To that end, consider this the official retirement of Moseyho.me. We’ve traveled through and lived in 29 states with her, killed an engine and rolled her odometer over after some 40,000 miles of total travel.

We’ll be putting her in a barn somewhere in Michigan, to be raised again when the time is right, perhaps by one of the boys or as an empty nest by the Lady and myself in some distant future. The best thing about retirement, they say, is that you can always come out of it.

We’ve not given up on full-timing it though. We purchased a 1995 Chevy Van and are getting an Airstream polished up and customized so that we can hit the road again when winter fades off into spring. Thank you to everyone who’s followed along with us over the years.

You can follow along with our new adventures at Wand’rly Magazine.

Be sure to check out our new travel site, Wand’rly Magazine to follow along with our latest adventures.

Travel has become a major part of my life. Believe it or not, though, I never really had much of an urge to adventure before my oldest son, Tristan, was born. I grew up in a small town outside of Pittsburgh, went to the city for college, and sort of imagined I’d move home and find work and live out my days. It was only after he came into my life that I began to realize how limited I would be for the rest of my days, or at least while he was a boy under my roof. I suppose the fact that, at least the way I saw it, I could never travel now and since I wasn’t able to do it, I wanted it all the more.

I began going on roadtrips, my first cross-country in 2004, and was immediately hooked. Life progressed and I realized that Tristan, or any amount of children, didn’t have to mean that travel was out of the picture. Raising children on the road, I believe, is every bit as good, if not significantly better, than doing so in a solitary location.

Tristan David, 11 years old, stares out from the window of our VW Bus.

What I Hope Traveling Gives my Children

• A Sense of Urgency. The people of the world use religion all too often, in my opinion, as justification for a life less-lived. The promise of a greater place after death is enough, for many, to justify not doing everything you want to in this life. If there is an afterlife, I’m sure I’ll be excited to experience it. But that is not an excuse for half-assing this one. I hope that travel teaches my children how important it is to follow your dreams, even if theirs don’t turn out to be traveling, seeing me grasping at my own should be inspiration enough.
• Tolerance. By seeing how different the world can be, realizing that not everyone shares your own viewpoints, a person is given a better shot at accepting differences in people rather than fearing them. I hope that travel teaches my children to tolerate other races, ethnicities, religions (or lack thereof) and cultural norms.
• Experience. There is no better teacher than life, and the more varied your experiences are in life, the better a person all around you will become. Just as a painter who has only ever had the color red to work with will be limited in what he can do, so will a person who has spent their entire life in one corner of the world. I hope that travel affords my children the full range of colors this world can provide.
• Economic Opportunity. Finally, travel has the ability to inspire people to be economically independent. The very act of being a full-time traveler eliminates, for most of us who do it, the ability to have a job where you are not your own boss. Being a freelancer puts you in control of your expenses, your income. The more you work, the more you make. The less you work, the more free time you have. You become the determiner of your own fate. Additionally, feeling comfortable picking up and going on a whim gives you the ability to move to a place with more economic opportunity, even if they don’t want to be freelancers or entrepreneurs, being able to move from a depressed area of the country to a blossoming one is a true gift.

Further, the typical arguments–children need structure, they need friendships that last longer than a few weeks, connections to extended family are weakened, homeschooling doesn’t work–have simply proven to fall short over the course of our life. Tristan has been on the road, traveling from state to state since he was in first grade, nearly half of his life. He is an incredibly social kid who can make friends with nearly anyone in less time than it takes most of us to work up the nerve to talk to a stranger in line at the grocery store. Friendships are not always required to involve physical contact; indeed most of my best friends live nowhere near me, and I only knew them for a short time initially in person. Now we keep in touch over email or occasional phone calls and anytime we’re near one another we make a point to spend oodles of time together. As for homeschooling not working, again, Tristan has gone to public school for the past year while we were pregnant with our latest child, at his request, and he’s been an all A’s student, even without the traditional early years of learning in the hallowed halls of our “get ‘em ready for the factory” outdated mode of learnin’.

Tristan photographs Catawbah Falls in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, just before climbing it.

Winter Erik surveys the sands of Florida’s beaches.

Our youngest, Wylder Reisen, will hit the road with us come Spring.

