Kathy & Rick Howe
Seeing our world with No Checklists,
No Schedules... One Day at a Time.
We’ve been living full time on the road for the past twenty-two years. On Halloween, 2001, we left our home in Paso Robles, California, and haven’t looked back since. We left that day on a motorcycle towing the small tent trailer you see below. As we had always vacationed by motorcycle, this seemed logical to us, though it would have worked out much better had we left in spring instead of autumn.
After about three months of mostly cold weather, which included riding through snow in Arizona and waking up to a 34 degree (1◦ Celsius) morning in San Antonio, we decided it was time for Plan B and we rode on to Florida and bought the first of what would turn out to be four motorhomes. During our first five years on the road, we traveled throughout the US, Canada and Mexico; Florida, 2020
visiting the ten provinces and two territories of Canada that you can drive to, much of Mexico and all but one of the states - and no, the missing one is neither Hawaii nor Alaska. As you will see on other pages of this site, we thoroughly enjoyed every day of that five years. If you like, you can read about our travels during this period in our US & Canada and Mexico pages.
Then, while spending a third winter in Mexico and having met lots of folks doing far more adventurous things than we were, we decided it was time to begin moving further afield. After what passes, with us, for lots of thought and research, we performed one of our famous left turns, dropped everything, and traveled cross country - actually from Guanajuato, Mexico, to Columbia, South Carolina - in order to pick out a new vehicle we felt would be suitable for the new adventure we had in mind. You can read all about our choice by going to our Vehicle page.
In June 2007 we headed north for a second time to Alaska and Canada’s Yukon and Northwest Territories, all the way to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, the Texas, 2001 furthest north you can drive in the western hemisphere. We then began traveling south along the Pan American Highway; through Mexico and Central America, heading for South America. We left the States in December 2007 and arrived in Cartagena, Colombia, on June 1, 2008, beginning a tour of South America that took us down the spine of the Andes to Tierra del Fuego at the far southern tip of the western hemisphere (actually as far south as you can drive anywhere in the world) visiting six countries before we shipped our vehicle and flew ourselves home from Buenos Aires in June 2009. You can go directly to our South America or Central America pages to share these adventures with us.
After spending some time in the US, resting, visiting friends and refitting the Tiger, we shipped our truck to Europe in Spring 2010 to begin a multi-year exploration of western and eastern Europe and surrounding countries. We spent six seasons in Europe (averaging eight months per season) and visited forty-one European, north African and western Asian countries. Among many other adventures, we’ve now crossed the Arctic Circle Peru, 2008 in four more countries, which, added to our two in North America give us six of a possible eight. You can go to our Europe pages to see our stories from these years.
After a lot of thought and consideration, in 2017 we shipped our Tiger to Australia. While it was at sea we were able to spend ten weeks touring New Zealand in a rental campervan, which proved to be a wonderful experience. In June 2017 we flew on to Australia where we were reunited with our Tiger and began a full year of travel all around this amazing continent. You can go to our New Zealand or Australia pages to link to our stories and photo pages from these fantastic destinations. In June 2018 our Australian visas were expiring so it was time to move on and we shipped the Tiger on to Africa, landing in Durban, South Africa, in July 2018. We spent sixteen months traveling in southern Africa and you can learn about everything we saw and where we went on our Africa pages.
Future travels? We don’t know. We were enchanted by South America but don’t think we’ll return. Sometimes the memories are just too perfect to put at risk by going again. A return to Europe with some Russia and maybe Central Asia added in is another possibility, but we hear stories from other travelers about ever increasing crowds and higher costs all across Europe. We’d love to return to Australia as we really loved it there, but the costs of shipping to such far Ireland, 2010 flung places will prevent our doing that. We also yearn for the chance to return to further explore some of our favorite haunts across North America so this is probably the most likely scenario. Who can say what might be around that next turn in the road, but we don’t expect to be bored and we certainly have no intentions of staying too long in one place. There is just so much to see and do in this always fascinating world we inhabit, and planning that far ahead isn't our style.
In 2020, the coronavirus disrupted travel all around the globe and we feel very fortunate to have been reunited with our Tiger back in North America just before the virus arrived. We know many overland travelers who were not as fortunate in this regard and were either separated from their traveling home or trapped with their vehicle in a country or countries where they were not free to roam. Happily the time came when we were all once again free to travel as we like.
Every Country, State, and Region we have visited has rewarded us with experiences and memories to last a lifetime and the joys of travel never seem to lessen. This life on the road that we’ve chosen has been everything we ever hoped it would be and we see no end in sight. In this website we hope to share with you our successes and our difficulties, the good times and the hard times; all in the hope that you will not only enjoy our tale, but will take inspiration from it to expand your own horizons in whatever directions you may choose. If you should have any questions about our life on the road or our travels, please send us an email; we’ll be delighted to hear from you.
Some years ago, shortly after we went on the road, we read the book, Undaunted Courage, by Stephen Ambrose, about the Lewis and Clark voyage to the Pacific. At one point, Merriweather Lewis describes the country as they go up the Missouri River and see the Great Plains for the first time. Among other things, they talk about the variety of flowers “delicately and highly flavored, raised above the grass, which strike and perfume the sensations, and amuse the mind” (italics added). Everything about our lives is like that sentence; we see the world around us and it strikes and perfumes the sensations and amuses our minds. We are so very happy.
In all of our time on the road, our motto has been “No Checklists, No Schedules”. Over time we learned that in following that simple rule we had become Travelers, not Tourists, and we were pleased.
We publish this website in celebration of independent travel and in hopes of encouraging others to expand their world and to follow their dreams.
Welcome Along! Bulgaria, 2011
I would love you all the day,
Every night we would kiss and play;
If with me you’d fondly stray,
Over the hills and far away.
~ John Gray
Tasmania, 2018
“The Traveler sees what he sees. The Tourist sees what he has come to see.”
~ G.K. Chesterton
“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction."
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
When the eyes see what they have never seen before, the heart feels what it has never felt.
~ Baltasar Gracián
“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers.
The mind can never break off from the journey.”
~ Pat Conroy
“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
~ Henry Miller
“Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.”
~ Louis L’Amour
“Not all those who wander are lost.”
~ J.R.R. Tolkien
“If you are not willing to be changed by a place, there is no point in going.”
~ Anonymous
“Life is a bridge, cross over it, but build no house on it.”
~ Indian Proverb
"Destiny deals the cards, but we play them.”
~ Bernard Moitessier, from “The Long Way”
Shared with us by friend, fellow traveler and sailor, Mabelle Lernoud
“Life is like a bicycle; to keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
~ Albert Einstein
“The more possessions you have the more you are robbed of your freedom.”
~ Wilfred Thesiger
Sea Menos Más (Less is More)
Rick & Kathy Howe
“Live and Enjoy”
~ Joe Culbertson, friend and fellow traveler
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.
Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice;
and most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”
~ Steve Jobs
For more pictures of us on our travels, go to The Family Album on our photo site.
The map on the side of our Tiger as of December 2021