Surrounded by Beat Experts

My impending trip has come up a bunch of times and about 1/2 the time someone makes a Jack Kerouac reference.  I was visiting a unit tonight whose leadership I wouldn’t classify as well read when the following broke out:

Leader 1: So I heard you were taking a bit of a trip.
Me: Yeah, I’m covering about twelve hundred miles.
Leader 2: A regular Jack Kerouac.  Plan on hitting Mexico? (a reference to On the Road)
Me: No, but I will be covering a good bit of the southwest.
Leader 3: I heard he wrote On the Road during a drug-induced two-week period on a single extended piece of tracing paper.
Leader 1: That’s apocryphal, it took him almost a decade and he used no stimulants.
Leader 2: Popular doesn’t mean good, I still consider Ginsberg’s Howl the pinnacle of Beat culture.
Leaders 1 & 3: *approving hmm*