This is Page 2 of Journey 1.

Coming from the book cover, we hope to find a path in Chapter 7 (ROAD). This chapter contains a lot of information, most of it not easily explained at this point. We will focus on a few key elements for this Journey.

The beginning of the chapter is about the crowdy city and the difficulty seeing through hazy air. Then we have:

She was beginning to understand that it was up to her to find a path. If she chose this fork or that turn, it could take her in any direction. It was a matter of chosing the right direction, and more and more she felt that the right direction was away from the city.

This above is very important. First it indicates that it is about finding a path. Then, it tells us that the right path is away from the city. In this chapter there are two images, one where the car is moving towards you, and one where the car is moving away from you.

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Clearly, the difference between these views has to do with the licence plates. The one moving away (VCER) is the one of interest. The other one (MLGGS) is not. Again, we have important information hidden by an apparent simple cipher. The Castenada/Boone solution solves the combination MLGGS/VCER with an Atbash cipher, which involves reversing the alphabet.

Using the above, we find that MLGGSVCER corresponds to NOT THE XVI (or Not the 16). However, as we just said, this is not the important clue. We must focus only on VCER.

On its grille, leading the way, was the figure of a running horse.

The car is a Ford Mustang. It represents Treasure.

She looked inside and saw the note on the driver’s seat. It read, Start me to your journey’s end.

The note is VCER. This is the secret to the path. The question now is how are we supposed to use these 4 letters? There are two pages of text left in the chapter but I cannot figure out what this text is really telling. Are we talking about runways (long narrow strips)? Amanda is said to fly above the road. Are we simply saying that we have to go everywhere (all chapters?) with the road? Or are we talking about future steps not obvious at this point?

Given the situation, I decided to focus on the movement of a running horse, the gallop. There are many references to a running horse in the book. The four legs are moving one after the other and at one point all four feet are off the ground. So we have what I would call frames of four positions following each other. The stride can be obtained from the distance between the letters VCER:

• V to C = 7
• C to E = 2
• E to R = 13
• R to V = 4

We will use these values to jump from chapters to chapters: 7-2-13-4-7-2-13-4-7-2-13-4… etc. This is a table doing just that, arranged by frames. We started at 0 so the first value in the table is 0+7 = 7, meaning chapter 7. The second value is chapter 7 + 2 = chapter 9, etc.

When arranged in frames, we see that the chapters in each column can be computed by adding 5 to the previous entry in the column (going back to 1 after reaching 21). It produces 21 frames. Only one of these frames has a sum of chapter numbers equals to 31 (our other number on the book cover). It is the one starting with chapter 4 (CEMETERY), a good place to start our Journey. This will be followed by chapters 6 (FISH), 19 (PARTY) and 2 (THE MAN WITH BLACK GLOVES). After that, we will see.