Wearing the Pants!

Friends, Dockers is running a contest offering 100k "Man Grants" through something called the Wear The Pants Project. Basically, they're offering grant money to help a few lucky men with crazy ideas fund those ideas.

So, I entered this contest recently & would really appreciate it if everyone would please vote for my plan here, though Facebook. Oh, & if you could do that before 11:59pm ET on Tuesday, 3/15, that would be ideal. Because voting closes then. The catch is this: When you vote through Facebook it asks to connect you with the Dockers page. Dockers will not steal your information & sell it to marketers (although Facebook sort of has all your information already & are jerks about that kind of thing, so I can't speak for them). I know it's a pain, but if you're on Facebook & want to help a brother out, it would be much appreciated.

My plan? Oh, right. So here is the long and short of it. In the spring of 1927, my nature-loving conservationist grandfather & a buddy of his left New York in a 1910 Model-T Ford & set off on a road trip around a young, pre-interstate America. Grandpa documented the whole trip in a journal and took some beautiful photos of his journey. Years later, after Grandpa died, my father transcribed his journals and had the photos professionally scanned (sounds pretty simple, but the photos were all on glass slides & had been hand colorized... the technology just wasn't really there back then). Then he had leather-bound copies created for the family (see below).

Since there weren't really any major roads in much of the country, it was quite a journey (not quite Lewis & Clark, but pretty remarkable for its day). Obviously quite a lot has changed since then. My plan is to retrace his drive mile for mile - preferably in a retrofitted classic Model-T or some other zero-emissions vehicle - meeting ordinary people along the way while writing about and photographing the journey. Considering my fascination with urban planning and interest in people in general, it should be a pretty epic journey. Truth be told, this will likely happen at some point with or without this grant money, though it would make the trip a lot more awesome to feel secure about my source of funding.

If you've got a minute and wouldn't mind, I'd really appreciate your vote.

Thanks, all.

P (+E)