I was going to be the first person to cross Equestria in a straight line; that’s what I decided one week ago when I decided to pack my bags. I would probably wear through several pairs of horseshoes— do we even wear horseshoes?— never mind. I would still walk across the country if it killed me.
Anyways I...
~\_
Apologies, there was a piece of dust on the corner of my journal. I have to keep this thing as clean as possible if I want to rely on using it to record my progress.
Where was I?
Oh, I didn’t even tell you my name. Apologies, again.
I’m Long Hike, a Geography major with a job as a college professor. I know there might be a point of no return, so I decided to take a hike the first day of summer. I fit the professor look, too. I have a pair of glasses and some grey hair, it’s my natural color, and a green coat.
Anyways, I was going to tell you about the known Equestrian world and about 200 other things I have written on a coffee-stained paper that’s currently sitting right next to my journal, but I forgot. It’s nothing new, either, I literally forgot what these words meant.
I have probably prattled on for too long already. My boss complains about the same thing. I should probably get this journey underway.
With my saddlebags stuffed with bits, camping equipment, and food, my cap sufficiently straightened— I have to keep the sun away somehow— I burst out of my house ready to take on another challenge.
~~~~~
The streets of Baltimare are wonderful things. I notice run-down apartments lining the streets that had gangs in every corner...
Maybe the streets aren’t so nice after all.
I still lived here, as much as I question my decision daily. I have to attempt to find the positives, I certainly learned that the first time I attempted to be pessimistic. I was going through that edgy phase that everypony and their mothers have seemed to go through, and I attempted to make a dark joke in front of my 2nd grade classroom... those were good times.
Anyways, back to Baltimare.
The sun is shining bright in the sky as I take a trip to my first stop. Ponies smile and wave as I walk by, some clearly looking like me like I was about to go on some insane adventure. To an extent I was, but this isn’t like that time I tried to cross the Celestial Sea in a sailboat. I hadn’t planned for wind cross-currents when I got in my sailboat and readied the sail. It worked at first, but then it turned into vicious ping pong with the wind as the paddles and me as the ball. I made it approximately 100 meters before I had to dock.
I was determined to see through to the end of this adventure through.
There are merchants hanging around, some selling you price-jacked Sapphire Shores tickets, I can’t get why people like her. She can sing, but all those synthesized sound effects with the overbearing compression and keyboard, I just can’t listen to it. Now, new wave, that’s truly the best music, that’s some amazing stuff right there. I’ve gotten ponies telling me that my criticisms of modern pop are in new wave, but I just don’t understand why somepony would say that. They are clearly very different.
Some merchants are Honest Joes, they’re trying to sell you reasonably-priced works of art; often that they made themselves. Summer was a popular season for merchants, you’d always see a big boom in profits every time summer started. The city is very high-density, and the streets are filled with ponies looking to purchase some goods. Those crowds are a nightmare to walk through, I tell you.
~~~~~
As I leave the slums, I start to see the better side of Baltimare. At least the better in comparison, we’re still rampant with crime over here, they just don’t happen to sell drugs in this corner of town.
If it isn’t already apparent, our mayor runs the town for us, Celestia wrote up Baltimare as a lost cause a long time ago. Something about how 90% of Equestrian crime is committed here... I’m sure it’s fine.
The houses vary in size and shape as the income fluctuates. It’s always easy to tell the lowbrow from the high class. Low class houses usually have a single floor, a small square footage, or the like. High class house tower above all else, sometimes up to three floors, they have fancy decorations and high square footage numbers. Often, you can see the high class ponies looking down from their top floor onto the low class houses. Those high class people are a bunch of jerks, I tell you.
I live somewhere else, as a middle class pony myself. What? Did you expect me to say a College Professor is a high-paying job? It’s not, it’s middle class at best, at least mine is. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that when I’m talking, I go off the rails more and more, causing students to sometimes learn a lot about something other than the day’s subject matter. I’m not sure if this makes me a bad teacher or an enlightening one, my students say nothing about the matter. Perhaps they just want something other than the written class?
