Called To Wander (2025)

08/12/2025

Day 19 of 150 The Story of Our Life On the Road]
4/15/25 Returning to Custer State Park

Lindsay interviewed over the phone with a woman who called herself "T" as we sat in our motorhome in a campground in Thermopolis, Wyoming. It was a good interview, though not exactly what Lindsay hoped.

We recently learned that a person (who likes horses) could get paid as a "wrangler" for leading trail rides in beautiful places, such as state and national parks. While the pay was not stellar, the idea is that Lindsay (who definitely likes horses) would be able to work a seasonal job doing something she enjoys, and I would find a local restaurant job.

Our return to Thermopolis in 2021 didn't go the way we thought it would. Previously, in 2019, we had broken down catastrophically in Utah and some wonderful friends allowed us to live in their driveway and share their kitchen, bathroom and lives with us in Thermopolis. We worked in a local hotel where Lindsay managed the spa, and I was a server in the restaurant.

At the time, we didn't need much. We were still living boldly on faith. And in 2019, what we made was just enough.

Returning to Thermopolis in 2019 came with higher expenses. And while we were handed our old jobs, they didn't pay as well and didn't feel as fulfilling as before.

Time to look for work we enjoyed.

When T offered Lindsay the job of managing the front desk of a lodge in Custer State Park, we had to consider that maybe God wanted us in South Dakota for reasons other than leading trail rides.

I was offered a serving job, with the option to become the Assistant General Manager, T's right hand in the lodge.

We had never been able to secure camping in Custer State Park. So the idea of getting paid to live there sounded incredible.

Four years later... here we are with our Alliance RV 23ML, ready to set up camp beneath the ponderosa pines for what would be our longest season (6 months!). Four seasons in a row, with one more on the way!

[This is one story, told in 1,000 words of a photo, that relates our call to wander, in no particular order.)

06/12/2025

Day 18 of 150 The Story of Our Life On the Road]
1/19/25 Driving Into An Arctic Blast

We shouldn't be smiling like that. There's nothing funny about two kids from Florida driving north at the end of January into a freak winter storm dubbed an "Arctic Blast."

But that's what we did, thirty seconds later. We loaded up in our new Ford F350 and pulled a 5x8' U-Haul trailer 1,000 miles north to Elkhart, Indiana, just east of Chicago.

We packed everything we owned into that trailer, the back of the truck and the cab, as much as we could and still be able to drive comfortably. As such, Lindsay's flowers went in the back of the truck.

We knew it would freeze each night wherever we ended up. We planned to bring everything liquid and all the plants inside the hotel each night.

What we didn't count on was Chattanooga. Once we reached Chattanooga, Tennessee, the temperature never got above 20 degrees for the rest of our journey north. Yes, by the time we reached Indiana we were just above 0. In two days time we'd go sub-zero for 12 hours...longer than either of us had ever been sub-zero because we'd never been sub-zero!

Long story short, the plants survived after 4 months of intense Baja sunlight and daily nurturing. We reached Elkhart in time to watch our new home begin production. From the chassis to the rooftop AC, we saw Alliance RV bring our next RV to life in a matter of days.

Working with Alliance RV has been great. In fact, while we hold the formal title of "Brand Ambassador" with them, Alliance RV owners are collectively called "Allies" and are loud about their pride of ownership.

Not everything has gone right with the trailer. But having met the men and women who put their hands on every part of it while they built it, we knew Alliance RV cared about the quality of the trailer. And they've done well in repairing all of the minor issues we've faced.

It's been a wonderful home to us for almost a year now. And it all began, for us, with a trip to the frozen Midwest at the end of January during an Arctic Blast!

[This is one story, told in 1,000 words of a photo, that relates our call to wander, in no particular order.)

05/12/2025

[Day 17 of 150 The Story of Our Life On the Road]
5/22/18 Our First (of many) Hail Storm

I've met many people in life. But not one of them has ever told me that hail is a good thing. Rain? Sure. But hail...

We're from Florida. We don't know cold stuff. In fact, if it's cold, it's bad.

But hail. Hail in Florida means there's a tornado somewhere within spitting range, where ping pong ball-sized chunks of ice are hurled through the sky at terminal velocity until they crash into your lives in some terrible way.

A few weeks into our journey, we noticed that the truck had some suspension-related issues. We had finally resolved our broken refrigerator situation when the next thing broke. We'd later learn this pattern simply meant that we were "full-timers." Kind of like owning a boat (Break Out Another Thousand).

Lindsay found a mechanic located in Longmont, Colorado, who specialized in the kind of suspension work we needed.

So we made arrangements with the shop owner, leaving our precious "Tree Trimmer" truck camper shell to itself on the ground. We'd live out of the trailer in a nearby county park until the reunion with the truck could be made.

