… is pretty much dead. Sorry. :/
It was sort of inevitable. By its very nature, adventure uncovers frontiers, and as the foggy edges of the map clear up, so too does the mysterious nature of the world that draws adventure out of us. The world gets bigger and bigger until the exact second we find all of it, at which point it gets smaller and smaller. The problem with this kind of thinking, though, is in its assumption that just because someone has discovered something, we don’t need to discover it, too.
Well that’s just plain wrong.
Back in the mid 1910s, when RVing was a new idea that few had heard of and fewer had tried, a group of guys got together to adventure. The line-up of this gang was so impressive, it sounds like something out of a comic book. They called themselves “The Four Vagabonds,” and you’ve probably heard their names before.
VAGABONDS, ASSEMBLE!:
- Henry Ford, captain of industry and insatiable drinker of life
- Thomas Edison, genius inventor, futurist, and super-scientist extraordinaire
- Harvey Firestone, industrialist and great friend of Ford
- John Burroughs, famed naturalist, ahead-of-his-time conservationist, and writer
These men gathered annually to pack up their gear in a few Ford cars to explore the splendors of the nation, breathe the fresh air of nature, and grow closer as friends. National attention followed them everywhere they went, and their highly-reported exploits inspired the foundation for hundreds, then thousands, and because of them, now millions of people to try the RV hobby and lifestyle.
Sometimes the men would go to new places. Sometimes they would go to land that Ford already owned. What’s important to remember when you go adventuring in a shrinking world, and what the Four Vagabonds knew, is that it’s not whether the place you go is new. It’s whether you have the eyes to truly see it anew. To breathe it in, drink it in, and be ready for the adventure that could be waiting half a day’s drive away just as easily as it could be half a world away.
When’s the last time you took a weekend and turned it into an adventure?
