Called To Wander (2026)

Traveling with our furbabies Everest & Huckleberry 🐾
Helping others pursue their call to wander and live life abundantly on the road.

12/09/2026

When you see life as your story, you start cheering like hell for the good guy, the happy ending you want the protagonist to have, against all odds. Cheer. Cry. Laugh. Celebrate. Experience it all.

It’s you!

We’ve come to the Black Hills for many years, seasons in our lives that read like pages in the book of our life.

Most years, it has been one form or another of making ends meet. Survival, at its base form, no room for dreaming or thinking about the future, living in the bottom rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

We discovered the Black Hills 5 years ago in leaving a place we thought would be our home on the road, and learning that there’s a sound the ponderosa pines make when wind moves through them that you never forget. There’s a glitter in the dirt that sparkles in the moonlight. There’s a wide variety of wildlife that worships its Creator, chirping, lowing, yelping, clucking, bleating, grunting through still mornings and warm days just outside our front door.

But as I look back, driving the red dirt roads, watching the sunset through a cloud of dust kicked up behind me, I see now that God brought me to the Black Hills time and time again to dream.

This is the place where I’ve learned to dream again. To realize that, against all odds, the protagonist is making headway when everything sometimes seems stacked against him. So many things we’ve experienced and overcome these past four years, good, bad and otherwise.

We’ve always found good people here, the best one could ask for, some who have become as close as family and whom family comes to visit. People are always the heart of any story about life. This is no Cast Away story. We’re not living alone on an island. We’re living in a sea of humanity, with waves of community rolling by year after year, some new faces, many the same.

These people have made the survival chapters worth remembering, when the anxieties and stress and uncertainties of those chapters are worth forgetting.

In this, our fifth season in the Black Hills, our story is changing. This chapter is filled with hope, gratitude, peace, love and joy. We’ve turned a corner, in some sense, in how we have been blessed to build a business that has allowed us to climb rungs on Maslow’s Hierarchy, born in the midst of the past 4 years of returning to the Black Hills.

God has transformed my survivor mentality into one in which I am released to dreaming again. And how big those dreams are! How strange it feels to dream again, to think for once about what I want to do instead of what I have to do to make ends meet.

Creativity has found fertile ground in these Black Hills, and the dreams are real. And while there are never any promises in the story of life of how the next chapter may go, or how the ending will play out, I’m ok with the release I feel in thinking that the best is just around the corner.

Even if it’s not, if there’s a twist in the plot that brings distress, sadness, overwhelming challenge, I feel better prepared to wade through it, seeking what good may be gleaned from hard times.

I am excited about life, my story, and have so much to share about what I’ve learned in my recent journey across America that has, perhaps for the first time, given me hope that the best is still ahead.

I cannot share these words without giving thanks to a God who decided it was worthwhile not to cut short my story so many times before when the ink spilled across the page and my future was on the brink of destruction. Without the experience of His Love, at a time when desperation was all I knew, there’s no real hope, no real cause to cling to through seasons of despair or future of which to dream.

This place will always be special to me, the carved out corner of a state I would otherwise overlook. I stack my gratitude one stone at a time, one prayer or answered prayer, a tribute to the glory of the One who led me thus far into my story…

09/09/2026

This season of working in the Black Hills of South Dakota has been different. It is a shorter stay, just over 3 months instead of 6. And my role is different, I am just a server in the restaurant and no longer in management.

While we still camp in the same spot we have for the last 4 years and while many of the same workers I have come to know over the years are here, there is a newness about life here these last few months for which my heart and mind are embracing as we move closer and closer to packing up and leaving for the last time.

Despite the familiarities and tendencies to fall back into the same rituals and routines that I’ve developed here over the years, none of which are inherently bad, I have learned to embrace the newness of each day and search for the meaningful among what may seem mundane, an appreciation for every moment here for what it is - life, and life abundantly!

One significant difference in my role this year is that I returned to serving meals to guests, gaining access to people who I only knew in passing when I was a manager, and who might have known me as a problem-solver for them when they were upset about something rather than the face of their first experience in such a beautiful part of the country, for which they likely planned and saved for months, if not years, to visit.

