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At its heart, Van-ishing America is a blog about finding one’s place in the world.
Before we go too much farther down the highway, I wanted to let you know that Jean and I have done just that: we’ve found our place in the world. We pulled off the road three months ago—ending the constant, restless go! go! go!—and are beginning to find ourselves, discover our true hearts, and iron out the wrinkles in our marriage.
I’ll have much more to say about this in the future, but for now our full-time travels in Sugar the Winnebago van have come to an end. We know where we’re meant to be: Eureka Springs, Arkansas. As Archimedes once said: “Eureka! I’ve found it!”1
I’ve been debating about revealing the End of the Story to you, worrying you would lose interest in this blog about how the two of us spent 14 months traveling the United States, looking for a place to live. We were essentially auditioning the country to find the right-sized community filled with the best kind of people. Though no town is without its flaws (not even Brigadoon2), Jean and I feel we’ve landed in as near a perfect place as we could ever hope to find. For the past year, whenever I told friends about our life inside the 17-foot van and they asked “How long do you think you’ll keep this up?”, I’d shrug and say, “As long as it takes. We’ll know it when we see it.”
Well, dear readers, I can hold the boiling secret inside no longer—the teakettle is whistling with steam—the search is over: “Eureka! We found it!”
Last March while traveling through Arkansas, I pulled Sugar into a parking lot in downtown Eureka Springs (population: 2,188, now 2,190). When we rolled back the sliding door, stepped outside and took one look around, Jean and I simultaneously saw it and knew it. Without another word, we looked at each other and nodded, smiles breaking across our faces like twin sunrises. “Oh. My. God.”
After a year of “speed dating America,” we’d found the perfect partner. We have never been so sure of anything in our lives.
It wasn’t just the location which attracted us—this charming, crumbling-facade town with its Victorian homes and steep, winding streets which never intersect at a right angle anywhere. “There are a lot of pretty places in America,” Jean just reminded me, “but here, it was the people who made a difference.”
It’s true. I have never, in all my sixty-two years of walking God’s green Earth, found a more loving and welcoming tribe of like-minded people as I have here. Eureka Springs pulled us in for a warm hug and has never released us from that embrace.
At long last, I could tap the brakes, pull the key out of the ignition and announce, “We’re home.”3
Here at Van-ishing America, I’ve been methodically telling our story in chronological fashion, bit by bit, town by town—and I plan on continuing to do so with dispatches from the road, sprinkled with book reviews, the monthly photo galleries, interviews with interesting people, and more. Eventually I’ll bring it to a close, but for now I hope you’ll stay on board as we keep on traveling across America, at least on the page. Next stop: Louisiana.
Our story is not yet done. I have so much more to report about what we saw outside Sugar’s windshield as we drove from Montana down to New Mexico, snaked our way to Key West, then leapt north to Michigan and meandered over to upstate New York. There are more diary entries to mail to you, more portraits of Americans to paint, more stories to be told around the virtual campfire. But I wanted to take a moment here and skip ahead to the end of the book to share the news about landing in the Good Place.
The road still unwinds ahead of us here at Van-ishing America, so buckle in as we head around the next curve. I appreciate each and every one of you who hang in there with me. Keep those cards and letters coming, my friends.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming….
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The ancient Greek mathematician exclaimed “Eureka!” when he stepped into his bathtub and noticed how the water level rose, “whereupon he suddenly understood that the volume of water displaced must be equal to the volume of the part of his body he had submerged” (Wikipedia). This led to Archimedes’ theory of displacement. In our case, we have been placed, not displaced.
It was, after all, hard to find and its residents were a wee bit too prone to burst into song and dance without warning.
Of course, if you’re my friend on Facebook, you already know how this story ends because I’ve been exploding my Eurekan joy all over social media for months now with photos and news of our arrival in northwestern Arkansas.
Have not been to Eureka Springs, but will put it on my list based on your recommendation. Went through Hot Springs and have spent time in Little Rock, which I quite liked. ARK gets a bum rap. One note, the rest stop on the Interstate on the northern border has a sign informed van lifers and others that you can stop for 48 hours there, which I thought was quite hospitable of them.