Reverse Pioneer: I Just Drove a Covered Wagon From the West Coast to the East

This country is fucking huge. Only that adjective will do. It's enormous. And even if my covered wagon is a new Saturn Vue, and I only drove 7 or 8 hours a day, and we took a leisurly 8 days from LA to upstate NY, it is still impressively large.

No wonder some people stopped in Ohio. Or Utah.

We loved Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills. It was great to look up and think that Presidents could, indeed, be figures worthy of high praise.

Each night, in a hotel that we could only hope would have a decent mattress, I would think over the terrain, the roads, the wildlife (or lack of it), and I would dream of car wrecks. Each day, fleeing Los Angeles at 10 to 15 over the posted speed limit, we got a little further away from the entertainment machine that used up my spinal cartilage and spit me out.

Now, in a place with reasonable rents and real estate prices as numerous as the spring mosquitos, and with more of each hatching each day, we have made it to the land of seasons, where cherry trees in full bloom echo the revolutionary roots of this little town where we're decompressing and searching, now, for a little land with a big house, where I can grow my contribution the slow food movement, and live simply, without the overhead of a suburban hell surrounding a metropolis built by workers who were used up and spit out.

If anybody knows of a lease with option to own on two acres in upstate New York (the Oneonta are is nice, but we're flexible), please let us know. It must have a large kitchen where the chefs don't feel cut off from the rest of the house.

Good soil is a plus.