It’s difficult to find a more American guy than me. No, I have never fired a gun (though I support your right to do so), and I don’t drive a Ford F-150 (just a Taurus). But I have a near-religious experience at every ballpark I go to. I would eat ribeye and down an old-fashioned every night if my wallet permitted it. And every time I think about my country — much like many of my NR colleagues — I am struck with childlike wonder. The sheer audacity of America to exist as it does. To have our improbable past, to be so limitless. This country was the first thing I consciously fell in love with.

Yet I have seen far too little of it. Sure, I remember being in 23 states (I visited a few more as a child), but that’s more than half I haven’t seen! Plus, I’ve been to only 14 Major League ballparks — and one of them was in Houston, so I’d like to pretend it was 13.

So when the opportunity arose to see more of this country in the weeks surrounding its 250th birthday, I had to take it. On Sunday, I graduated from Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. — a beautiful but fairly soul-crushing place. My greatest joy there was to study the American founding. Over the next five weeks, I will see what that glorious event has wrought.

I’m due in Arlington, Va., to begin full-time work at NR in late July. One way or another, I needed to traverse the country. I chose the most inefficient way I could think of: a giant sideways S in my trusty Taurus. My mother and I are first driving up the California coast before breaking off into eastern Oregon, stopping in Idaho, then down through Utah, winding through the Colorado Rockies (not the unfortunate team), and booking it through Nebraska as fast as possible. We’ll spend a week at home in Des Moines, Iowa, the only place I could celebrate July 4 itself. Then, we’ll curve down south to St. Louis (checking a 15th ballpark off my list), to Nashville, and to the criminally underrated Birmingham, Ala. We’ll pull up along the coast, hitting the coastal cities of Savannah, Charleston, and Myrtle Beach, finally cutting through the forests of North Carolina and up into Northern Virginia.

Aside from basking in America’s vastness, beauty, and epic pluralism, I have another goal for this trip. I want to remind myself before working in political journalism what the point of it all is. It’s certainly not whatever partisan battle is being waged at the moment. As Ben Sasse once told his Senate colleagues, most of whom failed to listen:

The center of America is not Washington, DC. The center of America is the neighborhoods where 330 million Americans are raising their kids and trying to put food on the table and trying to love their neighbor. That’s the center of America. We’re not supposed to be the most important people in America, we’re supposed to be servant leaders who try to maintain a framework for ordered liberty so that there’s a structure that back home where they live, they can get from the silver frame of structure and order to the golden apple at the center, as Washington would have said it, which is the things that they build together.

Most of life — the best part of it — takes place beyond politics. That’s what I’m here to see before I head into the steam room.

My plan is to share my experiences along the way with you all. For every day of my trip, I’ll be posting to the Corner about what I saw the previous day. Why should the World Cup visitors have all the fun?

I hope that you follow along with me, or even just check in along the way. Here’s to seeing America at 250.