Living a Dream: Connecting 1938 and 2023
I got my campervan Nelly Bly in May 2022 from the good folks at Drifter Vans. I was super excited as you can see in the “reveal” video that captured the moment:
I knew I wanted to take trips, but at the time I had no real direction or purpose. That changed in July 2022 when my siblings and I were cleaning out my mother’s old photographs and boxes and came across a big scrapbook with the cover on it that you see here.
My Eureka Moment
One look inside the scrapbook and I saw my van camping future before me! My grandfather had meticulously saved every map, every receipt, every letter and postcard, and every note and brochure from an epic one month journey in March 1938 that he and four other relatives took together in a 1938 Oldsmobile from Fredonia, New York to Bakersfield, California and back. They visited family, they saw sights, they had adventures together, and it turned out to be a trip that my grandmother talked about for the rest of her life.
After perusing the incredible detailed documentation contained in that voluminous book I knew that I needed to take the same trip. I began planning for it a year in advance and on October 1, 2023 I launched onto their 1938 trail.
The Birth of the Blog
This website is a direct result of my desire to tell not only the story of their trip and blend it together with my own trip, which I do, but I also wanted to tell the story of who these travelers were. How did they happen to decide to do such a thing? What do we know about their family stories? Who were the people they visited?
Since this is my own family we’re talking about, I decided to start my blog at the beginning with the immigration story of my mother’s grandfather (who was also one of the travelers), and how that history unfolded as he and his siblings settled in western New York in the 1880’s and established roots.
The early blog articles tell my family’s story within the historical context of their times. But the blog articles also describe my own camper van adventures and mis-adventures as I prepared for the two month road trip and did some “practice” camping in May and July 2023. Those travelogues continue while I’m on the 1938 trail as well. There is definitely a learning curve when figuring out how to get the most out of a months-long van camping experience, and I take my readers along for that ride while I also weave the history of my family and their trip in 1938 into a 2023 context and my own experience of their experience.
Navigating Your Way
You can scroll down the Breadcrumbs page to see the different topics and the dates they were written, going back to the very beginning in April 2023. Some introduce you in more detail to who I am and what I’m calling The 1938 Project. Others are historical, some are family stories, and many are descriptions of traveling adventures in my van Nelly Bly.
I hope you enjoy reading these articles as much as I enjoyed writing them. Perhaps they will spark interest in your own family histories!