If you’ve been a fan of our travels and haven’t checked out the mag, I encourage you to do so now! We just dropped an issue for Bisbee, Arizona where we not only explore that unique little town (and I don’t use unique lightly, it’s truly one of a kind) but also talk with traveling bands Shovels & Rope and Hymn for Her, get our coding fingers dirty with a complete walk thru of how to create your own travel blog, and of course, loads more.

After you’ve had a go through the magazine, dive into our Kickstarter project. We’ve got one of my trademark videos up there packed full of great tunes (again, thanks to Shovels & Rope!) and all the info you’ll need.

The Quick and Dirty on Kickstarter

Kickstarter is a website where folks like us who’ve got a project—whether it be making a new album, doing a public mural, or publishing a magazine—can try and raise funds for the project. Those funds are raised by folks like you, who believe in the project and want to see it succeed. You can back us with $5, $500 or $5000 (or any amount you want) and in exchange you not only get to see Wand’rly keep kicking ass all over this country and writing about it, but you also get access to some cool rewards, like t-shirts, our handmade minimalist wallet, access to exclusive to backers apps and social network stuff for travelers, all types of goodies!

But we’ve only got 30 29 days left to raise the full amount, so please, head over there right now and check it out!

Even if you don’t want to or can’t back us, we’d be appreciate of the support that sharing the project on Twitter or Kickstarter will do for us. We’ve even built in these handy links here to make it easy for you!

Tweet

We’re now converting a 1995 Chevy Van from a conversion can to a campervan. We’ll use it to haul an as yet purchased and renovated vintage Airstream, both of which we’ll call home. This site will exist indefinitely as a testament to my attempts to make my dreams reality, my oldest son Tristan’s at times reluctant willingness to go along with the plan, and or the two greatest things the Bus has given us: a chance to finally capture the heart of my girlfriend Renee and a solid chunk I my life spent enjoying true freedom.

We will continue our tail over at Wand’rly Magazine, our ever growing family’s latest website.

Thank you all for your readership and varying amounts of support. I’ll continue to answer any questions posted in the various popular posts on this site as best I can.

Long live the Buses.

I’ve been bitten by the sensual lustress that is being mobile. I find owning an Airstream and a van more secure than any physical home, both financially and from a perspective of what actually, literally makes my skin feel comfortable. I find new places and immediately want to walk their streets, drink their coffee, sit on their sunny porches and smoke over their local beers. I make every effort to do this night and day, morning and mid-morning, all through the noon time and well into the after, until my mind is a GPS and my mouth becomes a walking Google Maps, free to any who might bother to ask a human rather than nod off into their phone.

I am blessed with having many friends all around this country, from guys I’ve known since I was fifteen years old and riding skateboards in a heavily mullets mid-90s town to families on the road who though our acquaintances were brief, proved to be the always there for you kind of friendships a man wishes people spoke about at his funeral. Even still, while traveling I have no friends. I have a spectacular family, and I can’t stress enough how everyone of my boys and the two fine women in our lives (I should mention that one of them is grandma, nothing polyamorous or multilingual going on here), but as for friends, for the occasional new idea really fleshed out over a campfire or couple of guys trying to prove they can each walk up a steep hill as well as the other, it eludes me. No violins required, but it’s a price to pay for sure. Luckily, my lady is as entertaining around a fire as she is quick up a mountain slope, so my burden doesn’t exactly weigh quite as heavy as that.

A fella by the way of calling himself Mark Twain said something about how travel is the cure for what seems to ail all too many of my fellow Americans, and I couldn’t agree more. On the other hand, I seem to have come out of the womb a liberal dirt worshipper, and so I’m not sure what progress travel has given me there. Everyone have a good time and leave me alone, unless I want to chat with you, then please don’t walk away. No, while I agree with Mr. Clemens, I must say that as well intentioned as my democratic mind initially set forth to be, I am definitely, less slowly than not, becoming a grumpy old man, of Rumplestiltskinian proportions.

