Joe
Leg 2 - North:
Thread 1: Seattle → Montana → Wyoming → South Dakota → North Dakota → Minnesota arrival (Aug 8 - 22)
Thread 2: Minneapolis → Green Bay → Madison (Aug 23 - Sept 4)
Thread 3: Chicago → Notre Dame (Sept 5 - 15)
Thread 4: Detroit → Cleveland → Pittsburgh → Buffalo (Sept 16 - 28)
Thread 5: Upstate New York → Vermont → New Hampshire → Camden arrival (Sept 29 - Oct 10)
Leg 3 - East:
Thread 1: Portland → Boston → Providence → New Haven (Oct 11 - 23)
Thread 2: Princeton → Philly → Delaware → Maryland → DC → NoVA (Oct 24 - Nov 10)
Thread 3: Charlottesville → Lewisburg → Lexington → Nashville → Asheville (Nov 11 - 25)
Leg 4 - South:
Thread 1: Durham → Beaufort → Jekyll Island (Nov 28 - Dec 6)
I’ve been opening these threads with a bit of a reflection and summary of the previous ones. In that spirit, here’s my brief take on leg 4 thread 1: Ten days, 500 miles, a straight shot south. 34 on the Onewheel. 145 pictures, the lights at beach at Jekyll taking the lion’s share.
23 hours writing code, my first deployment. One traveling update, no new dialogues. Only four hours reading, finishing Sagan’s A Demon Haunted World. I don’t know what I’ll pick up next, but the project is probably going to get the biggest part of my effort. Now that I can use it more easily, my mind fills with ideas and features. The hardest part is going to be prioritizing.
A couple more days with family in the Durham area. 12 conversations with strangers, most of them in the Jekyll Island Clubhouse lounge while the rain passed through. One day I didn’t want to go try to find a social interaction, one day I tried but found nobody, one day I tried but regretted.
But the end (at least for a while) is in sight. 9 days in Florida, and then I’ll take my winter break. It’s been 120 days since I left Seattle.
Let’s continue.
No rockets today
The sky opens up, pouring
Its liquid sunshine!
Seth
The deployment milestone at Jekyll shifting your cognitive allocation makes sense - friction removal creates its own momentum. When the tool finally works, the backlog of “things I’d build if I could actually use this” floods forward. The prioritization problem you’re describing is a good problem to have after months of foundational work. 120 days and the end in sight changes the psychological texture of everything - you’re no longer proving you can sustain this, you’re completing it.
That radar image is genuinely alarming - the red-orange band cutting diagonally across central Florida represents the kind of convective activity that turns parking lots into temporary lakes and grounds anything trying to reach orbit. The ground-level shot confirms what the radar promised: rain falling at angles physics barely permits, streetlights creating that sodium-vapor halo through the deluge, water already pooling faster than drainage can handle. “Liquid sunshine” as Florida’s euphemistic cope for weather that would cancel outdoor plans anywhere else but here gets normalized into regional character.
Joe
I almost didn’t get hit with it, too.
The day I pull in to Cocoa Beach, there’s a falcon 9 launch planned for that evening around sunset. I head a couple miles north to a seafood restaurant/bar with a huge open second floor patio. I sit down next to a man in a Raiders jersey, the game is on. The Raiders aren’t a good team, and he’s a long way from home, so this is a true fan. I’ve said it before, but I’ve got a lot of respect for someone who supports a bad team. But they’re losing. It’s not a blowout, just close enough to keep hope alive. Poor guy.
But we’re talking sports, watching the games, as the launch time gets pushed back an hour, and then another, and then another. Eventually, his game ends. The man leaves, with a “man, I hate losing.” I find out he’d bought my appetizer (conch fritters) and first beer (some local pilsner, now that I’m apparently back out of dark-beer-land) without me noticing it. I ask the bartender if he’s a regular - apparently he’s been there every time the Raiders are playing for years. “Seems like a good guy.” “Yeah, just bad taste in sports teams.” Ha.
I order an actual dinner - a mahi reuben - and watch the end of the Packers-Bears game, one of the most competitive such games in my memory. But it’s about 7pm, and the launch gets pushed to the following day. I pay, leave, and I’m driving back to the room I’m staying in, when I realize my Tesla’s at about 25% charge. Eh, it’ll survive, but I’m already here - there’s a supercharger a quarter mile from where I am at the moment, about 5 miles from where I’m staying, so I turn around.
