Assignment America

1996-1997

Before Google. Before smartphones. Before anyone had a word for what they were doing.

In September 1996, Mark and Betsy Blondin pulled out of Boyne City, Michigan in a 34-foot motorhome towing a van, with three children, a golden retriever, a laptop on loan from a charter school, and a plan with no precedent. They called it Assignment America: nine months, 25,000 miles, 40 states, and one of the first family travel websites ever published.

The premise was straightforward. Their children would stay enrolled at Northwest Academy, a science-and-technology charter school in Northern Michigan. The school would lend them equipment and provide a curriculum. The family would document everything online – national parks and aquariums, the Smithsonian museums, Arlington Cemetery on Veterans Day, Big Bend National Park at dusk and Carlsbad Caverns at sunrise. The curriculum would bend to fit the country, not the other way around.

What made it different was the record they left behind. Every stop generated web pages, photographs, and dispatches filed from wherever a phone jack could be found — museum information desks, hotel lobbies, libraries, Radio Shacks, even a 7-Eleven outside Washington, D.C. In 1996, that was the infrastructure of the internet. You found it where you could.

The site drew attention that, in retrospect, looks like an early signal of what followed. Yahoo named it a Cool Site. The History Channel named it Site of the Month. The Jerusalem Post covered it. CNN ran it at the top of the hour. The U.S. Department of Education invited the family to present at a national conference on Families, Technology, and Education — their paper is archived in the federal ERIC database, where it can be read today.

They were not the first people to travel with their children, but they were among the first to do it online, in real time, with an educational framework and a school as a partner. The original site exists at blondins.com — Microsoft’s FrontPage code intact, preserved as a historical record. Assignment America turns thirty in 2026.

In June 1997, they returned to Boyne City. Six months later, they set out anew with sights set on a new home.  They arrived in Carlsbad, California — nearly broke, unemployed, and entirely undeterred. Mark landed in the data storage industry as the dotcom bubble was inflating; Betsy became managing editor at a book publisher. They built a life on the California coast. Donald went to Berkeley. Kelly and Stacy went to Harvard. By 2009, the house was quiet, the children were launched, and the map was on the table again.