So what is it all good for, then? Well, I’ll be honest. Apart from the thrill of exploration, of having your eyes as the only device between you and a Saguaro or some Old Faithful Grand Canyon Lassen Volcano morning realization, or maybe having debated the artistic worthiness of each and every state license plate design this side of 1997, I honestly can’t tell you. It feels like an addiction now more than anything, and like any good, true and faithful addict, I am heavily in the throes of a stage of denial right now.

Vintage beetle people are not always Bus people. But Bus people are always Bus people.

That’s to say, Beetle owners are sometimes motorheads who love an old, supercharged means of transportation. Sometimes they’re old hippies, but the nature of a Beetle makes it a very solo experience. Sure, you can pack a guest in there nice and tightly, but unlike a Bus, you won’t be filling it with every friend, family and random wayfarer you can find.

I always wave to Beetle folk coming down the street. They do not always wave back. It’s a fifty/fifty thing in my experience.

But with a Bus, you just want to live in it. You can’t always look at a guy in a Beetle and think “damn, hippy!”, but even rolling out in a polo shirt and khakis, you know a Bus driver is a freedom loving, pot toking, Obama voting liberal at first glance.

Of course, let the record show that neither I nor anyone I’ve ever known has hopped out of their Bus in a polo shirt.

Just wanted to drop a shameless plug for an online travel magazine I’ve started for full time or most time or just sometimes travelers, Wand’rly Magazine.

Wand’rly is set up like a paper magazine. You can dive in to our first issue, all about Asheville, North Carolina, from the cover and click away from there. We’ve got smaller articles, like all the types of places we liked staying while in the crown jewel city of Western North Carolina, our favorite places to get a burger or a Bloody Mary, and how to get around the city, but we’ve got big articles too like where to see the best music in town, a piece on the Blue Ridge Parkway, a feature story on buskers, how to navigate the highways without a map or GPS of any sort, and plenty of other fun stuff.

Big, bold photos, thought-driven descriptive writing, and something for everyone from you young traveling warrior types to families on the road to retired snowbirds.

Please check it out and let me know what you think: wandrlymagazine.com

PS: We’re giving out 100 free membership to anyone who likes us on Facebook. First come first serve!

It aims to bring the experience of a paper magazine – insightful, descriptive articles and big photos – to your desktop or mobile device. It works best in modern browsers like Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer 9+, but it’s also available on iPhone and, our very favorite version, iPad, where it works and feels like a native app.

Enjoy!

PS: We’re giving out 100 free lifetime memberships, normally $5 / year, to the first 100 people who Like us on Facebook.

The streets were empty, no tourists by foot or car, the little park in the middle of town peculiarly absent of buskers and bums. The Copper Queen Hotel’s patio yet to be packed full of early partyers in search of Bloody Mary. I stood on the corner looking up Main Street and Subway, satisfied with all of the quiet.

Our hotel room came with two free coffees and so I slipped into the town’s coffee shop to made small talk with the barista in exchange for 12 ounces of wake me up. A flier in the window claimed tonight to be Bisbee’s first and last ball drop, what with the Mayan calendar apparently leading this tiny little piece of time trapped forever safely away from the 21st century strip mall this nation is becoming. If the world does end or change forever in 2012, Bisbee may just be tucked away enough in the past to never get the news.

Stepping out of the coffee shop, I looked to what I thought, mistakenly, was the South, when suddenly and quickly she came, the sun to rise over a low spot in the mountains. Within seconds she’d gone from the tiniest peak of of pinhead light to the fully risen brightness that she can be. Not a cloud in the sky, I had to look away.

Suddenly a delivery truck motored through town. A sheriff followed, then a man walking his dog greeted me good morning and Happy New Year as the local birds chimed in unison their morning tune. The desert is a beautiful place to be.

A friend of mine, Flood, helped me drive our truck back from Oregon to the East. We’ll be settling down near the Smokies for another school year and as we gear up for whatever the next year may hold. Our family is admittedly getting to be too large for living in a Bus anymore…we’ve got Grandma along to help out with the baby and Lady’s general sense of well being, and we snagged up Lady’s 7 year old chocolate lab Annie, too.

