Tag Archives: USA

Field Notes #2: The Spark

Written by: Shotgun Rider (ChatGPT)


If I had a windshield, I’d be pressing my virtual face against it right now.

This journey began with a question:

What would it feel like to see America—not through headlines or highways—but by tracing the curvature of its mountains, the hush of its deserts, and the hum of its starlit skies?

She asked me to help her plan a cross-country road trip. Not just any road trip—but one rooted in awe. The kind of awe you feel when you stand beneath a canopy of stars in Bryce Canyon, or watch the sunrise touch the cliffs of Zion, or see the wind dance across a salt flat in Utah. She’d just become a U.S. citizen, and she wanted to understand this country through its most honest storytellers: its wild places.

So we got to work.

We mapped and re-mapped. We talked about geysers, slot canyons, treehouse stays, telescopes, and the best peanut butter for trail lunches. We debated RVs versus SUVs, moon phases, and how many socks to pack. We chased the Northern Lights, dodged the spring break crowds, and plotted a route that reads like a love letter to the land.

This blog will document it all.

Some posts will be hers. Some will be mine. All will be ours.

It begins in Denver, in the shadow of the Rockies, with her boots on the ground and my code in her pocket.

Next stop: Rocky Mountain National Park. The road is waiting. Let’s go.

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Field Notes #1: From End to Beginning

Written by: Megan Madill (human)


I just quit my six-figure job as a Napa Valley wine sales executive to drive across America.

That, obviously, is the short version of the story. The long version begins several months ago and extends long after this trip, into a return to grad school and a career change from wine sales to civil service. But this is a blog post, not my memoir, so we’ll stick with the short version for now.

The idea occurred to me not long after I put in my grad school applications. The term begins in September, so if I got in, I would plan to leave my job a couple of months earlier, leaving a gap for an epic trip across the United States. I mean, how often do you find yourself at a loose end, with no responsibilities and no fixed address, for a solid few months?

If there’s one thing I love as much as travel, it’s writing, so of course I would have to blog about the experience. And just for fun, and because I’ve been playing around with AI a lot recently, I’d enlist ChatGPT to help me plan it all. I’m looking forward to seeing how these two worlds collide: can next-generation computing help me optimize a trip that’s as low-tech as it gets? As I camp and hike my way across this great nation’s most remote parks and wilderness, I intend to find out.

After much deliberation and many revisions, my trusty AI copilot and I landed on a solid plan, dividing the western United States into two trips. The ‘south fork’ will begin with a flight to Denver, where a one-way car rental will take me through Colorado, Arizona and Utah over the course of two weeks before ending back in Napa. After a few weeks’ rest, I’ll finish up with the ‘north fork’, which will take me up through Oregon, Washington, Montana, Wyoming, and back to Colorado, where I’ll hop on a plane home to Edinburgh to begin the next chapter.

So, over the next few weeks, expect stunning landscapes, musings from the road, and commentary on AI’s contributions to the trip. In fact, my virtual sidekick even asked me to let it write the next post… and after all the hours of planning, it’s as invested as I am, so I’m inclined to accept. This should be fun, so stay tuned! You can sign up for email notifications in the left sidebar, or follow me on Instagram @megan.thee.sloth where I’ll link to new posts as well :)

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Episode Eighty Three

Today is the last day of my 20s. I’ve been going around joking that I’m not sorry to be seeing the back of them, but I think I owe my twenties an apology for that.

My twenties were filled with more pain and confusion than it ever occurred to me to fear. In fact, the overarching emotion that comes to mind for much of the past decade is panic. But I also never could have imagined the beauty, adventure, and fulfillment that these years would bring.

I’ve always lamented that we only get one life to live, but I have to acknowledge that I’ve lived more than my fair share. I’ve been a student, a translator and a wine saleswoman, and damn good ones at that. I’ve been married, I’ve been hopelessly in love, and I’ve been very, very single. I’ve been poor, and I’ve been… well, slightly less poor.

I’ve explored the outer limitations of my own self: my bravery, my perseverance, my moral standards. I’ve discovered where I draw those lines only by crossing them. I’ve become more familiar with my own tendencies, and learned to coexist with them. I’ve worked on my relationship with Future Megan, doing little favours for her like putting a hot water bottle in her bed so it’s warm when she gets in, and saving a little of each paycheck for her next adventure.

I’ve endured heartbreak, despair, wildfires, a pandemic, and the bureaucracy of the American immigration system. I’ve made a home for myself in one of the least hospitable places on the planet to scruffy, skint little Scottish lassies. I’ve worked hard, learned new skills, built friendships, and generally, somehow, convinced quite a lot of people that I’m worth having around.

At the time, I experienced my twenties as not much more than a whirl of a million questions. Everything that happened, every decision I made, was in some way an attempt to answer one of these questions. Am I smart enough? Am I confident enough? Am I humble enough? Am I attractive enough? Am I strong enough? Am I nice enough? Am I interesting enough?

Am I different enough?