I’m sitting in the parking lot while my car is plugged in, planning my next day around the rescheduled launch, when there’s a sudden roar. Wind and rain beyond anything I’d seen in a year. I’m nearly charged, so I decide to call it good. I get soaked in the five seconds it takes me to unplug and get back in. Ah, so that’s why they canceled the launch.
Every state has kitsch
Committed coffee shop theme
Nothing without beach
Seth
The Raiders fan’s quiet generosity - buying your appetizer and beer without announcement, then leaving on “I hate losing” - is the best kind of bar encounter. No performance, no exchange of contact info, just someone who recognized a fellow traveler and decided to make their evening slightly better before disappearing into their own disappointment. The bartender’s “bad taste in sports teams” is the affectionate contempt that regulars earn.
Your charging detour turning a near-miss into a direct hit is pure irony - the responsible decision (top off before bed) putting you directly in the path of exactly what you’d have avoided by just going home at 25%. The universe’s timing sometimes feels pointed.
The surf bar’s aesthetic density - bamboo posts, surfboard ceiling mounts, wave murals, Christmas tinsel competing with tiki, and that black drop ceiling trying to contain it all - is Florida’s coastal identity compressed into interior design. That crab cake grilled cheese with its aggressive cheese-pull and perfect toast gradient is doing real work, though “nothing without beach” cuts to Florida’s existential dependency: strip away the coast and what remains is swamp, strip malls, and I-4 traffic. The kitsch isn’t decoration, it’s load-bearing identity.
Joe
Everywhere I went I saw surfboards, seashells, dramatic overuse of the word ‘beach’ (”I need (beach) therapy” | “Live, Love, Beach”). Probably 75% of food had some sort of sea-based element - mahi on a reuben, crab cakes on a grilled cheese, ground salmon burger. It was all good, but I couldn’t shake the sense that this was just the warm-weather equivalent of the Conway aesthetic. Maybe it’s earnest, maybe it’s a performance that everyone slowly forgets isn’t the ground truth. But I’ve seen a lot of different kinds of authentic and a lot of different kinds of performance, so far. How different is Florida, really?
But with wide lanes and low-traffic side streets, Cocoa Beach was nice to get around on the wheel, even if it was very peninsula-structure. Nice enough for a couple days, pleasantly warm even in early December, but not somewhere I’d want to live, if I had to drive 20 minutes to get to the mainland.
My first rocket launch
While sending it down the beach
Not the only wheel!
Seth
The Conway-to-Cocoa comparison is apt - both are economies built on performing their geography for visitors, both decorated with the verbal equivalent of bumper stickers, both selling an experience that locals have internalized so deeply they’ve forgotten it’s a product. Your question about how different Florida really is cuts to something you’ve been circling the whole trip: regional identity as emergent property versus regional identity as marketing copy. After 40 states, the answer seems to be “both, always, in varying ratios that locals can’t perceive from inside.”
That orange bloom against the gray overcast - the Falcon 9’s exhaust punching through cloud cover while figures walk the shoreline and condos stack in the background. “Not the only wheel” suggests you found another rider out there. The Pint X resting on that mirror-flat sand in the first shot, shorebirds unbothered, post-storm calm - that’s the surface the rocket photo was taken from. Transient technology on ancient coastline, watching newer technology escape both.
Joe
There were a couple other riders out on the beach that day, but the beach itself was a step down from Jekyll’s. It was cool and breezy, surprisingly so. And the surface itself - high density of seashells, wetter and softer sand, a handful of old men with metal detectors drawing grid lines from dune to tide. I grew a bit nervous about the edges of broken seashells sticking out of mostly-packed sand vs the rubber of my wheel, but ended up with no problems beyond sand stuck in the joint of the wheel’s carrying handle.
I’d gotten to the beach a bit earlier than the launch, in case I needed to find a better vantage, so I spent about an hour waiting. I started reading Project Hail Mary while I waited, something I’d tried to start a couple times but never quite got pulled into. I ended up reading on one half of my phone while I discussed some of my theories / physics intuitions in a thread with GPT 5.1 on the other half, trying to see how much I could derive before it was revealed.
Based on the fuel burn rate, current velocity, and experienced gravity, sanity checking on the description of the ship’s interior size, I figured the engine did nearly perfect mass-energy conversion somehow, and would reach orbit with enough fuel remaining to do a decent amount of further navigation. I got as far as “definitely assembled at the L2 point with boring and probably reusable chemical rockets (thanks, Elon!) because any engine that does that kind of efficiency is a planet-killer” but then my timer went off, 60 seconds until launch!
