In September 2026, Longreads published our essay about the trip that started all of this. Still On Its Way to Cleveland covers the nine months in 1996 we spent crossing 40 states with three kids, a golden retriever, and a website we updated from any building that would lend us a phone jack. Read it at Longreads ?
Assignment America
1996–1997
It was 1996. Before Google. Before smartphones. Before anyone had a word for what they were doing.
In September 1996 we drove 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. The project became Assignment America: a nine-month, 25,000-mile, 40-state epic. One of the first family travel websites ever published.
The premise was straightforward. Our children would stay enrolled at Northwest Academy, a science-and-technology charter school in Northern Michigan. The school would lend us equipment and provide a curriculum. We 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 we left behind was the record. As we toured, we 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.
Yahoo named the site a Cool Site. The History Channel made 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 us to present at a national conference on Families, Technology, and Education, and our paper is archived in the federal ERIC database, where it can be read today.
We were not the first people to travel with their children. We were among the first to do it online, in real time, with an educational framework and a school as a partner. The original site is still at blondins.com, its FrontPage code intact, preserved as it was. Assignment America turns thirty in 2026.
We went back to Boyne City in June 1997 and left again six months later, arriving in Carlsbad, California nearly broke and entirely undeterred. Mark went into the data storage industry as the dotcom bubble was inflating. Betsy became editorial manager at a book publisher. We raised three children on the California coast and sent them out into the world. By 2009 the house was quiet and the map was on the table again.
ExpatExpressions
2009–2016
We left the second time with no motorhome, no school itinerary, and no children to account for at bedtime. What we had was work that could travel — Betsy's editorial practice, and Mark's job gone remote — and a conviction that a life could be designed around the work instead of the other way round. Today we would be called digital nomads.
The American goodbye was gradual: a housesit in Santa Cruz, two weeks in Monterey, three months in the coastal hills of Bonny Doon, extended housesits in Morganton, North Carolina and New Orleans.
Then abroad. Mexico, Central and South America, Europe. Back to the United States and out again several times, housesitting or subletting apartments. We learned the distinction that matters — between tourists, travelers, and people who know where the good bread is, which bus goes where, and what a city sounds like at night. We documented it at TheNextRoad.com, which became ExpatExpressions.com.
Then 2017 arrived with the particular weight some years carry. After two years caring for Betsy's mother in Sarasota, we said goodbye to her at 93. Not long after, a stay in Washington, D.C. found us at the Portuguese Embassy, filing for residency visas.
On April 2, 2019, we landed in Porto. Portugal became home.