Welcome to my nomad travel blog. I live in my Airstream, parked off-grid or in campgrounds, staying for a bit to explore and then moving on. This blog is always under construction; click around and see what’s revealed.
Recent Posts
(Click to Expand)
For the first time in five years, I’m going to share our travel plans for spring/summer/fall only broadly here. No detailed map with circles and arrows, no list with dates. Here’s: 1) why not, 2) our plan in broad strokes, 3) my new blog structure for presenting our travels. Seems …
Eons ago, Blogging Mentor Mark asked if I’d write a post about the odd people I’ve met on the road. Good idea, right? I started in on it all excited, thinking, this will be the best retrospective post ever! I called it, “Strangers Stranger Than than Usual Strangers.” That post …
It feels surreal to be spending energy on anything seemingly pointless compared to the news these days, but here I am, blogging. I will do my darnedest to make this interesting, even when I can’t feign cheerfulness. We have a week and a half left before we hit the road, …
Yes, I know. I’m always I’m saying, “No more tiny houses! I’m done with them!” and then I turn around and post about yet another one. I finished the last tiny house in June; that was the one I gave to my friend Mary Margaret’s niece, but even before that …
What a joy it’s been to get to know other full-timing Airstreamers whom we met at the International rally in October. Rachael and Leon run a Facebook group for us, and Tom and Amy inspire me with their activist writing every day. Here’s a fun post Tom left on that …
More recent posts
- Our 2025 Travel Plans (Kinda)
- Encounters with Neighbors
- Prepping for the Road
- Blue Fabric Tiny House
- You Might Be a Full-timing Airstreamer If …
- Dreaming of My Kind of Boondocking
- The Feel of India in the RGV
- How to Take a Campground Shower in 10 Easy Steps
- For Us Winter Texans
- On Grief, Nonattachment, and Beauty
- The Nomad Witching Hour Is Upon Us
- How Many Stories Can We Tell?
- Tangled up in Lyrics
- Surprises from Life on the Road
- Merry Christmas, from Warmth and Sunshine!
- Pre-Christmas in Brownsville, with Mangos and Beer
- Medical Mystery Tour Wiki
- On Hearing the Palm Fronds Rustle
- Still Catching Our Collective Breath
- Friends at the Heart of 2024
- Rest, Hydrate, Recoup, Repeat
- Our Impossible 11-hour Travel Day
- Wherein We Act Out Alice’s Restaurant Massacree
- On the Beach, the Crowded, Chilly, Still-It’s-a-Beach Beach
- Crowded Beach Spots vs. Empty Campground
- Get Your Banjo Wall Calendar Here
- Neither Fire Ants nor Boy Scouts Stays These Campers from Enjoying the Beach
- Where Salt Marsh Meets the Sea
- On the Border of Isengard
- Blogging in Dark Times, Redux
- In Anticipation of the Day After
- GDTR Press Clippings
- Birthdays on the Road: You Win Some, You Lose Some
- My Least-favorite Part of Full-timing
- Moments of Silly > All Else
- Your Daily Banjo Vol 2
- Big Boy, Pelicans, Airstreamers We Can’t Shake
- What Rallies Are Really About
- Airstream Rally: Early Halloween, Seminars, Clubs, Libations, Oh My
- Airstream Rally Day 1 Photo Recap
About GDTR
My name is Shelly; this is my blog. It’s filled with personal reflections on a lifestyle of travel. I began writing in 2019 when my husband, Tracy, and I sold our stuff, bought an Airstream, and hit the road with our dog, Banjo. We’ve been traveling the country and living …
I used to have a variety of maps here showing where we’ve been, but by now just imagine we’ve been pretty much everywhere. Below are posts about particular places, in case that gives you a feel. If you’re looking for info about a specific place not here, type it into …
These posts are about aspects of full-timing on the road, not really how-to, more like how-we-did-it. Boondocking Traveling Rough Travel Days! Errand Days We don’t have the trailer behind us for these days, but they’re a surprisingly big part of this wild lifestyle …
Lotsa Places
I used to keep up a travel map here with little color-coded icons that linked to blog posts I’d written from each place. The map got crowded and impractical after a while, so I’m now categorizing places as a way to indicate where we’ve been. National parks are such an …
I’m working on grabbing a sample post from each state in the U.S.; in the meantime, here’s a smattering …
Lotsa Photos
Lotsa Talk
I feel like I’m in a Star Trek episode where the transporter has malfunctioned (in the future no one says, “broken”), and I’m stuck between two planets. It’s not as bad as the time in The Next Generation when Geordie and Ro got stuck walking around the Enterprise like ghosts …
This is where we live this week. It’s just a site by a lake, in the woods, on the upper peninsula of Michigan. Nothing exotic: it’s not the Keys or the Utah Arches, just a lake. But reflecting on this spot this morning once again confirmed why I’m living this …
Just about this time a couple of years ago, Tracy and I were sitting in his living room in Maryland, watching the YouTube channel of Airstreamers we liked to watch. They were pulling into this exact Florida state park we’re in now (Tomoka, north of Daytona). On the TV, as …
I have a billion photos of our weekend here at Williamsburg as I celebrated my son’s graduation from William & Mary—with Tracy and with Finn’s dad and his big family. My first blogging instinct is to narrate the weekend with all those photos; it has been bright and busy and …
Tracy says it’s been ten days only that we’ve been camping without cell signal, and in truth it’s not been more than two consecutive days, since we’ll drive out to download email pretty frequently. But when I check my calendar and my social soul, it feels for sure like three …
I’ve a friend who lives in her Airstream but travels less than we do; she and her husband own a parking pad in a little Airstream community that they use as a home base. So we share quite a bit in terms of lifestyle, but we also live very differently …
Lotsa Lotsa
Creating tiny houses from kits is a hobby I started in the Airstream because it’s small and quiet (so I can do it at night while I’m awake and Tracy’s asleep). I am now obsessed. Quick View of All Here’s a slideshow of nearly all the Tiny Houses I’ve made …
This is a series of personal posts about grief and family, by me and my guest writers. Some of these were very very hard to write, and friends tell me they’re hard to read. Others I wrote real quick-like, mainly to fill in gaps in my life and to reveal …
I’m fortunate to include frequent writers other than myself, occasional guest submissions, and sets of links to other blogs that are relevant to mine. Here are the regular contributors: Shana and Marcus Click here for all of Shana and Marcus’ posts. We are a post-pandemic retired duo who decided society …