Part 1 is now available for immediate purchase! Find Out Where
Not Quite There Cover Art by Ryan RosenNot Quite There won’t escort you to the front row of a concert. It’s not about unlimited budgets and carefully crafted scenarios like you might see on some reality TV show. Rather, it will leave you stranded at 2AM in lower Manhattan. It will thrust you into the high reaches of beer-soaked bleachers to inhale the pungent aroma of marijuana as drunken concertgoers urinate on you. It will get you lost in Germany at nightfall, leaving you alone to drive the Autobahn with no cell phone and currency that only works in Switzerland. Oh, and you don’t speak German.
Not Quite There is a real-life account of the adventures and misadventures of what life “on the road” can bring. This book is about the perfect quest for the perfect place and the perfect experience, and the irony of always being not quite there. The skeleton might be accounts of travel experiences, but at the heart of the stories, the mishaps, and the people that create them is a glimpse at the answer to a question both complex and simple: where am I going?
The book begins in 1999 as a result of the year 2000 (Y2K) “bug”. Author Sean Genovese took a job as a college intern testing biomedical equipment around the country. His intent was to take advantage of an opportunity to develop professionally while traveling the country on someone else’s dime. Using a laptop and a 56K modem, Sean was determined to keep a promise to friends and family back home and “keep in touch”. He made a point of sending out regular emails and updating a web site with pictures of his experiences. It was blogging before blogging was invented. The mailing list was a hit, and now Not Quite There tells the story through those original, unedited posts, with witty commentary that puts it all in a context never before seen.
Nothing ever runs as smoothly as planned and Not Quite There capitalizes on those occasions as opportunities to entertain and educate. After Y2K comes the “Year 2000 Road Trip Extravaganza”. Planning began shortly after the Y2K internship, and that’s where Not Quite There picks up again. Readers will enjoy the contrast between the intense planning that went into the money-making endeavor and the reality of how those plans were executed. 24 days, 6,542 miles, 25 states, and a few thousand dollars later, Sean had a collection of photos, experiences, and stories that will last a lifetime. One of the most remarkable things about the experience is that only four nights of the 24 day trek were spent in hotels.
The summer of 2003 brings the European Excursion. A week after officially graduating from college, Sean fulfilled a long-time dream of traveling to Europe—but not the way most college graduates do it. No posh hotels, no backpacking or hitchhiking; just eight weeks in Switzerland working at an American summer camp with six to ten year old children from various countries around the world. Not only was Sean traveling into very uncharted territory geographically, working with children was not something he had previously done on a professional level. The experience had all the ingredients of a life-changing experience: new challenges, unfamiliar territory, relationships with great people, and a desire to experience something new in life. During his last quarter of college—when Sean wasn’t in class, working, or in a bar—he was training to be a Red Cross certified lifeguard and researching the intricacies of teaching English to non-English speaking children. At the conclusion of his counseling obligation, Sean spent an additional two weeks traveling and spending all the money he’d earned working at the camp.
You’ll read about it all in this educated, witty, and at times sentimental account of being not quite there.