I found myself eating on the deck of a seafood restaurant as the setting sun turned the sky over the gulf waters to pink and the lights of Mobile, Alabama flickered in the distance. If I’d driven straight to that restaurant I’d been just about 1,500 miles from my home in Maine, but during the two weeks I’d been away from home, I’d wandered all over the eastern states and down as far as the Everglades, which was about as far away I could be from my destination without leaving the continental U.S.

For no particular reason other than for the adventure, my girlfriend, Caitlin, and I had decided to move out to San Francisco.

She picked me up on August 21, 2008. Theoretically, I’d spent the past few days deciding which clothes would stay and which I would take with me but actually getting nothing done but making the mess in my room more impossible. By the time I really started packing, Caitlin was already on her way up from her cousin’s house in Boston so carefully packing for my new life became more like frantically stuffing things into other things.

My younger brother, Tim, drove Caitlin and me to the Kittery Trading Post where we picked out a tent for all the camping we intend to do on our way across the country. I also bought a sleeping bag named “The Cat’s Meow,” mainly because it’s named “The Cat’s Meow.”

Next, we stopped at a grocery store so I could visit a CoinStar machine and cash in the change I’d been saving in a jar labeled, “The Human Fund” since middle school. Somehow, it came to seventy dollars even thought I’d been mining the jar for its quarters for years.

Back at home, Caitlin and I loaded up the car and I scanned my room for anything vital I’d forgotten (The Boyscout Handbook).

I do my best not to be sentimental about goodbyes. Nothing is ever set in stone. But just after I’d said goodbye to Tim and Caitlin had started the car, he came back out of the house and asked if I wanted to bring my college diploma with me. I asked him to go get it for me, and as he ran inside I turned to Caitlin and said, “That means he went to go look at my empty room before we even left.”