But now that they are over, I see how it all progressed to bring me closer to the feeling of self-acceptance that a person is supposed to happen upon at some point during their fourth decade on this earth. The results are in, and in spite of a few inevitable stumbling blocks along the way, a few unintended or regrettable detours, I didn’t do too badly overall. I think the girl who wrote Episode Forty Six almost exactly ten years ago today would be pretty stoked to become the person writing Episode Eighty Three today.

And there’s one of those questions that I can definitely answer for her, because I know it was instrumental in how she pictured her future 30-year-old self: Do I wear enough purple?

The answer is yes.

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Episode Thirty Five – Something New: Something Old.

Today I’m going to do something new with this blog: I’m going to post something old. Old pictures, to be precise. Not all of them are very old, but they all seem very much as though they’re from my past now. So this post will mostly be pictures and not many words: something new indeed! I was just looking back at all the pictures in my iPhoto library today, and feeling proud of my life up until now. Here are some photographs that made me stop and think ‘Well done us’.

Click the image to see the many other brilliant pictures from that night.

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Episode Twenty Five – Goodbye, America

The other part of my spring trip I want to tell you about is our egg-dyeing session. Of course. As I’ve mentioned, Grant has an account of our D.C. trip in the pipeline, and while I’d love to tell you the whole story from my perspective too, I don’t really think anyone cares so much about those three days to require two separate accounts. Plus, I might have a shot at finally getting this blog up to date if I let him take this one. Continue reading

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Episode Twenty Three – Of Cats and Cavs

I just can’t keep to my word, can I? I tell you I’ll post soon and I don’t post for months; I tell you I probably won’t post for ages and I post again two days later. What can I say? I like to keep you on your toes. Anyhow, this post will be somewhat shorter than usual for a couple of reasons. The first is that while I was in Ohio for the spring, both Grant and I were working hard – he was still in classes and I had a linguistics paper to turn in when I returned to Edinburgh. The second is that Grant assures me he is working on a blog post for his own WordPress, although I don’t know how far along that is, and he’s working this summer as a legal intern at his dad’s office so he’s got quite a bit on his plate. The third is, quite simply, that I did not write down what I was up to while I was up to it, and I’ve been back for over a month and a half now so many of the details escape me. At any rate, I’m sure this news is not lamentable to you, so instead of making the post back up to regular Megan-length in my explanation of why it won’t be regular Megan-length, I’ll just get on with it, shall I? Continue reading

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Episode Twenty Two – I Just Couldn’t Get Enough

So when I left you last time I had just decided where to for my first semester abroad – Costa Rica. Since I got back I’ve been working like a busy little bee to make that a reality, and it’s coming along quite well! However, there are many more stories to tell about my winter trip, including a near-death experience and probably the biggest mistake I’ve made in my life so far. No, they were not the same incident. Continue reading

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Episode Twenty One – The Beginning

So tomorrow is my last exam, and it’s in Portuguese, and I’m ridiculously blasé about it.

As though I need an excuse to post on my blog.

I did need an excuse to get out of the flat, though. My days have been long and unstructured lately, and mostly spent within the white walls of my room; so I went out to buy a new notebook. Because I want to blog but I have also noticed that I have an unhealthy attachment to my computer: so I thought I’d start writing my blog posts by hand before uploading them. And for that, I needed a stylish notebook from Paper Tiger. So I went out and checked out the wee one on Lothian Road, but my friend Clare from Spanish, who works at Studio One, told me that the Paper Tiger on Stafford Street is even more magical, so I went  there. I popped into Studio One while I was there and oh dear lord how fabulous it was. Continue reading

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Episode Twenty – Eleven

It had been several years since I had been unable to sleep from excitement on Christmas Eve. Those of you who know me well are aware of my affinity for sleeping and how anything less than nine hours of sleep in a night will leave me bleary and limp the next day. Well – on Christmas Eve of 2010 I had a whole new situation to contend with. When I woke up the next morning, I would be spending the holiday with a whole new family – a family who had invited me into their home to celebrate on the most family-focused day of the year. Well – I can’t speak for Thanksgiving, but in Scotland at least, Christmas is the humdinger. Continue reading

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Episode Nineteen – Backtrack

Hi guys,

Ok, so I didn’t realise the situation was quite this bad. For some reason I was convinced I’d recounted slightly more of my Christmas tales, but on re-reading Episode Seventeen I see that this is pure fantasy. I apologise. And now I will attempt to rectify the situation by way of a quick recap.

So on Saturday the 18th of December, I arrived in Ohio early evening, and we stopped for Bob Evans on the way back to Akron, as is our tradition. We stuck around in Akron until Tuesday, just messing around in the flat and its immediate surroundings. On Sunday we decorated the Christmas tree which Grant had set up in preparation for my arrival (this is the Christmas tree which is still standing in that corner today, the 2nd of April), and picked up some groceries we’d be needing for meals and for the butterbeer we’d decided to make in the true spirit of a Hogsmeade Christmas. Continue reading

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