My day of departure is fast approaching, and I am as prepared as I would expect to be about a couple months out. Very little is planned, and my rough itinerary is markedly wrong and missing large chunks. A happy-go-lucky, play-it-by-ear attitude has permeated this entire trip planning process, and generally it has been intentional.

Today, two logistical surprises came up. “Surprises” is a bit of a stretch. If I had simply paid attention to what I was booking, they would not be surprises. The first surprise was my car rental. Rather than deal with the hassle of finding, buying, insuring, and then selling a car, I decided to simply rent a car from Palm Springs to Seattle. In my mind, I had one price that I thought I was paying per week, but reality did not match. The actual weekly price of the rental car was twice what I had thought. The total price is what I expected, but it turns out that I am incredibly bad at arithmetic when I am not trying to do arithmetic.

The second surprise was about the actual length of the trip. In my mind, this whole time, I have been saying and thinking that this trip is six weeks on the west coast. When planning out a rough itinerary—remember the one I just said was markedly wrong—some things felt a bit more rushed that I was expecting. Today I discovered that it’s because the trip I booked is actually one week shorter than I thought. It turns out that in addition to arithmetic, looking at calendars and comprehending what they mean is also not my strong suit.

None of these surprises bother me. They just caught me off guard. If I missed these very obvious things, what else, perhaps more important, did I miss? I guess I’ll find out in the coming days. Nothing to worry about, of course. A major part of this trip is not to worry, and I think I’m doing a pretty good job so far.

I woke up today feeling like it was just any other day. Per usual on Fridays, I stopped by Union Square Donuts on my way to the office and ate it with gloved hands as soon as I arrived. But today was different than any other Friday. Today was my last day at Formlabs—at least for eight weeks.

At the end of the day, my teammates gathered around the center table with delicious Elmondorf chocolate cookies that had bought for me to celebrate. Unlike the typical cake or cookies gathering for a departing formling, we all knew that I am not leaving forever, so it felt more upbeat. It was a nice sendoff, and I am grateful to have such wonderful co-workers.

Before leaving, I arranged my desk as I used to before taking a vacation—covered in snails. Due to the sensitive nature of my work, some things are [redacted]. A few fun snails to point out.

• Just below the center black box, you’ll see a snail with a white shell and a clearish body. From our new engineering line of materials, the shell is made from rigid resin and the body from elastic. It more resembles a snail than any other I have printed. Fun fact: we have wanted to develop an elastic-like resin since 2013.
• The blue snails scattered about are my experimentations with color kit. It’s my favorite resin in our Form X line. Colors are fun.
• The big snail at bottom right is the largest snail I could fit within the Form 2 build volume. During a paint night at work, I made it colorful.
• The big gray snail near the top left is an early Fuse 1 print from about a year ago. Unlike all the other 3D printed snails in this image, it is made using SLS, a process that fuses nylon powder.
• The big, white odd looking snail at the top left is a gift from a co-worker for Secret Santa a few years ago. The top of the hollow shell comes off and it is filled with smaller snails.

Hello internet friends,

I am about to embark on an adventure.

For the past seven years, I have been working as a mechanical engineer at Formlabs, a Boston-based 3D printer manufacturer. I have watched us grow from 5 employees to 500, from a small startup to a leader in the industry. After seven years of work, I have been given the opportunity to take seven weeks off. During this time, I will be heading to the west coast, driving from San Diego to Seattle, seeing friends and family along the way. Intentionally, I am planning as little as possible. I am writing this blog, in part, to document my travels.

Just as importantly, I am writing this blog to reflect on my travels. By taking a step back and putting my thoughts into words, I can look back on what is important and what is not, all the while becoming a better writer. That sounds pretty good to me.

What can you expect from this blog? Well, not much, to be honest. This blog is mostly for me and not for you. I can’t promise you great photos, because I am not a great photographer. I can promise you that the photos will be at least pretty OK and not have any stray fingers obscuring the lens or motion blur from moving the camera while taking the photo. I can’t promise you useful travel tips, because my traveling tends to be happy-go-lucky. I don’t tend to remember details on where exactly I went or what exactly I did. But I can craft a good story with some feeling. And I’ll probably make you laugh. At least there’s that.

I take off to the west coast next Thursday. In the time between now and then, I hope to share a bit more background—about my career, about this journey, and about what the deal is with all the snails.

So if you’re interested in following along, be sure to like and subscribe—which I think means adding this URL to your RSS feed. Do people still use RSS feeds?

OK before I end, I’ll add a picture. I hear pictures are pretty important for blogging.