welcome to my project blog.
The night before I left Raleigh, I was celebrating with my friends Garrett and Loren at their graduation party. I had met them in high school, but I wasn’t graduating with them because I had taken a gap year at one point during my college career. I planned on taking another semester off when I returned home from the adventure I was going to embark on this summer. I don’t know, something about taking my time with this whole college thing had been working for me thus far, so I was going to continue going with the flow. The party was wholesome, there was great food, and I met some new people while reconnecting with old ones. I also came dangerously close to realizing no one should hand me a karaoke mic, ever. Overall, it was a great time, and looking back, I really valued having that one night of familiarity with friends before hitting the road, where almost everyone and everywhere was unfamiliar and unknown.
So what’s going on, exactly?
I was all packed for the next day and nearly every last “to-do” had been done. But I still need to explain to you, the reader, what exactly it is that I’m doing. Let’s cover all of the basics. WHO? I’m Tushar Varma. Hi. I’m an advertising student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Go heels! When I’m not living in Chapel Hill, I’m with my family in Raleigh. I have an incredible younger sister, Nikki, who also attends UNC. When I have free time, I’m most likely watching a movie, going to trivia, or playing a board game—always with a friend. I miss painting and drawing. I love pushing out of my comfort zone. That’s all you need to know for now. WHERE and WHEN? On May 15, 2022, I hopped into my red Prius, Lola, for 2.5 months, driving south from RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA, and counter-clockwise around the mainland United States. I drove through the charming and historic American South, through the deserts and mountains of the Southwest, up the coast of California to the Pacific Northwest, under the big skies of Montana all the way to the Windy City and the Big Apple, and then back home through our nation’s capital. Approximately 15,000 miles. WHAT? I was dedicated to a project I had come up with over the past year: to create a documentary about the irreplaceable value independent bookstores create for their local communities, and how that value can’t be replicated by Amazon. This project took me to almost 100 bookstores around the country, and I shot 27 interviews to contribute to the film I’m working on editing right now, for release in early 2023. I received funding for the program through the UNC Honors Carolina Burch Fellowship, and partially funded the project myself. WHY? Well, there’s a whole ‘nother story in that question.
How this all began.
Remember that gap year that I mentioned? Well, I ended up receiving a fellowship for that as well for the 2020-2021 academic school year—the COVID year. The Global Gap Year Fellowship offered me a bridge year opportunity between my sophomore and junior years of college, and typically the program allowed recipients to go pretty much anywhere in the world. Our circumstances were influenced by safety policies to protect us against the pandemic, so I couldn’t leave the United States during my year. I spent the first few months at home and then left for the Big Island of Hawai’i to work on a farm and learn about sustainable practices in HONOKA’A, HAWAI’I. After my time on the farm was done, I moved to HILO, HAWAI’I, where I ended up stumbling upon a used bookstore called Turn The Page that had just opened. It was important to me that while I was in Hawai’i, I’d be volunteering and meeting as many folks as I could. They let me volunteer there, and then a lot of stuff happened very quickly. The condensed version is that I ended up moving into the bookstore for the rest of my time in Hilo, and ran the day-to-day operations myself for a few weeks while the owner had to leave town for important matters. I opened and closed the store, organized and arranged books, helped customers find what they were looking for, and worked with two wonderful volunteers. My time at the bookstore really got me thinking about how I used to volunteer at the library near my house in Raleigh and read constantly before college. In fact, the library had been such an important space for me even before I was old enough to volunteer there. It was a place I knew I was safe, within walking distance from my house, where I could get lost in any world of my choosing, and live a life of adventure, magic, or intergalactic travel. The bookstore in Hilo got me thinking about how I wanted to reconnect with special bookspaces around the country someday. When I came back home, I shared these thoughts with my mentor, Friederike, and she suggested I do something about it. I ended up looking into the Burch Fellowship and fleshed out my idea a bit more. To take it a step further, I decided to capture the stories of bookstore owners in a documentary format. To be clear, I’m not an experienced documentarian or journalist, but playing with video and audio had been on my mind for a while, so I thought “why not?” Never did I actually think I’d get the chance to make a wild, stray thought a reality, but now that I’m here, I’d like to introduce you to my project: The Greatest Bookscapes.
