Announcing Ploddington
I had an idea to walk across the country through small towns. My frustration was that in all the backpacking or exploring I’ve done, I was either on a hiking trail (separated from civilization) or just walking along the shoulder of a highway. I wanted to see if there was a way to plot long journeys while mainly walking through towns or suburbs.
Towards this end, I evaluated a bunch of different businesses to see if they would work as waypoints, and eventually settled on Dollar General. I chose DG for a few reasons. First, DG has an amazing number of storefronts and second, it has an interesting strategy for where they open new stores. I even managed to speak to DG public relations about the project, and though they were respectful and asked a lot of thoughtful questions, they ultimately declined to participate.
In the first week of July, I ran the first DG waypoint experiment, walking from my home in the vicinity of DC to the outskirts of Richmond. I covered a roughly 115-mile route and hit 9 Dollar Generals along the way. Here’s a rough version of my route, though this map doesn’t reflect how often I snuck off the highway and into little towns to see how much ground I could cover there. I will break down my Richmond plod in a series of forthcoming posts that will include more detailed maps and pictures from my journey.
The Richmond experiment yielded a number of important revelations, some of which are probably more obvious to the reader than they were to me. The first is that, at least between DC and Richmond, there are many places where towns simply don’t connect and the only path to cover ground between population centers is the highway, or the occasional hiking trail that you happen upon. This was a disappointment.
The other pretty obvious oversight I made was how dangerous it would feel to walk along the highway at certain points where the shoulder narrows, for instance on a bridge over a river or creek. It’s not that I didn’t anticipate these problems at all, but they were a bigger obstacle than I anticipated and there were even a few sections of the highway where I hopped on a bus rather than remain exposed on the shoulder in a particularly perilous stretch. I did ultimately cover about 95% of the journey on foot.
Based on this experience, I think a journey of hundreds of miles or longer, using DGs or any other brick-and-mortar site as waypoints presents a few significant challenges. But I’m going to continue. For now, in the form of smaller walks of 150 miles or so. The next will be following the C&O Canal Towpath between Georgetown and Cumberland Maryland which I think is the exact kind of balance I’m looking for - it's a long trail that is not always on roads but is mostly in low traffic areas and passes through towns you can step out and explore.
I will document all my various plods on this substack, and in particular I want to solicit feedback about where I should go, what I should see and the best route to take. I hope eventually I can build a community here and get people to walk with me, or at least do laundry at their house along the way. If you have thoughts/knowledge in these areas please reach out.
The Richmond posts will come out in serial form starting on Monday. The first one will be free, but many of them will be paywalled. I know this is sort of odd content to charge for, but it also costs money to take these trips and I hope if I can find my audience, you will enable me to go further and longer, and eventually I can find some viable method of crossing the country on neither highways or trails. There are a bunch of people I need to thank for their help and inspiration, but I will do so personally and individually rather than here.
See you on the road,
-Ploddington
