that meant I spent the entire day working only on the code for pagination.

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My $100 Million Idea

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I love catching the wave of a new idea. It's happened to me many many times in the past few months and each one is somewhat akin to a religious experience. I think every entrepreneur in the world knows the feeling I'm talking about. In fact, one of those idea waves at the beginning of the year was what finally convinced me to pursue entrepreneurship for real. This is not the story of that idea. That particular gem, a user-generated brand advocacy platform, didn't make it far out of the gate.

Some of my big ideas hit me in the morning and I can't even sit down for breakfast without first tearing through four pages of frantic notes. It is sudden and intense. The idea I'll get into here, though, actually resulted from many little discouragements along the way as I tried to follow up on those other bursts of AM inspiration.

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40% Chance of Rain

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The last couple weeks have defined the term "busy" while I packed up the apartment, gave away or sold off a whole bunch of crap (including a car), and moved into a storage unit. My aspirations to spend the whole time coding were quickly dashed when the enormity of the move became clear. Aaah well, such is life. I'm just glad the hours of my youth that I wasted spent playing Tetris came in handy.

Houston is finally in the rear view mirror and my multi-month roundabout journey takes me east through New Orleans. The original plan to tow the motorcycle up to Newport was scrapped when it displayed an alarming lean around corners due to the rake of the front end.

Sometimes having studied mechanical engineering can be a problem. I was never the least bit hesitant about flying until I took a flight class in college and realized what was actually going on around the wings. In this recent case, I was seeing force diagrams in my head and watching the bike lean made me too uncomfortable to allow those stresses to occur over 4000 miles of driving. I guess my trust in the magic of things has been shaken since high school physics (thank you, Dr. Watt). So, Plan B: I put a couple of huge boxes in the mail, hid the Jeep strategically in one of Houston's many housing complexes, and took off on the bike.

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