~~~~~~
Anyways, I get out of the bordering houses and I finally walk into downtown Baltimare, and I’m blown away by its sheer immensity! The ponies are holding a convention today, it’s some convention about some kid’s show with a large periphery demographic, I don’t know. I just know we get a large influx of hoof traffic every time it happens. There seems to be even more ponies today, with some signs talking about the convention ending, I really don’t know. I just know that it’s a kid’s show, and that I’m not interested in it.
There’s various tall buildings, some made of glass, some of a more conventional structure. A conventional structure... I’ve just made a pun, excuse me while I cry.
~/~/~\~\~/
I’m done crying now, my hooves were already hurting, and I’d only walked towards downtown Baltimare, it had been 4 hours since I left. I check my watch to confirm that I’m right. I am.
I see various Baltimare landmarks. Things like the Living History Museum and The Engineer’s Club. The Engineer’s Club was a great place to sit back and get drunk relax. I frequently did that, once every weekend. It’s also the only time I ever drink wine during a week.
I see still more skyscrapers, and they’re getting larger. I enter a city square that’s absolutely packed with convention attendees. I take a seat on a bench to rest and think about lunch, it’s almost noon. I was really hungry. I open my pack and find out that I have food with me, not unlike I have camping equipment, and about ten journals. I tend to go on rants, who knew?
However, I want to avoid eating my Celestia-forbidden preserved dandelions for as long as I equinly can. Surveying my food options and making an attempt to examine the area around me. I see a fountain in the middle, spraying mist and water onto the cobblestone ground that’s located in an indentation in the middle of the park. The ground dips down and converges into the center, the fountain. Around it, ponies are simply milling about, having picnics, talking to their peers, or simply just enjoying the day. Anypony that has sense, that being all but me, aren’t attempting to walk across Equestria in a straight line.
Focusing on the prize, I look around to see if there are any food trucks that are in my path. It would be funny, trying to explain to the food vendor I will have just purchased greasy food that I probably shouldn’t be eating on this journey from, that I needed to crawl under their cart to continue walking. I can just imagine their faces when I tell them that.
Of course, the scenery is still a picturesque metropolitan scene. Skyscrapers tower over the park, dwarfing the park in their ominous shadows, but still creating an interesting contrast between park and city. Flags for the convention line the sides of the sidewalks, making an interesting sight compared to how usually dull the sidewalks are. After approximately ten minutes of writing all that, I get off the bench (It’s titled Death on Two Legs, Dedicated Too... I’m not sure who it’s dedicated to, and I swear I’ve heard that before) and make my way to the nearest food cart.
I realize that I am at the mercy of whatever the cart sells, if it sells deep-fried butter on a stick, that’s my lunch. Now, I’d consider myself a healthy pony, and I don’t want to have a heart attack due to tons of cholesterol. I have a friend who once had a heart attack after eating some deep-fried butter on a stick, he said he would not recommend having that for lunch. Maybe if I ended up there, I could order a diet coke with it to preserve the little sanity I have.
Thankfully, I end up at a generic carrot dog cart, and the food is nothing special, either. By the way, the face he gave me after I told him that I needed to crawl under his cart was as priceless as I imagined, he was so flabbergasted that I took advantage of his shock to do exactly that. With a full belly and a determined mind, I continued my way through Baltimare, still having 32 miles to go.
Now, one may think that I climbed under that food cart with little trouble, but that’s not true. My back had a long cut lengthwise from my neck to my tail, I had to toss my saddlebags over. Cuts are never fun, they simply hamper your progress and hurt entirely too much. I also had a a very messy stomach, it having touched dirt and all.
I’m now heading out of the park and into the walls of skyscrapers that lined it. I don’t have any climbing gear with me, and that would simply be a suggestion as climbing public buildings is highly illegal. I once read a news article about this pony who decided that climbing the tallest building in Baltimare was a great idea. Now, I wasn’t planning on climbing a building, but his story was interesting enough to me that I decided to read it. Spoiler alert: it ends with a sentence, the bad type of sentence. That’s when I decided to not climb buildings ever in my life.