So we're inside, clinking away on our computers, when we hear the first drop. Instinct told us acorns. But we knew better. Deep inside I knew exactly what it was and what it meant.

"Lindsay," I said, strong and confident, but also scared quite a bit. "Grab everything important to us and run over to that bathroom."

I knew tornadoes favored trailer parks. I'd read enough news stories. The bathroom was our best chance.

When I looked up from my dash through the rain, there was Lindsay standing empty-handed... with her bike helmet on her head.

No, she's not an avid biker. That's not an expensive helmet.

She was protecting a pretty important thing under that helmet... Oh, the woman I married...

[This is one story, told in 1,000 words of a photo, that relates our call to wander, in no particular order.)

29/11/2025

Day 16 of 150 The Story of Our Life On the Road]
12/21/12 Our Wedding Venue

Like most married couples, before we could get married, we had to find a venue. As it were, we arrived on an island off the coast of Honduras just a week before our ceremony. Romantics that we were, already eloping to some degree, we envisioned being married at sunset on a sailboat.

No problem. I had been coming here for half a dozen years and knew folks up and down the 3-mile stretch of road that was the vertebrae of the island.

As a result of giving an Italian ex-pat friend a hand with rebuilding his dock, we had the sailboat locked down on Day 2. Two women who worked the Alaskan salmon fisheries in the summer and sailed the Caribbean in the winter offered their 35' sloop.

Don't tell that to the weather. Two days before our wedding (New Year's Eve), Lindsay and I woke up and looked out over the bay to see that the sailboat had left. Something about an approaching storm.

No worries. We're on a tropical Caribbean island. Next venue: beach.

As we walked down the road toward the beach where I was baptized 2 years before, a shirtless man with an Aussie accent handed me a piece of paper. "You coming to the rave," he asked. "On the beach?"

We had no interest. But out of curiosity, "What day," I asked.

New Year's Eve.

Sigh.

We told the man about our wedding plans, and he got excited. "We'll build a stage and we can stop the rave for your ceremony and then kick back up again!"

Nope.

Option 3: The dock where I spent a hundred sunsets in years past, that we had just rebuilt with our own hands. This place would become an intimate part of our story.

How the wedding went down... well, that's another wild story for another day!

[This is one story, told in 1,000 words of a photo, that relates our call to wander, in no particular order.)

27/11/2025

I have been ill the past few days, but will return to storytelling shortly. Thank you for your patience. So much story left to go!

This is the view from the campsite today. Not too bad, if only the wind would let up a little.

24/11/2025

Day 15 of 150 The Story of Our Life On the Road]
4/1/18 Breaking Into The Truck Camper

Before she ever earned the name "Tree Trimmer," our beloved first home on the road tested our patience and desire to travel by locking us out three days into our journey.

If this is how life was going to be, our journey to reach Alaska and the tens of thousands of miles south to Argentina was going to be challenging.

We had no idea what we were doing when we first set out on the road. It started as a dream Lindsay had during one of our long "respite" weekends. Then, over 18 months or so, the dream became a reality... sort of.

We had specific criteria for a camper. And Lindsay scoured the market looking for one of two slide-in truck camper floor plans that would become our home for the next 2-3 years along the Pan American Highway.

Truck campers are more of a West Coast thing. They're sparse on the East Coast. But we found a used truck + trailer combination for our exact desire located in Long Island, NY. After communicating with the seller, we learned that the RV was "partially" submerged during Hurricane Sandy's historic landfall in New York.

Nope.

We kept searching and found a camper in Colorado Springs. A friend was willing to check it out before we bought tickets to fly out. We didn't have a truck yet, and no clue how the camper would work out. But there she was.

Nope.

Within 15 minutes of giving my friend the address in Colorado Springs, another friend reached out and said their dad was selling his camper just down the road from us. She didn't know what kind and we hadn't told her of the 2 specific models we were looking for.

But I knew her parents were kind, so we would at least say hi.

As we pulled into their driveway, goosebumps raced up and down my body. It was exactly what we were willing to fly across the country to buy!

We were quick to settle on the price and my friend's father delivered the camper to us later that day, a short ten-mile drive where all our dreams of the road were waiting for our next home to arrive.

[This is one story, told in 1,000 words of a photo, that relates our call to wander, in no particular order.)

23/11/2025

Day 14 of 150 The Story of Our Life On the Road]
1/15/14 Wedding Resolutions

Lindsay and I were married at sunset on December 31, 2013, on an island in the Caribbean off the coast of Honduras. Well, that's where we were formally married in the church before God.

I like to say that we were actually married 3 times because, while we didn't elope, we also didn't invite anyone to join us for the Honduran ceremony.

On paper, we were married two weeks earlier when our pastor signed the marriage license that our Honduran pastor required before we could exchange our vows.

