The Improbable Traveler: the journey of a 20 year old guy

In April and May of 1978 my two brothers, one older, one younger, joined the air force. I did not think I was military material. Eh, I knew it. I mean, I was a gay guy who wasn't shy about it. What I heard from the relatives was “Ooh, wouldn't it be nice to have three boys in the air force!” It was most pleasant, there was no pressure. But, well, that just wasn't going to be me. So instead of listening to my family's importuning me to enlist I bought a one way ticket to San Francisco. I gave my boss a month's notice, and my mother 2 weeks. From there I went to Seattle and Vancouver, and to Florida. I had kept a journal of sorts of what I did, in different little notebooks and individual pages. It was just a pile of paper. So then I decided to write it all up in one book. Even before I got to Florida I started writing the text below, and back in New York I wrote up the rest of what happened. I'd copy some stuff from the journal written as it happened, and that would jog my memory, so I wrote some more about what happened. And so what is below is what I wrote at that time, and the dates of when I wrote it are there in the text. Some events, places and people I remember still, clear as a bell, though in snippets. For other things only this journal provides a memory.