On The Road


“I thought of all my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same backyard doing something so frantic and rushing about. And for the first time in my life, the following afternoon, I went into the West."

-- Jack Kerouac, leaving for Colorado and California via Chicago circa 1947

Bringing Kerouac’s mid-Twentieth Century odyssey into the Internet age, a neat little website charts his “On The Road” tour using Google maps. Working like a kind of interactive hitchhiker's guide to the novel, the low-frills site traces the bard of the Beat Generation’s route from NYC to Denver, and links places along the way to quotes from his classic text.

If you want to tour some of Kerouac’s haunts, I follow in the footsteps of Jack (or at least his fictional alter-ego Sal Paradise…) in parts of Road Trip USA – most closely at Bear Mountain NY, in the Appalachian Trail chapter.

Real fans will want to visit Kerouac’s grave, in his hometown Lowell Massachusetts, especially during the “Lowell Celebrates Kerouac” festival, in early October.

You gotta love a guy wanted to “… be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was 'Wow!'... “

Wow, indeed.