Planning My Route
There were an endless number of tasks that had to be accomplished before I could actually set out on the road. To name a few, I had to: create a list of notable, independent bookstores around the country to visit; put all of these bookstores on a map, and craft a route I could realistically take over the span of the summer (about 11-12 weeks); reach out to those bookstores about my project and hopefully have 20-30 willing to sit down with me; purchase any equipment I’d need for the documentary and any supplies I would need for a road trip in general; sit down with my mentors and any friends who had done a road trip for advice; make sure my car was in shape to go; find a way to pack everything in a small car; make a budget that I could realistically follow; find Airbnbs, friends, campsite, hotels/motels to stay at each night; create release forms to send to bookstores and schedule exact meeting dates; make a living calendar/itinerary for the project. It was all a lot to figure out, but I was glad to have some support along the way. The problem was that I’m a perfectionist and I was also enrolled in classes during the months leading up to my departure, so I was struggling with getting everything I wanted to get done on time. This was a marathon, not a sprint, and I had to pace myself accordingly, with one step at a time.
To create my route, I essentially spent a few days digging through as many blogs as I could find on the internet about special, unique, grand, quirky, tiny, [insert adjective here] independent bookstores that people loved around the country. I had to remove some that had gone out of business during the pandemic because my project was focusing on indie businesses that had survived the shutdowns and the impact of Amazon, and why they were valuable enough to their communities to still be in business. I also asked my friends and followers on social media to tell me about any memorable bookstores they had visited, and soon enough, I had a pretty long list. I’m a visual learner, so I thought to throw all of these bookstores on a map, and quickly realized that there were way too many on my radar. If I tried to visit every indie bookstore in the US, I would probably burn out and run out of money—fast. The map went through some edits and I thought to remove a few states from my map to visit some atypical bookstores for the documentary. I severely limited the number of bookstores I’d be interviewing in New England because you can do a whole documentary on how many stores they have up there—on the island of Manhattan alone, for that matter. Pretty soon, I had a route with some interesting stores from various places that were eager to meet with me and be a part of the project.
Note: I clearly didn’t trace the actual highways I took to get from place to place. I drove about 15,000 miles on this trip, using the fastest route on Apple Maps to get from place to place, day by day. All states marked in yellow are ones that I traveled through during this project.
A Bit of Mental Preparation
Creating boundaries for this project was a bittersweet process. I didn’t know when I would be doing something like this again, so, naturally, I wanted to visit as many bookstores in as many different cities as possible. I think I would’ve driven to Alaska and back if money and time would’ve allowed. Alas, boundaries are always important because we don’t run on batteries, and I wanted to ensure I wasn’t spreading myself too thin.
With a stroke of luck, I quickly found out that my Prius could fit a lot more than I originally thought it could—especially while I was traveling alone. Since I had never done a trip like this before, I took the time to ask all of the people I knew who had done a long car trip about what they packed on their trips—and more importantly, what they wished they had packed. I also asked my faculty mentor for a run-down of the kind of equipment I shouldn’t forget to bring along. After I had enough time to mull everyone’s advice over a few times, here are some things I tried to stay mindful of.
There’s absolutely NO way to go about doing this perfectly. The perfectionist truly had to be thrown out, or this would’ve become a truly miserable part of the journey. Even during the day before I was set to leave for my first stop, I was thinking of things I might need to pack for the trip. At the time, I viewed the tugging in my gut as an indication that I wasn’t ready to leave yet, but now I’m sure it was just pre-departure jitters. You have to leave at some point for the journey to actually happen.
I was also constantly thinking of how to best capture the in-betweeners—the time between my interviews for the documentary—so I could best show my friends and family afterward. I’ve always loved video editing and putting moments together in a fun way, so I was wondering if I had packed enough camera equipment. Did I need a GoPro? I’ll borrow one, just in case. Did I need…an underwater casing for my GoPro? Sure… I might? I’ll try to pack on just in case. Toward the beginning of the trip, I found myself recording almost everything I did, from the moment I woke up, until the moment I fell asleep. It took me about six weeks to ease up on that when I came to terms with how I didn’t need to document every second of this trip. Some of it could just be for me, and that was okay. I guess the overall lesson in this little ramble is that if you’re embarking on a journey, or starting something that you have absolutely no experience doing, just go easy on yourself. Accepting that you’re going to be learning things along the way really helps prep the perfectionist’s mind to view upcoming obstacles as opportunities.
Be prepared for the food situation. In my mind, I cooked up this lovely image of me shopping locally at farmers’ markets while I was on the road, making sandwiches in my car, and really saving on food costs by avoiding eating out as much as I could. Oh, boy. Oh, boy.
