I just wanted to apologise at how long this is.

I started playing a little before the Nether update, way back in Alpha. I started playing in middle school, and continued in highschool, and for my entire adult life I've played this game. I'm 20 years old and have spent 1/3 of my life playing Minecraft. Although I mostly stopped, about 10 months ago to do something.

Over the years I've been in many Minecraft communities. I've logged thousands of hours. I'd spend several hours a day on school nights and most of my weekends playing. Addiction is a term that might fit. Through this game though, I've made many friends. People I've only talked to online, some I had seen some pictures of, but I'd never met them in real life. Despite that, I still considered them to be friends. A several years ago that was a pretty weird sentiment. It's becoming more and more acceptable these days though.

Throughout my time playing this game I built countless castles and bases, and redstone contraptions. I ran my own UHC server for about two years (shout out to the /r/ultrahardcore subreddit), and I played on the Jsano Fan Server. One day while me and my friends were messing around, I jokingly said I was going to visit them. I even found a map of the US and in MS paint I drew up "my route". It was entirely a joke.

Out of the innumerable jokes I've made in my life, that one really stuck with me. It bounced around my head and would randomly come up. In my last year or two of high school I started running out of time to play. I'd sometimes just log onto the server and sit there and do homework rather than actually play. For those of you who have completed highschool, you know how the last two years there's a big pressure on what comes next. What will you do after you finish high school? Which university will you go to? Have you applied yet? What about scholarships? How are your grades you're keeping them up right? What are you doing playing Minecraft all the time don't you have homework to do? I work hard in highschool, and I was almost valedictorian. I was part of many extracurriculars as well. By the end there I was really afraid of burning out. I worried that I'd go to university and then all that pressure that had been building up would finally just explode like a bed in the Nether. So I realized I needed a year off before university. So what do you think was still bouncing around in my mind, like Steve on a slime block?

So in my final year of high school I decided to do it. I got a job and saved up the money, I more thoroughly planned out the route. I messaged people that I had fallen out of contact with. (My parents are separated, dad in San Francisco, and I live with my mom in Toronto). So when I was in California for Christmas with my dad I mentioned it to him very casually as if it wasn't even a real plan. He actually really liked the idea. After I had gotten back home to Canada, I fine tuned my plan a bit more and in February told my mom. She took it okay. She was far from pleased that instead of going to university I was going to walk across the US to meet some people I played videogames with, but she understood me as a person and could see I was dedicated to this.

I graduated high school June 28th, 2016. I got a second job a few days later and worked 60 hours a week until I quit both jobs. On August 14th I set off walking, from the small town of Waterdown, Ontario, to the American border. I crossed it and began my walk across America.

Over the last 9 months of walking I met 9 Minecraft friends. In Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana, Utah, Idaho, and Washington. In that time I walked 3,600 miles. I also met tons of other people along the way, I had experiences I never dreamed I could, I've been on TV, the radio, and even a newspaper. It's all because of that one joke, those friends I made, and this game.

It's impossible to quantify the impact this game has had on my life. I'm posting this now because I met up with my last Minecraft friend in Seattle about a week ago. I'm not quite finished with my trip. I will finish in San Francisco in about a month from now. I'm currently in Portland, Oregon.

TL;DR I kinda like Minecraft, it's fun.

If you want to follow me for this last portion of my trip, I have a subreddit /r/SkylerTravels and my Instagram is @skylerstravels.