Boyinks4Adventure

While we are home from our one-year adventure of a US-based RV road trip with our family, we aren’t settling back into life as we knew it.  We are resting, making some large decisions about our house and remaining possessions, doing client work, beginning a large update/change to one of our businesses, getting the kids back on track with a more formal curriculum, and caught up on their orthodontia.  We…   Read More >>

Ah, vacations. Travel. Sight-seeing. The chance to “get away from it all”. Living minimalistically. Taking only what you need - just the clothes on your back and a spring in your step. Buying food on the way.  Borrowing or renting what you don’t have. Sounds…sentimental. Poetic. Environmentally responsible. Counter-culture. And, as it happens, hard to do. At least for us. Set aside the fact that we traveled with a fully…   Read More >>

I’ll be the first to admit: I process things slowly.  If I see a movie don’t ask me what I thought of it until at least a week later.  When big life changes happen (like getting laid off from the “safe” corporate job) my immediate reaction is usually a non-reaction, then as days and weeks go by I’ll be better able to tell you how I’m reacting.  This reaction speed…   Read More >>

The current marketing campaign for the State of Michigan is “Pure Michigan”.  Ads like this one feature Michigan native Tim Allen doing the sentimental voice-over narration while the imagery is always during the fall, with the video slowed down and the sun glinting off the water. It’s marketing, and marketing will tend to show only the good stuff.  As native Michiganders we know the whole story - the failing roads,…   Read More >>

Re-entry. It can be a difficult thing when your life-style has not been the “norm” and you know that you’re not the same person you were a year ago. As we moved into the Midwest, and we knew that our return to West Michigan was within a week’s time, Mike and I decided we needed to ease back into the stationary life. We chose to stay at Mike’s parents’ summer…   Read More >>

On Thursday we made pretty good time around the Chicago area and entered the state of Michigan at dinner time. We decided to treat ourselves to a nice meal at a Cracker Barrel just south of Benton Harbor. Mike thought that after a good meal he could drive the remaining two hours to his parents’ Michigan house. While we were eating, the previously clear sky became cloudy, the wind began…   Read More >>

I’m not really sure what else to call this.  What initially looked like a freezing fog making all the trees white turned out to be a covering of “ice needles” that made most plants and trees look as if they were pines.  The interesting thing is the morning was pretty calm with just the whisp of a breeze, so I really can’t explain how these would form. Edit to add:…   Read More >>

I’ve lived in Michigan my whole life and I just wasn’t feeling in the Christmas spirit until we were back in the land of snow.  Yes, we saw snow in Georgia, and Kentucky, and Indiana.  But for me it wasn’t Christmas until we were back on Michigan soil, with the barren trees and white fields, and the crispness in the air.  Since being back we’ve split time between MsBoyink’s parents…   Read More >>

If people in America have a shared dream, it’s one of full time travel.  Even in our relatively short time on the road, we’ve already had a number of conversations that have started off with “How are you so lucky that you can do this?”  And while, for us, the main answers to that question are that we’ve been self-employed and homeschoolers for years so the transition was somewhat easy,…   Read More >>

One of the hardest puzzles to solve when planning this whole trip was how to handle the periodic maintenance on the kid’s braces.  My oft-reused joke has been that orthodontists don’t have a Midas network where you can pull off the road and get a quick tune-up.  The only real solution was a trip back home to Michigan from wherever we were at this point of the trip.  As it…   Read More >>