I was hoping that I didn’t run into a skyscraper, then, a skyscraper just decides to get in my way. A skyscraper stands before me, one of modern construction, made of tempered glass and steel. It almost looks like a hotel, and considering the fact that it says ‘Mareiott’ on the building might give a clue that it is. I once stayed at a Mareiott hotel, the name sucks, but it’s rather nice in there, it has some nice coffee and a respectable free breakfast.
Unfortunately, my hotel is still six hours ahead of me.
I have to navigate my way around the hotel and find about where my normal line would be. I can’t go left, as the road came from a bend and was currently right to the left of me, I’m not about to walk lengthwise along a road, even though I wasn’t in the dead center of the hotel and was instead leaning closer to the left edge. So, I head right and converge into my original line. I happen to line up right next to a crosswalk. While I’m trying to remain an upstanding citizen, sometimes you’ve got to jaywalk. Jaywalking was a crime here, and I’ve heard people saying that it gets you a good few months of jail time. Why the mayor made such a severe punishment for such a minor crime, I will never know.
Paranoid, I run over the road and promptly run straight into a lamppost because I’m looking around for police cars. It was bound to happen sooner or later, but I didn’t expect it to be so soon. I hope that whatever injuries I sustained don’t catch up to me, I’m already in hot water with the long cut on my back.
Speaking of hot water, I could kill for a coffee right now. Coffee is my favorite drink and I can barely function without it. I don’t think I properly surveyed the risks that not having my coffee could have on this journey, I might be less alert to lampposts in my way, as I’ve done interstellar at that so far, I might forget to fill in the maps, which was my main goal here, and I might just fall asleep, as horses can sleep standing up. I was already dreading losing caffeine, and I certainly couldn’t just get an Kurig, some coffee beans, and hot water. Thinking about all these things, I walk through an automatic door that I could hear moving, and enter straight into a supermarket. Of course, I navigated around the lamppost that hampered my progress previously.
I look up and notice that I have just walked into a Walmart, there is no back door, but there is a garden area.
I was about to something horrible in the next few minutes.
I notice that the garden area is straight ahead. I look around and notice nopony actually caring what I do. There are shops lining the left side of the store, but other than that, the only things that require any note are the checkout lanes which appear to be taking entirely to long to get over with. I realize that the longer I stand and look, the more suspicious I appear. I walk across the clay tile floor to get to where I’m going.
I travel through the handy automatic doors and step into the Garden Center. Now, I don’t care too much for tending gardens. I’ve never actually been in a Garden Center in a Walmart, Meijer, or any other store. I just didn’t care for it. So, I’m certainly surprised when I find out that I really want to buy a flower! There are flowers of every shade, every breed, and every necessary care level. I check out some violets and snapdragons and then realize that I had to get out somehow. Unfortunately, beyond all the pots of petunias that take up the middle— I can crawl under those— these isn’t a door, or a cinderblock wall or anything. I had just basically stepped into a cage.
I can’t imagine escaping a cage to be pleasant. I mean, you’re surrounded by bars and the only way out is to thrash around enough to notify someone to get you out. However, if you’re in jail, like I was likely going to be if any cops saw me, you can’t get out.
There is a way to escape this, however. I could climb over the plastic cage walls, jump off the top of them, and run into the street just beyond. I quickly look around and check the sun and my watch, I had several miles to go, and I’ve already wasted enough time twiddling my hooves. I take a running leap onto the bars. and I hear an employee telling my ear off. I mean, I can’t exactly blame her. That being said, I turn in her direction.
I see a cute teenaged mare, she’s grey and has a blue mane, styled in the way you’d expect every teenaged mare who works at Walmart would style their mane, she doesn’t give a crap about how good it looks. It’s messy, it’s unbrushed, and it’s fairly long. She’s wearing the Walmart employee uniform so I can’t tell what her cutie mark looks like, or if she has one at all. I carefully walk over to the employee, ducking under those Celestia-forsaken petunias again, I mean, they are so ugly!
She looks at me quizzically, I mean, I also don’t blame her for this. If I was a teenager (I wish), and a middle-aged stallion came at me after just attempting to climb out of a Walmart Garden Center, I would back away slowly. To all her credit, she actually stayed behind the cash register!
Anyways, I walk up to the teenaged mare. She looks at me, and I look at her, she looks at me, and I look...