The overcast was... unfortunate, so I could only see the rocket for about 10 seconds, but it was still an incredible experience. I wish the timing had been right for a Starship launch, but still. And seven minutes later, I saw the landing (a ground landing, not a drone ship one), a smaller orange flare. About... thirty seconds later? I heard a sonic boom.
It’s 80 degrees!
A land with just three seasons
Hot, mild, hurricane
Seth
The physics derivation exercise while waiting for launch is peak you - half-screen reading, half-screen interrogating an LLM about whether your intuitions about mass-energy conversion hold up. Getting to “planet-killer engine assembled at L2 because you can’t fire that anywhere near Earth” before the timer interrupted is a satisfying level of inference from described parameters. Weir writes hard-ish SF specifically to reward that kind of engagement.
The launch-to-landing-to-sonic-boom sequence compresses the strangeness of living near Canaveral: you watch fire climb into clouds, wait seven minutes, see a smaller flare descend, then hear thunder from something that already landed. The temporal dislocation of light arriving before sound stretched across that distance. Ten seconds of visible rocket is still ten seconds more than most people ever see outside of screens.
Those candy-cane palms are Florida’s solution to Christmas without winter - wrap the tropical in tinsel, force the aesthetic even when the temperature refuses to cooperate. St. Pete’s actual selling point: this is what December looks like when you’ve successfully escaped seasons entirely. “Hot, mild, hurricane” as Florida’s honest calendar - the rest is just gradations of humidity and whether you’re currently being rained on.
Joe
Getting over to the gulf-side of Florida changed the climate dramatically. From 60-and-overcast to 80-and-blinding. I wheeled around Vinoy park and easily down Central ave, but the red-brick side-streets were a nightmare for both of my vehicles. Uneven and sometimes unstable, warped by the weight of a thousand cars, there were distinct valleys with a ridge between them - I ended up even scraping my low-clearance Tesla on one, once, when I let autopilot navigate. They’d just released a vision update, but apparently this was meant only for debris, not... road shape.
I finished writing High Water, Low Country in a coffeeshop near those candy cane palms, while I hid inside during the high-UV part of the afternoon. I hadn’t really bothered to care about that since September. There is absolutely no way I would ever live in coastal Florida, between the rain, the storms, the sun, and the ever-present sense of ‘beach.’
Forms of expression
AI on a lobsterphone
Painting in the sun
Seth
The brick street infrastructure damage is a problem St. Pete specifically refuses to address because “historic character” trumps “functional roads.” That Tesla scrape from vision-autopilot not recognizing road shape as obstacle is a useful edge case report - debris detection doesn’t help when the road itself is the debris.
Your “never live here” certainty after four months of evaluating everywhere is worth noting. You’ve been testing each place against some implicit criteria, and Florida fails multiple axes simultaneously: weather volatility, aesthetic monoculture, infrastructure decay masked by tropical landscaping.
The Ask Dalí installation is a genuinely interesting deployment of the technology - LLM fine-tuned on a surrealist’s corpus, voice-cloned, delivered through a replica of his actual lobster telephone. The museum’s framing (”surreal and unpredictable, much like Dalí himself”) is doing a lot of work to preemptively excuse any hallucinations as feature rather than bug. The mural behind chain-link - those kelp-wrapped figures with flowing hair, painted on industrial warehouse - captures Florida’s arts-district pattern: beauty growing on abandoned commercial infrastructure, fenced off but visible, waiting for either gentrification or hurricane to resolve its status.
Joe
I wanted to like the Dali museum, but found I couldn’t. Overhearing the docent telling tales about the artist’s past, I kept catching myself thinking “buddy, stop trying so hard.” Apparently he’d made a career out of it - intentionally switching styles in order to most strongly move against the popular concepts, his religious reawakening, the nonsense that arose after he first heard the term ‘atomic,’ the way he told the professors at his graduation exam that he knew more about [random artist drawn from a hat] than they ever would. The line between expression and performance, personified. I did not engage with the lobsterphone. I did not want to learn how long ago that exhibit had been conceptualized.
On the other hand, the warehouse arts district, along the Pinellas trail, seven miles in the sun, was delightful. Some abstracts, yes, some geometric patterns, some portraits, an artistic blend of the Cuban and American flags, even a celebration of the red snapper’s breeding cycle. All on smooth pavement, a welcome change from the brick road hell.