And while the life of a server is typically built on the idea that the more tables you serve, the more tips you get, I have approached this year differently.

We have been blessed in abundance this year, relative to our past ten years, maybe not to your standards, but beyond our imagination and any planning and number crunching I could have done.

Money is still important. But it is not what has driven me the last three months in serving food to guests.

I have had to be intentional about this. It is terribly difficult to work in an industry where hustle is built into every moment and success is measured by the amount of cash in your pocket at the end of every shift.

We have financial needs, like everyone, and Lindsay and I set a target, to make enough to cover our monthly expenses here, but not to become so obsessed with making the next dollar that we miss something important in the moment.

What could be more important for anyone at work than a paycheck? After all, we are dumped into a world where we learn at a very young age that we must work and work and work to earn and earn and earn, exchanging time for money, time one will never get back but for which they may be rewarded one day by no longer having to work.

What’s more important than that?

People.

As we arrived here after my first experience with Someone Tell Chris taking me deep into the lives of people across America, I asked God to help protect me from myself and my tendency to look toward money (tips) as a measure of the worth of my day.

I have a brief 3 minute walk to work between our camper nestled beneath the ponderosa pines and the lodge and restaurant at the bottom of the hill. During that time, each day, I have spoken with God about the day and have learned to ask Him one thing:

Please introduce me to the people you want me to meet today.

This prayer has changed everything about my time here this year.

I have met wonderful people from all over the world, people who didn’t know they were sitting down for a meal and being served by someone who had prayed for them that day.

And I’ve had peace about the times when I did not receive the gratuity I anticipated my service to be worth.

In everything, God has shown His blessings toward me by pouring out an abundance of everything I have needed.

On days when it was slow and I did not earn much, I met people with whom I shared the story of our nomadic life and the impact we have as we wander. And they have opened up their lives to me, some even praying for me right there.

And other days, I have been blessed by an abundance of gratuity when the old me sensed an anxiety about whether ends would meet that week.

As I removed our finances and my typical worry over them, I have found a deeper peace and intentionality toward the people I have met the last three months.

And I long to remain in a place where my financial needs do not overshadow the value of engaging in conversation with a stranger who I will likely never see again.

Who would you be if money was not a factor?

We are not without want. There are still things I want in life, mostly to one day be able to do whatever I want whenever I want (is that “retirement”?), to pursue my passion to tell stories that change peoples’ lives and inspire them to pursue the Abundance in their own lives.

But in every season in my life, I have never had need. All my needs have been met, thank God.

So as I am close to wrapping up this last season of living and working in the Black Hills of South Dakota, I am seeing my time here as a journal of personal interactions where the value of the people sitting before me is not based on my expected gratuity from them, but from the quality of the service I give them regardless of what they ultimately tip me, and the depth of the connection I form, even for those who simply want to sit down and eat and enjoy the fact they don’t have to think about silly things like refills on their water or clearing their plates when they are done.

This has been a valuable season for me, beyond the financial blessings we have experienced. And as we begin staging our departure, my prayer remains the same whether I’m walking three minutes to work or driving three hours to my next destination.

Please introduce me to the people you want me to meet today.

Money will come and go, like guests on vacation in this lodge. But the true value of the time I am exchanging in working is not measured by the tips I walk away with at the end of the day. Rather, it’s measured by the relationships I have - with my colleagues and guests alike.

And fortunately, for an analytical guy like myself, there is no way to measure the value of relationships.

There is only the call, the desire, the need to connect with the people God wants me to meet, and to let what happens from there become another one of life’s beautiful mysteries.

06/09/2026

I have been anxious lately. Change always does that to me. As much as I know that I am truly called to wander, when I find myself in situations where I can stay briefly enough to establish rituals and routines, basic as they may be, the idea of packing up and moving again stirs a restless that does not settle well with my spirit.

The breeze is blowing through the tops of the ponderosa pines, which have grown up around me over the last five seasons of working in these Black Hills of South Dakota. Small birds are chirping and soon a dozen turkeys will come peck at the ground just feet from where I sit, as unafraid of me as I am interested in the way they live in the woods out here.