Let’s just say that I was not the best at following through with what I had envisioned for myself… and I’m not going to suggest that there’s one right way to go about planning how you do your meals. You just have to be realistic with yourself. For example, I left home with a crate of unperishable snacks and a cooler with some short-term, necessary items like a loaf of bread, coffee creamer, bananas—stuff like that. This was good! Definitely a great start… kinda. Let’s just say a lot of those perishable snacks were not eaten during those weeks on the trip. There were several times when it had slipped my mind that I needed to replace the ice in my cooler and I had to toss some stuff out. Mind you, I was out in the summer, and the car got HOT when the AC wasn’t blasting.
All I have to say about food is that you may be inclined to pack a million snacks to be “prepared.” You’ll have a small cooler you pack with things that you like. Make sure you are keeping in mind that you will have to be getting new ice daily. Your trail mix M&Ms will melt and then you’ll have a weird mystery Ziploc bag you can’t remember the origin of. The fast-food receipts will begin to clutter your little front area because you had a long day and you just needed a bite to eat quickly, so that loaf of bread in your cooler will go uneaten just a bit longer. So, if I could give any advice on this topic, pack a few, non-perishable snacks and a loaf of bread, and some PB & J, and then purchase accordingly, week-by-week, and try to save money by making at least one meal a day! Usually, that meant breakfast for me, and I would have some homemade coffee and a banana and be on my way.
Cutting out the BIG daily cost—coffee! Now, admittedly, I had seen a lot of videos of “van life” vloggers before I departed for this project. Something about my phone always listening to me did wonders for the Facebook algorithms. Regardless—even though my circumstances didn’t exactly involve me living out of my car, something I knew I wanted to do was make my own coffee as much as possible. I generally drink a cup of coffee in the morning and a cup of chai around 4 pm every day, especially if I’m home with my parents. If I forego coffee any given day, I start feeling pretty slow and drowsy, but I didn’t want to spend money on getting expensive coffee on the road every day. I got a 1) handheld, manual coffee grinder, 2) a small French Press, 3) a bag of coffee beans; a cheap tumbler with a lid from Target, 4) a pretty inexpensive water thermos that could heat up water with a car plug attachment, and 5) a bottle of French vanilla creamer in the cooler. Of course, I didn’t do this every day—even though I probably could have with some more self-discipline. But spending 10 minutes grinding coffee and then making a fresh brew out in the woods after having camped felt amazing. It was definitely nice to have my mind focusing on something simple and ritualistic in the morning that didn’t involve me powering up for the day by scrolling through my phone. It helped me start the day with a clear head, and was a good solution to my coffee consumption habits from a financial aspect. And it was delicious.
Making sure I had car maintenance covered. When it comes to car maintenance, I really don’t know anything. I’m talking about changing a tire, using jumper cables, checking tire pressure, etc. And this is something I definitely would’ve spent time learning if I had a bit more time before my trip because you never know what can happen on the road. Thankfully, I didn’t have any car troubles during the 2.5 months I was out there, but I made sure to keep any of the equipment I would need in my car, just in case, as one probably should even if they’re not on a long road trip. I also had a AAA card made just in case I got into trouble and needed towing, and I made sure to get my car serviced once I made it to the West coast. This is probably all common-sense stuff, but it’s worth noting that keeping these things in mind gave me some peace on the road.
Scheduling in time to rest. Being on the road and doing something new and exciting constantly was a great feeling, but after a while, the fast-paced nature of every day took a toll on me and left me pretty exhausted. I knew this was something I would deal with before I headed out because I had faced serious burnout once before and I didn’t plan on repeating it again. I basically scheduled a few points during the trip where I spent about a week in one city—instead of moving around every day—so I could recharge and just practice some intentional self-care. These rest weeks happened every three weeks or so, and I honestly don’t know if I would’ve finished my journey with high energy if I hadn’t had those. Just speaking for myself, if I feel like I’m not doing something work-related during the day, I suffer from serious “productivity guilt,” but it was so important to have days where I sat on the couch of my friend’s house and just watched TV for hours because you just can’t be productive on a low-battery. Rest is part of the productivity process. Put that on a coffee mug.
And these are just some things I kept in mind to prepare me for the rigors of a cross-country road trip. I hope these are of any value to you, whether you’re planning on doing something like this or not. Oddly enough, I wasn’t really worried about the documentary-shooting part too much. I’m great at chatting with people and finding good camera angles. I knew that the best way to get better at shooting interviews was to practice. After my first few interviews, I could see myself improving with my setup/take-down time, and I also found myself referring to my notes less when asking my questions.
The Ultimate Packing List
Packing for an 11-week trip away from home is no joke. Making sure everything was compact enough to fit in a Prius wasn’t all that funny either. But hey, in the end, I made it all work with some room to spare. If you watched the little video I made, here’s a more in-depth list of what I packed. You can get most of these items from Target, REI, and your local camera store!
