Our wandering path
Glimpse: Franconia Sculpture Park
The colorful Franconia sign caught our eye and we steered The Epic Van into the parking lot.
In the Saint Croix River Valley, we stumbled upon the Franconia Sculpture Park, its colorful sculptures popping up as we drove along the back roads. It is 43 acres of amazing artworks, presented by a nonprofit organization that also sponsors artist residencies and community arts programming. We wandered the grassy preserve in awe. My favorite was a multi-colored play structure by Bridget Beck, whose says her works create play lands she has imagined. “I believe that there are too few interesting, magical and thought-provoking places,” she states. “I see my sculptures as places to escape responsibility and seriousness. … I want drudgery as a prisoner and the swing to reign.” I’m totally with you, Bridget.
Elephants and motherhood, just so
Elephant eye.
In a foggy Kansas dawn, when I was six or seven, my father woke me up and took me to watch elephants put up a big top.
My memories are as hazy as the morning mist: papery gray wrinkles, enormous lumbering legs, deft, grasping trunks. It was the beginning of a lifelong fascination with elephants and the circus, a fascination I recently fed at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin.
It felt like witnessing the end of an era, with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey announcing earlier this year that, after 145 years of featuring elephant acts, it will retire them by 2018 because of the public’s “mood shift.”
Glimpse: Trail of the Cedars
The Trail of the Cedars in Glacier National Park, an easy paved and boardwalk trail, takes you through a cool, green, drippy canopy of ancient western hemlocks and red cedars, some more than 500 years old and up to 100 feet high and seven feet in diameter. The forest floor is covered in ferns, mosses climb the rocks, and waterfalls in Avalanche Creek roar in the background.
Glimpse: Polebridge Mercantile
It's a long ride down a bumpy dirt road to Polebridge Mercantile, but it's worth it.
The bakery at Polebridge Mercantile is legendary. More than one person we met on the road, hearing we were headed to Montana, said with reverence, “You have to go to Polebridge. People wait in line for the bear claws to come out of the oven.” The Mercantile is more than 100 years old, built in 1914, just outside Glacier National Park. It’s a way station for travelers, rafters, and other intelligentsia looking for food, drink, merriment and fresh-baked sweets. The website describes founder William L. “Bill” Adair this way: “He fished, using only one fly (the Coachman), and drank and grew king-sized cabbages while his wife (and later, after she died, a second wife) ran the store and lived in their homestead cabin, which is now the Northern Lights Saloon.” The bakery was started in 1994, and continues to follow the recipes Dan Kaufman, a third-generation baker from Idaho who owned the Merc for 15 years. The afternoon we visited, bear claws were going in and out of the oven, along with gluten-free pineapple-coconut bars. Yum.
Glimpse: Glacier National Park
One of the boats in the beautiful water of Saint Mary Lake in Glacier National Park.
Glacier is so vast it’s hard to describe. We traversed the Going to the Sun Road on the free shuttle, rolling past cascading waterfalls, breathtaking vistas, the Weeping Wall, and precipitous drops. Then we stepped aboard an old wooden boat to tour Saint Mary Lake, where pieces of the mountains form tiny islands. We hiked with a ranger to the beautiful Saint Mary Falls, past wildflowers and aquamarine water sparking in the hot sun. The indescribable color is due to light reflecting off sediment in the water.
Followin’ the Tambourine man to the pool
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you
I must have been nine, because Bob Dylan’s Tambourine Man, released in 1965, was playing on the radio. It was summer in Leavenworth, Kansas, and my babysitter, who also taught swimming, was driving me and my sister to the pool for lessons.
Swimming is summer. Or summer is swimming. The two are inseparable in my mind. Bikinis, sunburns, Dylan, Big Hunk candy bars, and romance novels.
This week, The Epic Van cruised into Columbia Falls, Montana, our base camp for exploring Glacier National Park, and record temperatures in the upper 90s created heat waves on the pavement as we rolled past the community pool filled with splashing kids.
I insisted. We had to go.
Goodbye, Pippi
Pippi
They’re livin’ my high-school dream
Happy friends on their way to the Rainbow People gathering.
Look who we ran into in the Walmart parking lot in Butte, Montana. They’re on their way to the Rainbow Family gathering. If I were a few decades younger, I might have jumped on board.
You can read about my obsession with living in a school bus here and here.
Article in Phoenix New Times
Tom, Judy and Pippi.
Here is an article I wrote for the Phoenix New Times about Livin’ the Dream of full-timing in The Epic Van.
Enjoy.
Hello, neighbor
Fred and Boomer
The concept of “neighbor” morphs when you’re living on wheels.
We’re learning to strike fast, connect quickly and hang on digitally. There’s no room for shyness on the road.
Nomads and the civilised look at each other with disapproval and misunderstanding. Why would anyone want to wander the wilderness and live in a tent? Why would anyone want to live in a box and obey unnecessary masters?
Ali, Mostly we’ve found people think it’s really cool. Many tell us they dream of being able to wander the world. Are you a nomad?