After 5 years of planning, we finally did it. May 1st, 2024, we hit the road in our van, Tom.

Tom is named after Tom Bombadil from the Lord of the Rings books. Unfortunately this character didn’t make it into the movies. But Tom rescues the hobbits from a hungry tree, leads them safely through the forest, and we learn he is pretty intimate with Mother Nature. So, it seemed a fitting name for a van who will guide us safely through forests, shores and deserts, and who we hope gets to know Mother Nature quite well.

These first few days have gone surprisingly smoothly. I’d like to think it was because of our careful planning, and not luck… but thats giving me much more credit than I probably deserve. From our home in Portland, we headed straight to the coast through Astoria and crossed the bridge in to Washington. Our first 8 days on the road will be spent in the vicinity of Olympic National Park before we head up to Vancouver Island.

Writing is not a particularly strong suit of mine. With this in mind, I have been debating how I want to share our adventures during these next 12 months. What I have decided is to write something once every 2-3 weeks’ish. Basically every time we are starting or ending in a particular area. For example… Washington State. To complicate things, I will be taking fun iPhone photos, amazing (hopefully) photos with my digital Leicas, and will be receiving scans from my film cameras every few months as I ship my film to my photo lab for development. So I will need to find some coherent way to share casual update photos, and photos which I deem to be of a slightly higher caliber. I do reserve the right to change my mind at any moment as to how this will happen.

Though we have not finished with Washington just yet (Hello from the Olympics!!), this post felt timely just to say we have begun, we are enjoying ourselves, and we are excited for what the rest of this trip has in store.