Migratory Dispatch No. 1: A Leap of Faith from Louisiana to Maine
Exploring a Modern Nomadic Lifestyle and Mapping It with Felt
What does it feel like to long for summer?
When you grow up in southeast Louisiana, summer is less something you look forward to and more something you endure. There is plenty of summer throughout the year in these parts, nearly eight months worth some years. You are awash in summer.
Most of it is brutal, too, especially in terms of the weather. You can count the ways with the letter “H”:
Heat
Humidity
Heat Index
Hurricanes
There are people who perform an annual migration from north to south to escape long, cold winters. These people often are referred to as snowbirds. Well, whatever the opposite of a snowbird is, that is what I am.
The high temperature at home in Slidell, Louisiana, hit 97 degrees on Friday, so we pointed the camper van north toward Maine and hit the road. This is our second annual summer migration after trekking to Iowa for RAGBRAI last summer. After that successful three-week beta test among the rolling hills and farm fields — and cool nights! — of Iowa, this year’s iteration is a six-week attempt to escape, albeit temporarily, the extremeness of the Louisiana summer.
The main question to be answered by this trip is not so much about the weather, though. Rather, it is this: How can you live on the road?
Taking that even further, how does life on the road work? What kind of life can you live? Can you thrive? What will you learn?
I imagine finding pleasant, meaningful, surprising, difficult, and other worthwhile answers to those questions and others during this expedition. The experience and the teaching it offers are the real goods.
The short break from the four Hs? That’s just lagniappe.
Follow Along with Felt
Maps stand the test of time when it comes to documenting a journey. It is a natural medium through which to share the experience, as there is such a strong current of geography and place on any trip through the physical world.
To that end, Felt, a collaborative, web-based mapping platform, is being used to catalog our trip this summer. Felt democratizes map-making with an easy-to-start and easy-to-use model that seems well-suited for this type of application.
Follow along on the map here.
The Boondocking Count
One of the goals for the trip this summer is to boondock at least 50 percent of the time. We are going to be away from home for 42 days, so that means we need to boondock at least 21 nights to succeed.
The updated boondocking count through this morning:
Total nights = 3
Total nights boondocking = 3
—
100 percent boondocking