SLEEPING
Originally, I was planning on sleeping in my car some nights. Alas, it is tricky to fit everything I needed in a Prius and still have room to sleep comfortably. Fortunately, I spent half of the trip sleeping with friends around the country, camped for about 25% of the nights, and put some money into sleeping at a motel/Airbnb every now and then.
If you plan on spending nights in your car, you may add some sort of padding/mattress/topper that fits your car to the list.
Pillow + Blanket
Camping items: sleeping bag, air pad, tent
CLOTHES + ACCESSORIES
Having to do laundry at a laundromat or a friend’s place is going to be inevitable on a trip like this, of course. With that in mind, I packed enough outfits to last me 7-10 days before the need for doing laundry arose. I was on the road during the summer, so you need to make sure you pack seasonally! I also did some trips to National Parks in between bookstores, so I packed for that as well.
4-5 pairs of jeans/pants
4-5 pairs of casual shorts, 2 pairs of outdoor shorts, 2 swim trunks
3-4 shirts, 5 t-shirts, 2 hiking shirts
4 pairs of pajamas
7 pairs of socks, 7 pairs of underwear
Swim goggles
Baseball caps
Accessories (rings, earrings, jewelry, watch)
Raincoat
Hoodie + sweater
Hiking boots
Tennis shoes
Comfort shoes (i.e. my Vans!)
EQUIPMENT
This part is not necessary if you aren’t shooting a documentary. Duh.
A backpack to store stand lights, diffusers, reflectors, etc.
A bag to store tripods and stands for lights (I found a bag meant for tennis rackets to be a solution for carrying these long items so I didn’t have to spend money buying a special bag)
A camera bag for the camera, microphones, extra batteries, and any charging cords
OUTDOORS
If I’m going around the country, I definitely want to visit some National Parks along the way! I won’t be doing any overnight hikes where I won’t have access to my car, so my hiking bag will just be for day hikes.
Hiking backpack
Sun protection: bandana, sunglasses, sunscreen
Map of the park/area, usually obtained from the Visitor’s Center
Camera (if you want)
Snacks (protein bars, trail mix)
1-liter water bottle (I also had a refillable hydration sack I could slip into my backpack for extra water storage)
Mini first-aid kid
Toilet paper (Yeah… just keep one in that bag. Just do it.)
HEALTH + HYGIENE
Honestly, this is probably the most important section out of the bunch. Since I wasn’t going on any flights, I made sure to have bottles that would be big enough to last me the trip.
COVID masks
At-home COVID tests (I didn’t pack these originally and ended up having to buy some on the trip when I had a scare. Hopefully, these aren’t as necessary in the future, but if you think about it, you interact with a lot of folks on a trip like this. Better to be safe than sorry)
Bath towels, beach/lake towels, washcloths
First Aid kit
Shower caddy with soap, shampoo, and conditioner
Shower shoes (these were super nice to have at campsites and they can be bought super cheat at any CVS)
Toiletries bag with lotion, skin care products, deodorant, etc.
Toilet paper and a roll of paper towels
FOOD
Non-perishable snacks, chocolates, trail mix, soup cans
Cooler box, with bread, creamer, and sandwich ingredients
Mints, gums, vitamins, etc.
Reusable utensils, plates, etc.
Tupperware boxes
Coffee items: coffee beans, coffee grinder, French press
Refillable water bottles
MISCELLANEOUS
Lysol wipes and microfiber cloths (do five minutes of required cleaning in your car every week, at least. A light dusting and tossing out the trash will go a long way.)
Hand sanitizer and small lotion in the driver’s side door storage
National Park pass and stamp passport (if you’re serious about going to a lot of National Parks!)
Umbrella
Glovebox Items: document binder with car registration, proof of insurance, driver’s license copy, passport (if you plan on dipping into Mexico or Canada); AAA information; roadside assistance information; car manual
Spare cash + credit card
Spare key (I had a friend with me for half of the trip, so if we ever split up, this came in handy)
Roadside emergency kit
Physical map (this actually came in handy once or twice out west, when we lost service a few times. Don’t sleep on physical maps, folks!)
Dash camera (not required, but could help you if you’re ever in an accident. Thanks, Papa.)
Windshield repair kit
Phone accessories: phone holder, phone charger, external battery
Sun shields + window covers (it got unbearable hot in the desert)
Car wastebasket
Entertainment (Playing cards! Small board games! Books!)
Song + podcast playlists
Back support (a small decorative pillow I bought at the $5 section at Target saved my life. Invest!)