And we had a wedding party a few weeks after our return from Honduras, where we presented our vows in front of all the friends and family that we did not invite to our island wedding.

So our Honduran wedding was the one we hope will stick. It's the one we stood before God and a handful of random people (later story on that) and exchanged vows, rings and a kiss in the presence of an officiating pastor.

You can imagine the fireworks and party that took place after our wedding ceremony! That is, of course, because we were married on New Years Eve.

Fast forward one morning. When some people write New Year's Resolutions on how they want to improve their lives over the next 365 days, we wrote our "New Life Resolutions" to cover the things we wanted to do in our marriage.

We wrote it while sipping coffee at one of the only restaurants on the small island that was open on New Year's Day. A mixture of excitement and dreams filled a napkin with all sorts of things that we prayed we could accomplish.

Spoiler Alert: We're still working on ALL of them 12 years later!

[This is one story, told in 1,000 words of a photo, that relates our call to wander, in no particular order.)

22/11/2025

Day 13 of 150 The Story of Our Life On the Road]
4-17-25 Snow Day in Custer State Park

People often ask us how we winterize our RV. We tell them with as much of a straight face as possible, "By heading south to Mexico!"

We've spent 5 of the last 6 winters cruising the Baja Peninsula. What started as a first taste of our attempt to drive the Pan American Highway has since turned into a professional caravan company.

But for the last 4 years, we've spent the "in-between" time work camping in Custer State Park, in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

The first year was a fluke. The second was somewhat planned, but much delayed. The third year was an accident. But this fourth work season was the only one that was intentional.

As such, the job required us to arrive by mid-April and remain through the end of October. While we knew our jobs very well by this point, there was one thing we were reluctant to experience with this much time in Custer State Park.

Snow.

We've always managed to avoid snow in our travels. Every now and then, we found ourselves on the edge of flurries, leaving only enough snow on the ground to quickly melt away.

On this day, the snow machine turned on and didn't turn off for 2 days. We were out of our comfort zone. But when in Rome, they say...

Lindsay wanted to find the bison that free-range through the park so she could capture a photo of them covered in snow. Great idea, I thought.

We loaded up and set out to find the bison, only to be met with an anticlimatic moment where there was not enough snow to blanket the warm bison bodies.

So we looked toward the famous Needles rock formation and imagined how beautiful it would be covered in snow.

Off we drove, gaining nearly 2,000 feet in elevation and losing confidence at the same rate that I could drive in the snow. At one point, the road was covered and we were forging new tracks. Not a good idea.

We imagined being found days later on the bottom of a cliff with only our tailgate and license plate visible: Florida, that would explain everything to whoever found us.

[This is one story, told in 1,000 words of a photo, that relates our call to wander, in no particular order.)

21/11/2025

Day 12 of 150 The Story of Our Life On the Road]
3/5/16 - Everest as a Pup

Lindsay and I made a life-changing, God-led decision to serve foster children for two years in the early days of our marriage. At the end of our time as foster parents, we would have 24 children come through our care, with the house full of as many as 8 children at a time.

While tending to the needs of the children, we realized that we were not quite ready for children of our own. But we did want a companion to join our soon-to-be-crazy adventures in life.

Along comes Everest.

When Lindsay and I discussed the possibility of getting a dog, I had two simple criteria:
1) No "kick-me" dogs. The dog needed to be big enough that I could wrestle and play with it.
2) The dog needed to be smart. Dumb dogs are great. But I wanted a dog that had some intelligent human characteristics in it.

A neighbor at the dock where we kept our old sailboat had a Blue Heeler. It was big enough to wrestle with and showed impressive signs of intelligence as it heeded unspoken commands. Lindsay showed me videos of other Blue Heelers that did amazing things and I was easily convinced.

Plus, the foster home was on 500 acres and had cows - so we could train our pup to be a working dog!

Heelers can be born deaf. So Lindsay told me to clap and shout and make noise to ensure our pup responded when I picked her up from the breeder.

I did none of that. I fell in love the moment I saw her.

She climbed up on my shoulder and rode there for the 2-hour drive home. When I handed her to Lindsay, she climbed up her as well. Then she tackled the sofa, stairs and anything higher than where she was.

I said, "She would climb Mount Everest if we gave her the chance."

And thus, she earned her name.

Nearly 10 years and tens of thousands of miles later, Everest remains a steadfast member of our family, committed to adventure and climbing to the top of any hill or mountain we hike.

Heelers are known to live long lives. So we hope she'll continue on this journey with us for another decade or more!

[This is one story, told in 1,000 words of a photo, that relates our call to wander, in no particular order.)

