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.

March saw the kids and I head to California to visit my parents again. This time we flew out of Duluth, which is a delightfully tiny, empty airport that knows nothing of lines or hassles. When the four of us went through security we were the only people in the line, and we outnumbered the staff by two. It reminded me of flying in the previous century, back when it was fun. The only real downside was connecting through Minneapolis, which meant we had to wait a few hours for our flight to California. From the air you can really appreciate how flat Wisconsin is, almost like a giant sheet of ice came along and smashed it. California has changed a lot over the last few decades. I really don't recognize it anymore. I was thinking about this on the last trip too. When I was a kid growing up in southern California there was still room for weirdness. I think housing prices have driven out the last of the odd people now, but back then you could do weird things, like build a ship in your backyard. This story is something of a local legend. In the 1970s, in a regular suburban yard in Costa Mesa California, a man, driven by some obsession, decided to build a ship. Not just any ship, but a 118-foot replica of a Revolutionary War-era privateer. In his backyard. It took Dennis Holland 13 years to build the ship. He had to bulldoze his house to get it out and down to the harbor. That is dedication. It was mostly before my time, but I remember it vaguely. It launched when I was 9 in 1983. Later, in high school, when I was rowing with the crew team, we'd see it going in and out of the harbor for charters. Unsurprisingly, even as a kid I was drawn to people like Holland. I never met him, but I have always admired people with the obsessive drive to do the weird things they want to do. Most people in the world would laugh at Holland's plan. Probably many did. He just went and did it. If you want to do something bad enough, you usually can. Holland died over a decade ago, but the ship is still around. When you put something like that into the world, often the world takes care of it for you. Holland eventually sold the Pilgrim of Newport, as he called it, to the Ocean Institute in Dana Point (who renamed it, Spirit of Dana Point). You can still do a half day sail, just like you could when Holland was chartering it in Newport. My kids have been begging to get on a tall ship pretty much since they found out they existed, so we signed ourselves up for a sail on the Spirit of Dana Point. I wasn't expecting much from the sail. Usually on these sorts of things you're luggage, they hand you a plastic cup of juice and stow you in the back. This wasn't like that. This was hands on sailing. The crew of Spirit of Dana Point had passengers raising the sails and steering the ship. We may not have gone far, but four hours flew by and the kids had the time of their lives. Thanks Dennis Holland for having the crazy idea that you could built a Revolutionary War vessel in a suburban backyard and then for actually doing it. Never listen to the people who say you're crazy to build a ship (or live in a 50 year old motorhome). Just get after it. The Spirit of Dana Point was a tough act to follow, but we had fun just hanging around Newport. I took the kids down to The Wedge, where I used body surf. We also went back to the Balboa Fun Zone because Elliott has been talking about it pretty much since we left it last time. Then, after a week of citrus and summertime (and tacos), it was time to head back to the haggis and cider of the long winter.

Around the middle of March winter started to lose its grip on the lake. The end came quickly, the ice broke up just as fast as it had formed, there one day, gone the next, almost precisely on the solstice. For another week great sheets and chunks of ice blew around, gathering on the shore in the evenings and then drifting out into the lake to melt during the day. Toward the end it looked like someone had emptied countless bags of crushed ice into the lake. And then the ice was gone. The snow melted right behind it and the weather turned warmer. The sun felt somehow faintly warmer, and lingered longer in the sky with every passing day. Only on the lake shore did signs of winter linger. And then winter came back for one last storm, dumping some fresh snow overnight. The world oscillated for about a week. Snow came, snow melted away later the same day. Then the day it last snowed fell farther and farther back on the calendar. Rain replaced snow. The world turned to mud, the lake was again free of ice.

Winter drains the color from the world, turns the horizon to a monochrome ranging from pure black to a dusty blue-white. Even the evergreens seem more darkness and shadow than color. When I lived in Massachusetts I always found January the hardest month to get through. Here in Northern Wisconsin I'd pick February. January nights are still too long to offer any glimpse of hope, and hope is what makes life difficult, because hope is the feeling that things will be better than they are right now. Without hope you remain resigned to now. Hope reminds you that now is not good. I don't mind the cold, or even the snow really, but all of it, combined with the darkness, is not my idea of a good time. I understand some people love it, which is great for them. They are welcome to it. I prefer to spend winter on the beaches of Florida, hiking the deserts of Arizona, or perhaps surfing the Pacific coast of Mexico. One of my favorite movies growing up was called Endless Summer. If there's a movie called Endless Winter, I've never seen it. I'm also not one to force what I love on other people, so here we are. Monochrome winter. Stark white ice racing across the horizon to meet the edge of the great gray-white dome of sky. Stark, dark, sugar coated with snow. At least there is snow. Last year there was hardly any. The year before there was something like 16 feet. This year we had to wait a long time for any snow, but then there were a few storms that dumped enough for the kids to get out and go sledding and build snowmen and do other wintery things. If it sounds like I don't like winter, that's not quite right. I like snow. I like cold even. I like getting out in it. Unfortunately, aside from a couple nights I spent on the lake shore, I wasn't able to get out much this winter. We don't have the clothing or the gear. Nor did we have what I think is the quintessential winter thing to have up here -- a fireplace or wood burning stove. That leaves a kind of monotony of days. Being driven indoors by the cold is hard for people who've lived their lives primarily outside for the last 8 years. Still, I think on the whole we had fun. I would call it a successful experiment. We learned. Would I do it again? Not without more preparation and better winter gear. Even then, I'd probably head for the beaches or the desert long before winter was over.