SO grateful for our years as nomads in Nomadland!!

My husband, Gene, and I found many touchpoints in this movie to bring us back to our days on the road. Like the central character, Fern, we lived in the Badlands, ate and shopped at Wall Drug, walked with bison and crocs, marveled at the mud nests of the cliff swallows, felt the wind in our hair as we ambled along the shores of the Pacific Ocean, bathed in lakes and streams, danced in raucous bars, stood next to the great Sequoias, and looked through telescopes at Jupiter and other astral phenomena.

We spent many a glorious evening under the stars by countless campfires, sitting with an astonishing assortment of folk: helicopter loggers, a gold panner, moonshiners, survivalists, musicians, a man who worked for years as a prison guard at the supermax Pelican Bay, a veteran who’d served as a tunnel rat in Vietnam, a veterinarian who only made house calls, a knitwear designer… All widened our horizons and became cherished companions along the way. We didn’t refer to ourselves as “houseless,” as does Fern, in this film; rather, we thought of our Carriage Cameo as our “not-attached-to-the-land” home.

We traveled through all the states seen in the film—South Dakota, Nevada, Arizona, Nebraska, and California—and the remaining 44 as well (I also made a side trip to Hawaii; the RV couldn’t take us there). We served as workcampers, park hosts, visitor specialists at national parks…about the only thing we didn’t do was work for Amazon.