This year we are road-schooling, remote-working, and adventure-chasing full-time across the United States with our two kids and cat. In a couple of weeks, after months of waiting out covid-related supply chain delays, we’ll pick up our new 25’ Airstream Flying Cloud. In the latter half of October, we’ll leave our home in Connecticut and make our way across the country to Southwest Colorado and Utah. We’re excited to see more of our friends and family around the country, and we are hoping to document our adventures and keep in touch with our local NYC/CT community through Instagram (@hesselsweets) and this blog.
Our loosely-held plans are to spend the fall hiking in the Southwest, December visiting family and playing squash in Austin, and the snowy months skiing in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming. In approximately April, we’ll head to Florida, making some educational stops in the South along the way, and then we’ll meander up the coast with stops in the Carolinas and D.C., probably arriving back in Connecticut for the start of summer.
You may recognize the blog title from the Wendell Berry poem, which was a source of inspiration for our journey (“For a time, I rest in the grace of the world, and am free”). Having lived and raised children through the Great Recession and now a pandemic, we’ve learned to find peace and renewal in wild places, and we hope to share what we find. And as socioeconomic and political divides seem to grow ever wider, we also hope to show our children a different pace of life and more views of these beautiful and complicated United States. As Henry David Thoreau said, “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.”
The Peace of Wild Things 