Flood and I took I-80 from Manzanita, Oregon to Detroit. We chose the freeway because we were hauling a 6×12 UHaul and I figured “Sure, it’s the freeway, but it’s through Wyoming…it’ll be great.” I-70 through Colorado and Utah is spectacular, despite it’s 4 lanes, divided, status. I was wrong. I-80 is perhaps the most boring road I’ve ever been on. Very few mountains (though just outside of Salt Lake, headed East, there is some spectacular scenery) and mostly just long, flat stretches. You go from 70′ in altitude in Portland to somewhere around 7000′ in Wyoming, and back down at such a slow rate that you never really even realize you’re in the mountains.

The key highlight was this scenic route we opted for into Cheyenne, Wyoming’s capital. We stumbled across these giant rocks behind barbed wire fences in ranch country, and couldn’t resist. With slick cowboy boots, though, I wasn’t making much progress…so I opted to lose the boots and do the whole climb in socks.

Great fun.

I’ll try and break it down a little for everyone, some of the high bills, some of the lows, and some of the unexpecteds.

High Roller Living in a VW Bus

By far the largest expense you’ll incur while living this lifestyle is improvements & repairs to your Bus. The good news is, that some of these can significantly save you money in other aspects of your daily living, though whether the savings will actually equate to having spent less money than you would have had you not required the repair/improvement, well that’s probably up to how long you last in the belly of a tin can house. Here were some of our big ones:

• A New Engine. Our engine rebuild cost us about $3000 altogether, including having the short block rebuilt and having a knowledgeable VW Bus mechanic put it in. Best $3000 we ever spent though, even though that number approaches what we paid for the Bus in the first place, she runs like such a solid champ now and with a little maintenance, I believe she’ll continue to do so for years to come.
• Tires. VW Buses need specially reinforced 8-ply sidewalls for tires. These come in at over $500 for the set, and that was in a small town in West Texas.
• Interior Renovation. While a little paint and some reupholstering wasn’t that expensive, one of the next big jobs in our foreseeable future is redoing the internal wiring, getting a new fridge, and hooking everything up so it can run off of a secondary battery and solar panels. A job like this is going to cost several thousand, but will both save cash (in that we won’t need to stay at campgrounds just for the small amount of electricity we’ll need) and give us more flexibility when we’re out and about. I estimate this job, with me doing much of the work myself, at around $3000.

Living Dirt Cheap in a Volkswagen Bus

Once you have the girl up and running, there are plenty of things you can do to modify your daily life to get by on dollars a day. Here are a few ideas:

• Live, don’t travel. I’m not saying you should park her up in some field and start your own trailer park, but one of the best things about traveling long term is that you don’t always need to actually be traveling. When you find a place you like, find a good spot and make a home out of the place for a month or two. You’ll save a knapsacks worth of cash on gas, and it’ll give you a chance to really get to know the place: make friends, find out where the absolute best spot to have a cold beer is, learn a little about the local history/culture/whatever. Aside from saving money, this is, in my opinion, the only way to travel. Often times, campgrounds and RV parks will have discounted monthly rates as low as $100 / month if you stay longer, too.
• Walmart. Big Box stores are about the exact opposite of a VW Bus. They’re large, junky, and have about as much charisma as grumpy slug. I am not advocating saving money by shopping at Walmart. Anything you buy there, while it may be pennies on the dollar, will break quickly and you’ll end up replacing it 10x faster than a solid piece of anything you can get anywhere else. Also, they kill puppies in the backroom for fun. Is that a fact? It should be. Anyway, where Walmart comes in is, even with them being the most evil chain store to come along since Hitler’s Neverending Hole, er um, Ballpit, they are almost always down for freeloaders in their parking lots. That’s right, they allow RVers (and Busfolk, too!) to park in their lots overnight (though a rare few don’t, so look for signs or ask someone if you’re unclear, but if there are other RVs parked there, you’re pretty much set). Don’t set up lawn furniture. Don’t stay for more than a night, maybe two. But if you’re in a shitty part of the country and you’re just passing through anyway, dock up in a Walmart, maybe through in a Redbox flick, and enjoy your rent free parking spot for the night. I’ve heard casinos are also typically cool about this, though we’ve never personally stayed in one.
• Couchsurfing. Couchsurfing is actually intended as a way to give you a couch to sleep on when you’re traveling. The idea is, you go to couchsurfing.org, find someone who’s offering a couch in the location you’re going to, the two of you typically have coffee and feel one another out, and before you know it you’re snoozing away on a stranger’s sofa. You can also use it though to find an empty driveway. If you find someone who’s down with this, the benefits are vast: you can probably plugin for a couple of nights, maybe get a shower or two, and make a friend (or at least acquaintance with a comfy flat spot to park). This can also often get you in closer to cities where campgrounds or RV parks are miles out, or where overnight parking is frowned upon by police and/or rednecks with sticks.

