Some of the best advice you can get from anyone is to kayak to Hawaii, then Japan, and finally, jet ski to China.

I have found that for the most part, if you live in America and use Google Maps, it will only help you for traveling within the U.S.  But evidently one of the workers for Google Maps got bored on a slow Wednesday afternoon and “planted some Easter eggs” for fun people like you and me.  No matter where you are leaving from, if you type in “China” as the destination, you will be instructed to kayak from the coast of Washington state to Hawaii, drive a car to the other side of the state, then kayak to Japan, drive a care to the to other side of Japan, then jet ski to China.  I’ll save you the trouble.  Here’s a link to Google Maps to try it out.

During the summer before 7th grade (1993) on church bus ride back from Six Flags Over Georgia, I heard a song on the cassette tape playing through the stereo speakers by Steven Curtis Chapman called  No Better Place.  The main part of the chorus says, “There’s no better place on Earth than the road that leads to Heaven.”  That’s when I realized that a road is actually a place itself- not just a means to get to other places.  I had never thought about it before.  A road is a location, despite its abstract shape and the fact it overlaps countless other places- other cities, other states, even other countries.

As the title proclaims, this is indeed my 500th post. That’s a lot of material from my brain. I spend an average of at least one hour on each one (I’ve spent up to 5 hours on a few of them), and considering that that my average post is 666 words long (strange but true), that adds up to an estimated bare minimum of 21 whole days of writing and 333,000 words used to do it.  I would actually predict that in reality I’ve used at least 500,000 words and 30 whole days simply in writing the content of Scenic Route Snapshots.

Sometimes I go back to the earliest posts back in 2009 and dress them up with better pictures and titles.  Interestingly, these older writings of mine are not only less physically attractive and appealing, but their content alone shows me that I’ve grown up not only as a writer but also a person.  This website, my main hobby, is like a metaphorical road of my life.  It shows me the similarities and differences of me now, compared and contrasted to me then.

A road is a place.  By looking down it we can see where we’ve come from and we’re were headed.  If we should find the road we are on is not leading to where we need to be, there are always intersections.  And u-turns.