We were not the first to document travel on the internet but we were among them — plus our story had a twist.
Twenty years ago we purchased a 34-foot motorhome (our first and only) and a dolly to haul our minivan and had arranged to rent our home for the ski season. Final plans were in place for our educational trip around the United States.
By early September, we had built a website and partnered with our local science and technology charter school, which was in its first year of existence. The school loaned us a laptop and digital camera and provided curriculum for our three children ages 11 (twins) and 14. They would receive credit for participating in our school on the road project in exchange for us chronicling and sharing our journey via the website. It was groundbreaking stuff.
On September 30, 1996, we left our home in Boyne City, Michigan. What might be the world’s largest field trip and hands-on learning experience to date began in Cleveland, Ohio, with science, rock and roll, and natural history. It progressed to marine life in Maine, the story of independence and immigration in New England, and national history and heroics in Philadelphia. It then intensified during our two-week stay in Washington, D.C. in an election cycle, and kept developing as we headed west.
To give you an idea how ambitious we were, here is a list of places we visited in just the first month and here is an article about our first 10 weeks.
We received a fair amount of press that led to the U.S. Department of Education inviting us to be keynote speakers at a conference called “Families, Technology and Education.” Our paper was called, “People Make Dreams Come True, and Technology Expands the Possibilities: An Educational Journey across the United States.” Pretty cool and still relevant.
While the 90s may seem like the middle ages technologically speaking, our Power Point presentation, including a video from Big Bend National Park our children put together on animal and plant life there, was pretty sophisticated and played well for a crowd of 400-500 educators from around the country.
Note: If you visit Blondins Assignment: America and we hope you do, please keep in mind the site was built as we traveled using Microsoft’s FrontPage and that we have left it vintage for sentimental reasons.
During Assignment America, high-speed Internet was rare. Google did not exist. Yahoo, Netscape and AltaVista were early players but wireless was a dream so we were out there connecting to the internet for email and uploading web pages using dial-up. That raspy connecting noise is forever with us.
We would walk into Laundromats, local businesses, libraries, 7-Elevens, and even museums carrying local access numbers (you might have to Google that one), our laptop and a 50-foot phone cord. Strangely enough, after telling our story about school via the internet, most people agreed to share their phone line. We went through that process at least once a day. Many times it led to great conversations.
Fast forward 20 years, we have accessed the internet in some of the most remote areas of the world with just the Wi-Fi code and the ability to ask for it in a couple different languages. You can read more about that here.
After returning to Boyne City, we moved to California. I started work in the data storage industry and my wife went to work in publishing. Our children went on to graduate from Berkeley and Harvard and then to advanced degrees.
Travel and technology have merged in the last 20 years and opened endless possibilities.