September is here. It’s still warmer than it should be. But the sun sets at different angles now, at northern latitudes, and shadows cast longer than they did a few months ago.

It’s leaving season. For the last five years this sense overcame me, though the actual leaving has come anywhere from mid September to late October.

This time, it comes in less than two weeks. And with the leaving, there will be no return, at least the way it has been the last four years.

The ground has shaken here, partly my fault for asking God to move the mountains in my life, and its impact will ripple out in ways I won’t ever know.

For years Lindsay and I have prayed over our business endeavors, hoping beyond hope that we would find a way to get things moving forward in such a way that we could remain on the road indefinitely, relying on our own creativity and the efforts of our minds and our own two hands to bear the fruit that would sustain us.

Every year, around this time, we had a plan for what this would look like. And after the leaving season, in which we found ourselves back in the beauty of the Baja Peninsula, some event would happen that would change our plans, divert our forward progress, and return us to the Black Hills for one more work season.

This is the last season, so it goes, as my prayer for confirmation that we should stretch our legs and make one all-inclusive effort to trust our entrepreneurial minds and our hearts set on changing peoples’ lives, has been answered. Albeit, those ripples will impact me despite my intention of leaving this place for the last time.

Another company won the bid to manage the park’s lodges, forcing a more local mom and pop shop out as it brings in the force of its billion-dollar revenue machine to replace the people who made this place what it is. More than just a place for tourists to visit, the park has become a seasonal home for me and nearly 300 staff members, where I have experienced tremendous joy and suffering and run the gauntlet of life’s challenges and opportunities these last 5 years.

And much more than me, in a leaving season where I had already begun preparing myself to say farewell to the people I have worked with and for over the last 5 years, there are other people who are forced to confront major ripples in their lives because of this change.

I am not writing to bash big business, though the experience has made me more aware of how much of peoples’ lives are impacted by business moves like these all of the time.

I am, however, writing to reflect on how one answered prayer may bring relief to the one who prayed at the expense of others around.

Still, hold fast to the notion that the same God who answered one prayer is holding the lives of everyone else in His hands as well, and He will work all things together for good.

Lindsay and I made the decision to go all-in this year in pursuing the opportunities that both our RV caravan business and our latest storytelling journey are presenting.

But in the back of my mind, I always had this spot beneath the ponderosa pines as a fall back, a safety net of sorts. If our plans ever fell short, if money ever got tight, we were one phone call and a few thousand miles away from a soft landing in a safe place we have come to know and love so well.

This year had to be different.

So we made the decision that we would go all-in, trusting the desires of our hearts and the creative energies of our minds, and we committed to ourselves that this would be our last season here.

Still I prayed for confirmation. I knew what my mind and heart were saying. But I needed to feel it deeper inside, deep within the space my spirit resides, where anything of any value in my life rests.

God confirmed this decision for us, in moving the mountains before me, when this contract fell through this week.

There is nobody else I want to work for again than the wonderful boss I have had here. I call her my boss-friend, and I am grateful now that I can drop the term “boss” and leave just the word “friend.”

But her life is at the epicenter of God’s movement here. As are dozens of other people I have come to know and love.

And while for me, there is a peace in seeing clear signs of the closure in this leaving season, I have the empathy to understand how others will see this as a terrible event in their lives.

I pray now for new mountains to move in their lives, for perspectives to broaden and opportunities to present themselves in ways they could not have done if this first mountain had not shaken the ground around.

(I have a story about that, which I’ll share sometime later, how confronting a desperation within me caused profound transformation and set me on a course that I was always meant to pursue.)

If you’ve made it this far, and the algorithm has let you view it in the first place, please know that there is a deep movement within Lindsay and me to share the moments in our lives that are stacking up with the tremendous opportunity to bring goodness into the world, to change peoples’ perspectives and lives and responses to challenges like these.

We’ll be sharing more of our pursuit of Abundant Life and invite you to remain engaged. From this leaving season, from the moving of the mountains before me, new life is being born… new life we think you’ll enjoy.

31/07/2026

You need to know The Red Clay Strays.

Driving through the park at sunset…

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