I bought the van in November 2022, sight unseen, from a retired electrician outside Brattleboro. It was a 1976 Type 2 — seafoam green over cream, with a rebuilt engine that ticked like a metronome above forty miles per hour. The listing said "runs well, needs love," which turned out to be a generous reading of both clauses. That first winter, parked in my landlord's driveway with a socket set and a borrowed Haynes manual, I fell into the kind of project that quietly reorganizes your priorities without asking permission.
The Detour Doctrine
The first long trip was supposed to take me from Vermont to New Mexico in six days. It took eleven. Somewhere in rural Pennsylvania, I missed an exit and found myself on a two-lane road winding through covered bridges and farm stands selling cider for two dollars a gallon. I pulled over at a place called Zimmerman's and ate a sandwich on the tailgate while a border collie watched me from across the road. That unplanned hour became the reason I stopped planning altogether.
Speed is a kind of blindness. When you are optimizing for arrival, you train yourself to ignore everything between departure and destination.
Over the following months I developed what I started calling deliberate detouring — opening the map each morning and choosing the thinnest road headed in roughly the right direction. Blue highways, they used to call them. The routes built to connect small towns rather than bypass them. Each one a reminder that the places worth remembering are never right off the interstate.