Slow Travel. It’s the art of living in a place for a limited time, immersing yourself in a new culture, learning as much as you can about the people, the language, the life there, and then choosing a new destination and moving on. Repeat again and again.
We’ve done it twice.
The first time was in 1996. We pulled our kids out of their Michigan school, loaded everything we needed into a vehicle, and slow-traveled across the United States for nine months — living in places, not passing through them. We called it Blondins’ Assignment America. The kids attended their local school remotely via the Internet, which in 1996 was not a sentence anyone had ever said before.
The second time started six years ago and is still going — Mexico, Central and South America, Europe. Same instinct, different technology, different world.
What makes us unusual is that we can tell you exactly what changed. We didn’t read about it.
In 1996, high-speed Internet was rare. Google did not exist. Yahoo, Netscape and AltaVista were early players, and wireless was still a dream. We connected wherever we could — dial-up, a laptop, and a 50-foot phone cord. We walked into 7/11s, laundromats, local businesses, libraries and museums with local access numbers, told our story about school via the Internet, and most people agreed to share their phone line. It was always a challenge. We met fascinating people in the process.
We visited an ambitious list of places in just the first month. We documented it as we went, uploading pages to a website that our paper for the U.S. Department of Education — "Families, Technology and Education" — would later reference. We presented to 400 educators in Chicago. We had a 1.2 MP Kodak camera and thought we were well-equipped.
We were.
Fast forward to now. We access the Internet in remote corners of the world with a Wi-Fi code and the ability to ask for it in another language. Folding maps gave way to GPS. The Kodak gave way to a phone that outperforms the laptop we carried across America. Travel sometimes feels too easy — and that’s not entirely a complaint, just an observation from people who remember what it cost to do this the hard way.
The variations of our story are everywhere now. Millions of travelers document their lives in real time, untethered, moving through the world on their own terms. In 1996 we felt like we were inventing something. In some small way, maybe we were.
The technology changed completely. The impulse never did.
The Blondins' Assignment America site remains online, built with Microsoft FrontPage as we traveled. We’ve left it vintage — for historical reasons, and sentimental ones.