My Why For Overlanding

America is a place that buries its history. There are thousands of places around this country that remind us where we come from: Mom-n-Pop cafes where they still do things the way their grandparents did, before the age of a global supply chain. They couldn’t get mangoes flown in from Indonesia, or bland tomatoes in February. Their food is a product of the place they occupy.

There are country stores with hitching posts out front, because they predate motorized travel. For the communities they serve, they used to be the Post Office, the Doctor’s Office, the pharmacy and where locals could pick up ten penny nails & a bag of flour in one visit. These places were once a lifeline for the communities in which they operated. They are a window into a way of life that made this country what it is today.

And they’re disappearing.

My mother was born and raised in southern Germany; I have a lot of family still over there, and spent a number of summers there during my childhood. Even back then, I was struck by how one couldn’t get away from the history of Europe. You’re surrounded by it at every turn. There are cathedrals where Charlemagne stood, every hilltop seems to bear the ruins of a castle. The local brewery was older than our nation.

Their history, where they come from is self-evident everywhere. America, on the other hand, bulldozes ours to make way for a Taco Bell franchise. That we tend to re-invent our nation roughly every generation is part of our strength, but I also believe we lose a lot in that bargain.

Ask ten overlanders what it means to them, and nine of them will tell you it’s all about off-roading. That is the demographic in which the pastime took root here in the States. They’ll say you need a lifted 4-wheel-drive on 37s, armored, with a winch, or they’ll sniff that you’re a ‘mall crawler’. I think that overlanding suffers from an ‘all-apples-are-fruit-therefore-all-fruit-must-be-apples’ fallacy. If you want to travel the Rubicon then, yes, you’d better have a vehicle that can conquer that terrain.

I don’t wheel much, though. If I’m taking to an actual trail, it’s going to be because I’m trying to get to a specific site. I know my vehicle’s capabilities, and I know its limitations. Often, discretion is the better part of valor. My objective is to find those places in our country where our history still lives, the cafes, the country stores, the historic sites. I like to travel in order to stand in these places and hear the echoes of a way of life that we will surely erase all too soon.

I overland to be a tourist, a traveler to those out-of-the-way corners that the modern world is busy trying to forget.

A dirt road tourist.