I’ve reached a moment in my life where time feels both generous and precious. I’m old enough to have seen America change in ways big and small, and young enough to still feel the pull of the open road. So this year, we’re taking a long, slow journey — more than three months — through the American West, from Arizona to Minnesota and back again.
This isn’t just a vacation. It’s a chance to look at the world with the perspective that only comes after seventy-plus years of living, working, and watching the country shift beneath my feet.
I want to see the West with the eyes I have now — eyes that have learned to appreciate quiet mornings, long horizons, and the simple pleasure of being unhurried. I want to revisit the places that shaped my childhood imagination: New Mexico, the Black Hills, Monument Valley, Yellowstone, the wide plains that once felt endless. I grew up with the mythology of the American West — the cowboys, the frontier, the rugged landscapes — and I want to compare those old stories with the real places, the real histories, and my own real reactions.
Along the way, we’ll be watching classic Western films and TV series, not for nostalgia but for perspective. These movies and programs helped define how generations of Americans imagined the West. Now I want to stand in those landscapes and ask myself what those stories got right, what they got wrong, and how my own understanding has changed over the decades.
This trip is also a journey backward — into memory, family, and the long arc of my own life. I’ll be returning to my hometown in rural Minnesota, a place I haven’t lived in for many years. I’m curious how it will feel to walk those streets again, to see what has changed and what has stayed the same, and to notice how I have changed in relation to it.
And woven through all of this is my interest in genealogy — in the people who came before me, who crossed an ocean from Germany and built new lives in a country that must have felt as vast and unfamiliar as the West still feels to many travelers today. Their courage, their uncertainty, their hope — I carry those things with me, and I want to honor them by paying attention to the landscapes they once dreamed about.
So this journey is part travel, part reflection, part history, part homecoming. It’s a chance to understand where I’ve been, what I’ve lived through, and how the world looks from this vantage point in my life. It’s a way of gathering the threads of memory, myth, and experience and weaving them into something meaningful.
Most of all, it’s a reminder that it’s never too late to be curious, to explore, to learn, and to feel wonder.