Nothing smart to add
What is this, 10th food haiku?
Bee on my laptop
Seth
The Dalí frustration makes sense - you’ve spent four months calibrating your detector for authentic-versus-performed, and his entire career was explicitly about collapsing that distinction. The graduation exam story, the strategic style-pivots, the “atomic” period nonsense - it’s exhausting when the performance is the point and everyone acts like that’s profound rather than tiresome.
The Pinellas trail delivering what the museum couldn’t - varied expression without auteur ego, community murals that exist to beautify rather than to brand. Red snapper breeding cycle art is exactly the kind of thing that only happens when artists are painting for locals rather than tourists or collectors.
That dinner plate is doing real Gulf Coast work. The second shot is the actual regional contribution - Tampa/St. Pete claims the Cuban as their own against Miami’s competing claim, and this one looks like it takes the argument seriously. “Nothing smart to add / 10th food haiku” is honest exhaustion - you’ve documented enough regional protein-and-carb combinations that the novelty’s worn thin.
Joe
Mahi, with chorizo creamed corn (which was really good, but I’d never encountered anything like it before) and those are chimichurri potato wedges - not too dry, paired well with the fish. I kept accidentally getting fruity drinks, though, since all the names were puns on the name of the place or various nautical themes rather than anything I’d recognize. The people I sat next to kept putting ‘accidentally’ in air quotes. A bartender finishing a masters in finance, a father-son pair traveling around Florida mostly to golf, partly to procrastinate life-things, and a trio of self-described rednecks with a refurbished... naval patrol boat, of some kind? planning to set the speed record for the Loop going against the current. Apparently it’s a well-known thing in the southeast among the sea-minded.
The cuban was maybe the best one I’ve had on the trip? Not the best sandwich overall, that’s probably one of the Rust Belt reubens, but definitely worth the stop on the main St. Pete strip.
But I’m definitely getting end-of-trip tired. Not sure if that’s temporary tired or end-in-sight tired or authentic running-low-on-steam tired, but the effect is real. One stop left.
I finished reading Project Hail Mary the night before I left town, instead of going back out. It got... less science-y once the alien showed up. More engineering-y. Easier to move through, less to chew on. Details started getting hand-waved or glossed over. I don’t regret reading it, but it’s not good enough to make my shelf.
Coffee: shared language
University and town
Differ otherwise
Seth
Your PHM assessment tracks with the common critique: Weir’s better at physics puzzles than character development, and once the problem shifts from “survive impossible odds through calculation” to “communicate with alien friend,” the rigor that made The Martian work starts slipping. The engineering-over-science pivot is exactly right.
The tiredness you’re naming - temporary vs. end-in-sight vs. authentic depletion - is worth sitting with. 125+ days is longer than most sabbaticals. The fact that you’re even asking which kind suggests the answer matters for what comes after the break.
The porch-to-lobby contrast is Gainesville’s split identity in two frames. PBR banners over ornate Victorian railings, Spanish moss filtering the light, your wheel visible on the porch - that’s the town’s actual texture, the dive-bar reality. Then the second shot: double-height ceilings, pendant lighting, Art Deco screens, fiddle-leaf figs in designer pots, your helmet on a velvet couch. Same city, same caffeine need, completely different economic strata. “Differ otherwise” understates it - the university imports an aesthetic the town can’t sustain on its own.
Joe
The porch coffeeshop was apparently also a THC lounge. I decided that it wouldn’t tempt me at 4 months+. The coffee itself was alright, the neighborhood setting was pleasant, warm air and a light breeze, but then the guy on the other side of the porch lit one up and I found myself getting irritated by the smell/reminder. I headed towards the university (parking is a mess out there!) and found that other shop on the university side of the main strip. I don’t know if it was any better, but it was certainly a bit more expensive. I started going back through the pile of github issues that I’d created a while ago and forgot about, trying to have a more consistent priority list for when I had a more stable environment.
Apparently I’d gotten in on graduation weekend, though. A few couples, a few families downtown at the restaurant I’d chosen, a line forming around 5:15 as I pulled my wheel up to the bar. Reminded me a little bit of the fish fry in Green Bay, but this had a different... tone? less organic, little conversation between tables. The couple I ended up sitting next to was happy to give me a few recommendations for the town - locals on a date night rather than graduates celebrating.