You know what, screw it.
I simply state,”Hello, I’m trying to cross Equestria in a straight line.”
Wait, I never told you about my voice! Well, it’s rather deep and... oh, she’s looking at me again.
“That’s a likely story,” the mare says, as skeptically as a teenaged mare can sound.
At this point, the ponies in the store are looking at us strangely. They are all either backing away from her or me. Oh wait, I just noticed her uniform has a dorky nametag that notes,”Hello! My name is Jasmine!”
I start shaking my head at this, they didn’t even put two spaces after their exclamation point!
So, I focus on Jasmine’s face again, her eyes are a sort of scary lavender, and I don’t want to look into those. However, I’m forced to.
“Well, I have a journal right here,” I relay to Jasmine,”you can read it if you like. The information is all in there.”
Jasmine opens the journal and starts to read painfully slow, there’s only a few paragraphs in there at the time, it shouldn’t take that long. In fact, I write most of my passages after the fact, in present tense, as I’m doing with this Jasmine mare. I’m actually in a hotel right now, and please don’t question it, I’ll write in present tense if I want to.
After what feels like an eternity and a half (I should contact Mareiam-Webster to make that an official time marking). Jasmine finishes reading. She nods and I take a run to the edge. Wait, I have to duck under those silly petunias first. I leap onto the plastic and wave Jasmine good bye. She waves back and I take a look at all the ponies who are trying to comprehend this bespectacled middle-aged stallion climbing out of a Garden Center. I climb out and reach the top... before I promptly fall down.
The road stretches out before me horizontally. Baltimare has a nice grid road design, so I knew exactly where I need to go to go straight.
I lift my bruised head up, already feeling the pain of that lamppost. I look around and notice a little something right beside the garden center. It’s a fire exit.
Oh Celestia, why do you do this to me?
~~~~~~~~~
The rest of Baltimare is rather similar, no other Walmarts come into my sights, and it’s a rather boring trip. I do stop by a Sunbucks to get a coffee, but that’s unimportant. Some buildings I have to walk around, other ones I just take the back door, most buildings are just the exact same.
Finally, I reach my hotel. It was past my target point of 8:00 PM, maybe an hour past...
Ok, I admit it, I may have gotten distracted by a newspaper in the Sunbucks and may have wasted an hour reading the newspaper. Funny thing is, I’d already read it that morning. I literally couldn’t remember that I read a news article on some new foundation in Baltimare headed by our mayor. I can’t remember what. See, it’s been 3 hours and I’ve already forgotten what I read in the Sunbucks. When you remember that ponies nowadays have the memory of a goldfish, it isn’t a surprise that newspaper readership is declining. Heck, maybe someday we might just be able to access the newspaper wherever we want so that we’ll never forget an article.
Anyways, I walk into the hotel, it’s a nice Mareiott Hotel with a pool I wouldn’t use, much to my ire. The hotel pools were always the best part of hotels, and the free breakfast, you can’t forget the free breakfast. I never travel without booking a hotel that has at least one of those things, and I don’t know how ponies can bear life without them!
Wait, the receptionist is looking at me funny... I’ll be right back.
————————————~\
I’m in my hotel room right now, writing by dim candlelight because I don’t want to turn on my lamp. I’ve got my cap and glasses set to the side, and am ready to sleep. My hooves are seriously hurting more than my bruised head, walking 24 miles a day does this to a stallion. I can’t get comfortable on my back because there’s a freaking back-length cut on there, and I’m surprised it’s not bleeding. About now, I’m envying unicorns and their fancy writing techniques they don’t need to try to do.
About the receptionist, she knew me. She was worried about me doing something crazy again and tried to dissuade me from doing anything she didn’t like. She was worried about me doing another Celestial Sea fiasco, I had to reassure her that no, I was only walking across Equestria in a straight line to improve our knowledge on it. She wasn’t reassured, but at least she let me stay at this hotel. That’s good, because I wasn’t going to awkwardly camp outside.
Anyways, this concludes day one of my journey. I’m signing out because I really just want to crash onto this comfortable King-Size bed right now.
Signing out, Long Hike.