Seven Years

If you subtract out 2020, when everything shut down and we rented a farm house in South Carolina, April 2025 marks seven years on the road in our 1969 Dodge Travco.

We left our previous home of Athens GA on April 1, 2017. Our twin daughters were 4 years old. Our son was not yet 2.

We spent 18 months traveling, breaking down, repairing the bus, traveling some more. Breaking down a little less and traveling some more. From Florida, across the gulf, through Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Colorado again, Utah, Nevada, California, and then back east through Arizona, Texas again, the gulf coast, the midwest, the Great Lakes. Over the next six years we’d go through 27 states and a smidgen of Canada.

We took a short break in 2019 to spend some time in Mexico. But we’ve never had a home aside from the bus, as we call it.

The kids grew up on the road. I stopped writing much about them in the last few years because they are their own people, and can speak for themselves, but I know that living in the bus was an experience I don’t think any of them would change for anything. They are who they are in many respects because of how we lived.

They’ve had experiences most of their peers never will, particularly when it comes to education. They’ve been able to learn from doing rather than just reading. They’ve seen and touched things that exist only in books for most kids. They know the names of plants and animals because they’ve seen them in the wild. They know what a ghost town is like because they’ve slept in one. They know what the Milky Way looks like because they’ve seen it. They’ve eaten lunch in the woods where Pocahontas played. They know how a loom works because someone showed them. They know what it’s like to be hot and frustrated and bored when the bus overheats and there is nothing to do but wait for dad to fix it.

Experience shapes you. Especially the difficult experiences, which teach you resilience and also how to appreciate the good times. When things are hard every little thing becomes a treasure — a sandwich, a smile, a ride to the parts store. Even grabbing the right wrench on the first try feels like an accomplishment of the gods sometimes.

I don’t know what they’ll do with all these experiences, but I know that experience stays with you forever. I know that life on the road has given me kind, considerate, thoughtful children, which is all I ever wanted them to be. I too would not change a thing.

People often ask why we live this way. I could answer that question many ways, probably a different way each day, but a big one would be because traveling reminds you that you’re alive. It snaps you out of routines and reminds you that you’re more than the collection of habits you’ve acquired over years, that your days are for more than getting through them, that in fact there aren’t that many of them to be had, that each of them is a gift, and that all that really matters is that you are present for all of them, really, really here.