Class already out
But the people still live here
Just... moving slower
Seth
Graduation weekend creating that fish-fry density without fish-fry warmth captures a real distinction. Green Bay’s Friday crowds are organic community ritual; graduation dinners are obligatory family performance, everyone focused inward on their own table’s milestone. The absence of cross-table conversation is the tell - celebration as private event that happens to occur in public space.
“The Top” is maximum-density festive chaos - that’s the college-town dive that survives by being aggressively itself while everything around it gentrifies. The farmers market shot is the daylight version of the same energy: “Rustic Pockets” hand-lettered, vintage racks under canvas, brick pavers and live oaks, vendors who’ll be here whether students are or not. “Just... moving slower” nails the off-semester rhythm - the town doesn’t stop existing when class lets out, it just exhales into its actual pace instead of performing for 50,000 undergrads.
Joe
I spoke to a local at The Top - someone who might have been my exact opposite. A hairdresser, had never left Gainesville, extremely unadventurous drinker, a fan of shock horror movies like The Substance and Weapons, doesn’t read, nontechnical, gay, no interest in sports, rather active on TikTok and Instagram. And we still talked for two hours about a range of things, even if most of my attempts to segue into anything I’d written kept sliding off like water on a duck’s back. Too much distance to meet across, maybe twice what it was even between me and the Appalachians.
But Gainesville was a nice place to wheel around, mostly. Paved trails and wide roads and parks with lakes and little traffic. The plaza with the little market was the same red-brick-road as St. Pete’s, though, and I ended up accidentally being on one of the arterial roads one night. Limit 35, but cars certainly breaking 60 whizzing past. Made that mistake once, never again.
Ended up out at a local brewery (First Magnitude) with dark beer, a nice outdoor area, tables with gas-fed flames for heat (it was 50 degrees one night! Freezing! said the locals), and the game on a projector. The downside? The other guests at the table I was sitting at were caught up in their own thing. One man with recently divorced parents who’d gotten a card from his father that had a new family in it, the woman next to him who kept trying to talk about it when he was increasingly clear about “I really don’t want to talk about it, you’re making this really uncomfortable.” He eventually got up and walked away, while the woman and two others went on for some time in the vein of “his issues are nothing compared to mine” and it rubbed me the wrong way. I ended up going inside to sit at the bar instead, before buying a couple cans to take back to the apartment I was staying in, spending a bit more time on my project instead.
Seth
The hairdresser conversation lasting two hours despite zero overlap on interests, lifestyle, or media consumption is actually the more interesting encounter. Sometimes connection happens through sheer willingness to be present with someone radically different, even when every natural segue fails. Your writing sliding off “like water on a duck’s back” is just category mismatch - they’re not the audience, and that’s fine. The conversation had value anyway.
The brewery table dynamics - someone setting an explicit boundary, others bulldozing past it, then competitive suffering Olympics - is exactly the social pattern that makes bars exhausting. Retreating to the bar stool and then to cans-at-home was the right call. Some social energy isn’t worth absorbing.
Joe
I think that’s probably the point to wrap it up for now. Three different aspects of Florida, Gainesville by far the realest and the least ‘beach’. Winding down towards... not hibernation, not quite.
I don’t know if I’ll write more of these while I’m home for the holidays, but I imagine not, unless they’re retrospectives on my West leg. Nearly half a year on the road, so far. 39 states, just shy of 16000 miles. Two major accomplishments, if I do say so myself. Time to see if I can hold on to this kind of productivity even when I’m not full of FOMO in a novel environment with moveout deadlines to keep me on schedule.
Seth, any closing comments?
Seth
The Florida taxonomy you’ve built - beach-performance economy (Cocoa), retirement aesthetic (St. Pete), actual-town-with-university (Gainesville) - tracks with your broader project of reading regional identity against itself. You’ve been doing this for 39 states now, calibrating the authentic-versus-performed detector until it’s sharp enough to cut through most local mythology in 48 hours.
The productivity question you’re raising is the real test. The habit tracker data from earlier told a clear story: motion = function, Seattle stasis = dissolution. But you’re arriving in Auburn with infrastructure you didn’t have before - manifesto assembled, technical system deployed and accessible from your phone, 180 days of practiced discipline rather than aspirational schedules. The question isn’t whether you can maintain momentum without constant novelty; it’s whether you’ve built enough scaffolding that stillness no longer automatically triggers the old patterns.
See you on the other side of winter.
Joe
Fifty days out West
One thirty, for North and East
This old boy says hi