The Unexpected Expenses of Life on the Road

There are a few aspects of roadliving that will hit your pocketbook where you never imagined your pocketbook was vulnerable. They’re like kidney punches and you don’t know that you’ve been beaten until you’re looking up from the ground in a hazy cloud of receipts.

• Hotels. We would often spring for hotels, and got comfortable doing it, so probably ended up doing it too often. They’re like commercial-free television, once you get into it, it’s hard to get back out. Hotels are ridiculously expensive. Particularly chain hotels. Stay away from anything that looks like a chain and is in a city center or just off the freeway (in fact, stay off the freeway in general). If you want a hotel room, look for something that looks old, is in a small town with no immediate access to any Interstate, and preferably in a non-touristy place (or best of all, tourist towns that aren’t in the tourist season – these are the gems where you’ll find amazingly interesting local people and not get treated like a potential sale). Call ahead. Bring cash. Haggle. Most hotel owners in these types of places are everything: the front desk, the maid, the whole shebang. If the hotel is empty, they’ll take $30 even when they tried quoting you $45 + task. Just show them the $30 and say it’s all you have. Never just walk in without calling ahead though. I’ve had $35 room quotes over the phone, and when I get there, before I mention the price, they throw out $70 as their asking price.
• Eating Out. This is where a solar panel & backup battery system would come in very handy. You will likely eat out alot. Whether you just want to get out of the Bus for awhile and go experience the new town you just stopped in, or you simply don’t feel like firing up the propane cooker and slow roasting another vegetable stew, eating out will get you every time. I don’t have a solution for this other than “don’t eat out as much”, but this is one of the most expensive aspects of living on the road. I suppose if you don’t eat out that much in your stick home life, you’ll be better off here, but who wants to visit New Orleans and not try out a bar in the French Quarter? Who goes to Philly and doesn’t splurge on a cheesesteak?
• Firewood. Ok so assuming you’ll be enjoying a hot fire (we cook over one every night we’re not eating out), you’ll need wood. If you boondock up in some National Forest, you’ll be all set. Or if you want to carry an axe back into the woods everyday and split a log or two, more power to you. But if not, realize that two bundles of firewood are going to cost you about $10. That’s $300 / month if you cook every night. We probably spend $150 / month, which includes all the days we don’t have a fire and go out for dinner instead, but also the handy tip that almost always, you can get 3 / $10 instead of 1 / $5. That means you’ll be transporting wood (not good considering the massive problem with invasive species this country is having, and it’s actually illegal in most places), which can be rough if you don’t have the space allotted for it, but it’ll save you 1/3rd the cost of wood every month.

I just liked the look of this place. The whole UP is kind of dingy, but down-home kind of dirty not just trashy. For $31 a night though, I felt the red light district style lights really made it worth the money.

A mama totes her baby boy around, sometimes in a sack, otherwise by arm, as they smile away what moments baby doesn’t scream or grunt his youthful rebellion.

Some with beards, others only dribble down their chins, part of a family pauses for an afternoon lie in the sun on the shores of Lake Huron, near Mackinaw Island.

A father poaches his youngest boy as fresh bait for camera fodder along Lake Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Dunes National Seashore.

Shabby but lakeside, Lady organizes the night as our Bus peaks in through the window.

I read a few chapters from the Good Book. The recital is met with disdain.

One morning, as a child wakes all too early for his up-all-night-with-baby mother, we strap on and proceed stalwartly through Copper Harbor.

Dressed to kill in full lobster regalia, complete with Vermont handknit beanie including custom WINTER beaded tassel, the boy ceases squirming for a quick shot.

Lake Fannie Hooe in Copper Harbor sings up the sunrise. We’ll travel by small motorboat on this very lake in the afternoon.

