This Minimalist Travel Guide Gives Detailed Directions for Recreating Kerouac’s On the Road
As mapped out by Google, the trip would take about 272 hours and 15 minutes
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German communications student Gregor Weichbrodt has made it easy for Jack Kerouac fans to retrace the famously wandering journey in On the Road. His minimalist travel guide, On the Road for 17527 Miles, contains simple, printed directions correlating to each chapter in the book.
Weichbrodt put in all the locations mentioned in the book into Google and got an incredibly lengthy set of instructions 55 pages long. He divided it up by the chapters in Kerouac's original book. The trip, as mapped out by Google, would take about 272 hours and 15 minutes total time on the road.
It's not an especially engaging read:
But reading isn't the point. The point is to get out there and find out if you're one of "the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, made to be saved, desirious of everything at the same time..."
And if you're not, you can always take a similar literary tour without getting in the car, with one of the many other On the Road-based Google maps out there, including these by Dennis Mansker.