On Monday, we visited L.B. Williams Elementary School in Mitchell, South Dakota. Among all the schools in South Dakota, we chose L.B. Williams, in no small part because of the graciousness of our host, Deb Bartscher. At the end of a compelling essay about what our...
On Monday, we visited Barnes County North, a preK-12 school serving nine towns in Barnes County, North Dakota. We thought it strange when we crossed the county line about an hour before we arrived but later learned from our host, librarian Beth Undem, that the county...
Robbi planned our tour route to avoid cold weather, and especially snow. The bus isn’t insulated and there are six external mirrors to defrost. Minnesota didn’t get the memo. We woke to snow and cold on the morning of our visit to Garden City Elementary. Our host,...
Last week’s visit to Ludlow Elementary began the night before we arrived at the school. Our host, grade four teacher Lisa Marks, invited us to spend the evening (and night) at her home. Lisa’s family made us a delicious dinner (and breakfast), gave us a place to plug...
After twelve years of dreaming and three years of planning and and more than a thousand generous contributors chipping in to make it possible, we’re hitting the road today with 25,000 books to give away and 25,000 miles to drive. (There’s a symmetry to it.) We’ve...
The Busload of Books Tour is about to begin. In service of our mission, we’ll be traveling through all fifty states in the year ahead. We’ll visit state parks and national monuments, roadside attractions and hole-in-the wall eateries. From the Black Hills (South...
We embark on the Tour one week from today. As I contemplate our pending departure, I alternate between bursts of excitement, fits of panic, and passages of restorative gratitude. Robbi and I have dreamed on this project for more than a decade but never thought we’d be...
For the pre-K-1st graders we meet on the Tour, we’ll be giving away a copy of Everywhere, Wonder, our picture about the importance of noticing and appreciating the beautiful and interesting things to be found wherever we go. The point of our school presentation for...
Friends, perhaps you can help us with something. One of the great opportunities our family will have on the Busload of Books Tour is talking to people all over the country—getting to know them and picking their brains if we care to. We purposefully selected schools...
Yesterday, Brian and I headed out in the bus. Our goal: to test the systems and troubleshoot before Robbi and I hit the road at the end of the month. We started out tired. Brian has been working on the bus around the clock. I have been managing non-mechanical tour...
Yesterday the bus started to feel a lot more like a home. We got up early, grabbed our rollers and brushes and many cans of paint and headed to Brian's house, where the bus has lived for the past few months as he continues to magically domesticate it. While I opened...
The Daily Minute: 3.30.23
In which Matthew demonstrates the transitive power of the crank crevice.
#busloadofbooks
Here’s a photo I should have posted a month ago, the mural as it stood on March 1.
I’ve been dragging my feet for a number of reasons. Long and tiring days. The (self-imposed) pressure to say something meaningful and conclusive). The math involved to see how many miles we’d travled in February.
But mostly because March 1 marked six months since we left home. Which meant our adventure was more than halfway done. Which was not something I wanted to admit.
This trip has been the greatest six months of my life, and it’s hard to imagine anything that happens hereafter measuring up.
I’m already nostalgic for September when we were just getting started. I’m already nostalgic for yesterday.
This photo is badly outdated, but I’m putting it here for the sake of posterity. I don’t have the energy to process our travels on a day-by-day basis, so these posts will be the record I’ll return to as I try to make sense of all this once we’re sitting still again.
Breadcrumbs in the woods, leading me backward to the place and the moment we started.
#busloadofbooks
In which Robbi wants you to know we are often to be found doing nothing in empty, windswept places.
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Good night from Milford State Park in Milford, Kansas, where we were not planning to sleep tonight.
We started the day in Oklahoma and loafed a while before driving north to Tanganyika, an interactive wildlife park in Goddard, Kansas. We fed romaine to giraffes, tortoises, and guinea pigs, little tubs of milky fluid to lorikeets, and craisins to lemurs. We pet kangaroos (who were surprisingly chill). Kato fell in love with the lorikeets and Augie with the guinea pigs. I’m guessing there will be another power point presentation in my future.
Afterward, we drove to Wichita and found a grocery store. The kids stayed in the bus to do their homework, and Robbi and I spent a few minutes strolling the aisles, totally alone except for the other hundred or so people in the store. It was the closest thing we’ve had to a date in a while. We were hungry and probably bought more food than we needed, including an inadvisable box of Peeps-flavored cereal.
Then we drove two hours to our next campsite, a lovely spot on the banks of a lake, where we parked and set up camp only to discover the bathrooms were locked for the “off season.” The “off season” ends in two days, but Robbi couldn’t wait that long. She scowled profoundly by the lakeside as I packed up the bus for departure. She consulted the Google and found a new park an hour down the road.
On this drive, I made a terrible error, opening my driver window at the wrong moment and creating a draft that blew my favorite lei from Hawaii out the window. I despaired, but Robbi did not. We turned around, found my lei, and rejoiced as the sun set.
Then we drove another hour to a new park where we poked around in the dark for a bathroom that worked. The first set of bathrooms we found was also locked, but we persisted and finally found a set with doors that actually opened. More rejoicing transpired.
Now we are parked and Dumbles is getting his frisk on. Robbi is making a salad, and soon we will all pile onto the mattress on the back and watch TV.
It’s good to be back in Kansas, where I lived from sixth grade through the end of high school. Stay tuned for blasts from my past.
#busloadofbooks