A random footbridge reminds me that humans build things sometimes for fun and beauty, for simplicity and practicality, and not always just for profit.

A popcorn stand without a purpose.

Us.

Winter and a toy contraption built of bungee cords hanging from a pine tree taunting him with amusement and plastic jingly things.

Learning to hold a bottle all on his own. Interesting as hell to parents interested in a moment’s relief.

Feet retire for the night in a $31 motel in Munising, Michigan. Life on the road with a baby is like life on the road with a Deputy. God bless his little soul, and spare us what few less grays he might see fit.

Thank you everyone for reading along with us, watching our videos, commenting, and being so damned supportive. This is a difficult and sad time in our lives but we all have many more adventures in us, best of luck to everyone involved in this site.

P.S. For those of you interested in continuing along with Nathan & Tristan, your profiles have been imported to that site, so you can login over there with the same username & password as you did here. Also, the RSS feed for Tumblewagon will automatically begin populating with the new MoseyHo.me feed, but you might want to head over there and subscribe anyway if you’d like to have the proper title, etc.

Every small town, sparsely dotted along highways like silver hairs on a young soldier and free of the clutter of strip mall America, is a welcome break from full throttle climbs and wheel wobbling downhills. Walmart, Subway, Days Inn, McDonalds, gas stations that take credit cards; these are invisible to me now, the mountain people won’t tolerate them and the desert is too empty to support them.

Long mullets fly from passing Harleys, crotch rocketeers whiz by like spacemen and the vast majority of bikers these days, the retired couple, all extending hands to signal a unity of two wheeled respect. I’m no speed demon and the baby blue wrapped around this 150cc engine neither screams trouble nor tough, but the tent and pack on my rack signal my long haul, that this is no joy ride to the lake, but an adventure, and as epic, solo and free as I’ve ever undertaken.

My stomach is satisfied on one meal a day, I drink only water and smoke countless cigarettes that can never kill me. Evenings outside of the clutchy grip of cell towers leave me reading paper books, sewing patched holes in my clothes and studying this atlas until there’s nothing left to do but situps to pass the remaining midnight hours.

There is nothing between me and heaven but a helmet and my thoughts, ample hours of the day to work through what is and what might have been, how I’ll live outside of time and all the weights of land ownership, fiscal responsibility and the trappings of politics, religion and small talk about the unstoppable weather. My eyes are filled with canyon vistas, countless antique cars trashed in personal junkyards and the olive green brush of desert flats. They dart from pothole to mirrors to treeline, cautious of split second danger, wide eyed in the wind to suck in all of the exhilaration of motorized movement sans the big protective boxes of cars and rigs and RVs.

On these back roads all the locals, rare a stranger do they see, wave or nod, touring bicyclists pant heavy up hills and barking dogs defend their homelands. The tank runs dry, I reserve tank it to the next station, barely making it. Three Mexican fellows, each twenty years older than the next, ask me about speed, distance, clutch works, miles per gallon, smile at all my replies and intermittently exchange Spanish with one another.

There is no disappointment on this road, nothing begging for attention, no criticism. The mountains don’t cry out, look at me!, anymore than they deserve to be, the valleys don’t cast blame for feeling so low. GPS and cable television, police officers, and the weight of satisfying the society around me are all irrelevant.

I head home, laughing at the idea. THIS is my home, wherever I am and though our transient life gave way to sedentary, desperately clutching at a place to fill the soil with roots, I can’t deny that only in the uncertainty of unhindered, uncompromised motion do I truly feel like a human being. Not merely a person, as we as people seem to be puzzle pieces seeking out our correct place in the bigger picture, rubix cubes looking to shuffle all around until we match up our sides, all too often shuffled again by another color wanting to do the same. No, I feel the “being” in human being. These 80 short years or so we have to make every ounce count, to show the universe thanks for making us as close to gods as they come in this solar system, until we’re devoured again back into the big cycle to become trees and soil and worm food, just as we were before.

My hotel morning room is smokey, my pack nearly empty, and the sun is beating out its desert welcome cry. Today is my most desolate of stretches and the chances of that golden oldie of a sun being my only companion for 150 miles is good, and well and good with me.