An Epic Summer

My family is spending the summer touring the US park system in a converted sprinter van. We’ll be on the road for two full months, visiting parks, friends, and family. This is possible because I stepped down as Puppet’s CEO last year and am not yet fully committed elsewhere. I might never have this kind of opportunity again, and I am taking advantage of it.

We have three specific goals for this trip:

• Have a fantastic time visiting some of the country’s best parks
• Be as comfortable going on a camping or road trip as we currently are going on long plane trips
• Get in some great trail riding as a family

The decision to use a Sprinter van was driven by my requirement that we bring bikes along. I don’t want to just visit parks, I have to ride in them. Yes we could have slapped bikes on the back or top of an SUV, but not without miserable compromises. I ride more enthusiastically than the rest of my family, but I hope to find a mix of trails that enable us to see more by bike than we could have by foot, and also to get the family more comfortable on dirt. I am looking more for bike touring than technical challenges, which matches how I ride the road.

In a forthcoming post, I’ll be writing up the design for the van, but the short version is it seats and sleeps four, holds four bikes, and most of the work is being done by Outside Van in Troutdale, OR. Amazingly, they are one of nine van upfitters we have found in the Portland area, but they’re the largest and most respected.

I’m calling the vehicle (and this blog) the Kanivan because, well, it’s a Kanies van, but also because it evokes a famous caravan from my history. In 1971, hundreds of hippies left San Francisco in retired school buses and wandered the country looking for cheap land with no building codes. They eventually settled in rural Tennessee, founding the Farm, which is the commune I was born on and lived on until I was 8. The legend of this Caravan lives today in the descendants of those who joined.

This trip will be, ah, different. I expect small towns will receive us slightly better than they did fifty school buses full of hippies in the seventies, and we’ll assuredly be far better appointed. We also won’t have to play the Ants Go Marching In like the Caravan did, with groups dropping off randomly to earn enough money to keep traveling.

On the trip will be myself, my wife Cindy, and our twin daughters, Vivian and Lillian, who turn nine at the end of the summer. Our plan of record involves driving more than 7000 miles, stretched so we can visit family in the Smokies. We’re unfortunately skipping all the big southwest parks, because we only started planning this in the winter and they all require a year’s notice to get reservations. We’ll have to be satisfied with Glacier, Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, the Smokies, Painted Rocks, and Mt. Rushmore, among others. Poor us.

The weight of the photos I’ll be taking will crush the meager uplink we’ll have on the road, so expect frequent posts on Instagram and periodic larger uploads. I will also shift my writing habit to capture the experience here.

Many people have asked how they can follow along at home, and this blog is my answer. Well, this, and Instagram.

I hope you enjoy. I know I will.