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No offense but it sounds like he needs to update his audition tape and find a paying job.

Proark, I apologize. I read this as a pitch for "support" (i.e. money) for which - had I the money - I could think of numerous other things that need financial attention before I could/would give money to somebody's joyride through America. If his trip is fully funded, fine. If it isn't, I suggest he find advertisers for his blog so they can support him.

But, unless he is leaving his resume as he goes around the country, all he's doing is killing time when he ought to be job-hunting. Hopefully, he doesn't have a wife or kids depending on him.

Fair. I think, to some degree, I was influenced by watching "Shark Tank" on ABC last night. The premise is that you have small businesspeople (small businesses, not small people) who need an infusion of capital to grow their business and have been turned down for the traditional financing or have maxed out their mortgages, credit cards, etc. So, there are five venture capitalists in the "tank" who hear the businessperson's story and then offer to buy in or explain why they won't buy in and it is interesting to listen to these capitalists explain what was good/bad about each idea pitched to them. It's not a very sexy show so I doubt the ratings will be very good but it was fascinating, in its own way, to see the sort of ideas people would pitch. Many of them had really unrealistic ideas of how to make it in business and your friend's idea sounded like one of those crazy pitches:

"Hey, support my blog while I travel the country spending your money..."

"Yeah, so what's in it for me?"

"Well, it'll be so cool for me to see baseball all across the country! And I'll share it on my blog!"

"Yeah, and what do I get from all of this?"

"But, I've mapped out the entire trip..."

The capitalists were basically saying "How does this make money?" and so many were so latched into their dreams that they couldn't understand that their dream wasn't profitable while they kept going deeper into debt.

Now, I don't know too many people in this economy who are ready to quit/lose their paying job without a viable means of support. I tend to see this whole exercise as somebody who is not grounded in reality who wants to quit his sucky job and pursue his dream. Well, that's all well and good if you are either prepared to lose a lot of money in pursuit of the dream or if you have the financial backing to come out of it still ahead of the game.

Back in October, 1989, I quit my job to spend a year writing a book on the Astros after I realized nobody had written such a history of the franchise. I thought it would sell easily. The remnants of all that research is what became "This Date In Astros History" and the accompanying "Astros In Sound" which both have been reformatted into AstrosDaily.com's history section. When I quit, I thought I had enough money to ride out the year but I never did find a publisher who would agree to print my book and jumping back into the job market took six months longer than I anticipated (April, 1991) while I was borrowing money from my mother (all paid back, by the way) to stay afloat.

I lived mostly off tv dinners and Sonic during that time and was as frugal as I could be. Yet, I was out of funds by November, 1990.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I took my own flight of fancy years ago. I know how easy it is to have a plan that isn't entirely thought through and suffer the consequences. The job I left had reached its own suckiness level but my advice is to never walk away from a paycheck until you have found something to replace it with. Especially in a recession, the time frame before you find a new paycheck can turn out to be much longer than planned.