20/11/2025

Day 11 of 150 The Story of Our Life On the Road]
5-25-23 Little Devil's Tower

There is a particular beauty, a hidden magic, of climbing to the top of Little Devil's Tower in Custer State Park. During our first season of work camping in the Black Hills of South Dakota, we were overwhelmed by all that people told us to see and do. But since we didn't have a towed car at the time, exploring the area was challenging.

But upon our arrival in our second work camping season, we set up camp, unhitched our modest Honda CR-V, and drove in every direction seeking adventure in such a hyper scenic destination.

Little Devil's Tower has nothing to do with THE Devil's Tower, an ancient monolithic volcano that has eroded on all sides, leaving just the dense core for climbers and photographers alike to enjoy.

Little Devil's Tower is a clump of rounded rocks accessible after a few challenging miles of hiking. The trail starts one thousand feet in elevation below the summit and winds, mostly vertically, through forest, before the last half mile of scrambling up the exposed rocks.

We bring all our friends, both new and old, along this trail because we appreciate the awe-inspiring views it provides. You can see the entire southern Black Hills from there, including Cathedral Spires (behind us), Mount Rushmore, Black Elk Peak and the flat prairies that extend both south and east from the hills.

While most people prefer to hike to the top of Black Elk Peak, the tallest peak in North America east of the Rockies, we always and only return to the place where we let our hearts wander.

South Dakota was an accident for us. It was only supposed to be one year of seasonal work to refill the coffers and set us back on our way south toward Argentina.

But places like this captivate you in ways that can only be explained by the peace that comes in touching the hand of God.

[This is one story, told in 1,000 words of a photo, that relates our call to wander, in no particular order.)

19/11/2025

[Day 10 of 150 The Story of Our Life On the Road]
11/8/14 - Sailing

When many people were making New Year's Resolutions on January 1, 2014, Lindsay and I made "New Life Resolutions."

We were married at sunset the day before, standing on a dock in a bay of a Caribbean island off the coast of Honduras. I can't recall why Lindsay chose to get married on New Year's Eve. But it's easy enough to remember, so I get points for that. Plus, she usually gets a firework display wherever in the world we happen to be for our anniversary.

On the morning after our wedding, we went to breakfast at one of the handful of restaurants open on New Year's Day on that tiny little island. While sipping terrible coffee and waiting for our meals to arrive, we started to write down a list of things we wanted to do with our new life together.

Up to that point, I had been a fiercely independent traveler, having backpacked thousands of miles across four continents. But Lindsay inspired something in me that revealed that our life together would be full of adventure.

Having met in Cuba on a mission trip, we were married nine months later on this Caribbean island, with the time between strung together with one adventure after another.

So learning to sail was an easy first item on our list, combining our mutual love for the water with the idea that learning to sail could take us around the world.

Fast forward two months and our learning resulted in buying a sailboat older than me, named Orange Monkii, that was in need of the kind of TLC we didn't realize we had in us.

We didn't actually sail the Monkii until fall. And when we did, I was always worried that something terrible would go wrong - except in brief moments like this, when a gentle wind caressed the sails just enough to pull the boat forward silently.

Although we took the Monkii out a dozen times, we can't say we ever really learned to sail. But the fact that we ran headlong into the adventure of buying an old boat means that a spirit of adventure was woven into our marriage and ultimately our call to wander.

[This is one story, told in 1,000 words of a photo, that relates our call to wander, in no particular order.)

18/11/2025

[Day 9 of 150 The Story of Our Life On the Road]
2-6-25 Cooking on Playa Santispac

We love hosting guests on our caravan tours almost as much as we love Baja itself. And while our travels and mode of transportation have changed since we first discovered the Baja Peninsula in 2019, our love for the beauty of its people, culture, landscapes and wildlife grows deeper with each visit.

On beautiful days like this, the Bay of Concepcion is like no other. With sunrise and sunset offering various pallets of color, subtle breezes keeping you cool while leaving the turquoise water of the bay glassy and a circle of chairs where strangers turn to friends one day at a time, it's hard to beat this life.

We work hard for it. Harder than most people work to pay their mortgage and have a little leftover for a date night once in a while.

But years ago, we chose this restless lifestyle because we truly felt called to wander.

We've worked a variety of jobs over the years, piecemealing together a life that has sometimes kept us just barely above the poverty line, but keeping our focus on the relationships we form and the impact we have on the people around us.

There is nothing else we can imagine doing at this point in life. We feel blessed to be able to call such a view the "office" as we invest time in helping our guests experience everything we have come to love about such a unique place in the world.

As such, Lindsay is always cooking or serving guests, offering unmatched hospitality and sharing her servant's heart with our guests.

Life is good. We don't take that for granted. And as we continue to trust God to reveal the next steps in our call to wander, we're grateful to have stumbled upon Baja and to be able to earn a living doing something we love.

[This is one story, told in 1,000 words of a photo, that relates our call to wander, in no particular order.)

Called To Wander