“Greyhound Summer” is the fictional blog of Arie Moon, a recent college graduate who was looking forward to spending the summer with her father. Unfortunately, her father and his newest wife are planning on touring with his western band. They’ve bought Arie a Greyhound Bus ticket so she can go anywhere she wants. Disappointed, she heads out from Atlantic City with her guitar and a backpack.
The blog is a diary of the road trip she takes across America. It’s all about little “moments”. She meets people on and off the bus, she thinks about life, and she sketches the places she sees. The pace is fairly slow and laid back. Some of the pages have drawings, photographs, a poem or a video for a song she mentions.
Arie herself is an interesting character. She’s disappointed that her father is “sending her away” instead of letting her have a last summer together, but accepts the change in her plans. She mentions that she’s got three job offers in the bio-med field, but other than that she’s only writing about her father’s world of western bars, cowboys, rodeos and life on the road. She says she hates performing in public but when she meets people she ends up playing her guitar and singing. She comes across as lonely, lost and drifting.
While reading, I discovered that there are two ways to navigate through this story. If you go back to the “Chapters” page you can click on each chapter’s link and just read Arie’s blog. If you use the links at the bottom of each chapter, you also get pages with personal comments from the author, and interactive segments. In the interactive segments the author asks the reader to suggest the best places for Arie to visit, or song titles, or other input for the story. I’m afraid I gave up reading with the July postings as I found the extra links kept distracting me from the story.
If you like reading blogs, this one is well-written. Arie comes across as a real person, trying to get over her disappointments and figure out what she wants out of life. The writing is very personal and the “story” is character driven. The sketches, photos and poems add to the feel of a real diary.
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