All this fit into a handmade camper shell I found at the last-minute, on Craigslist.

 All this fit into a handmade camper shell I found at the last-minute, on Craigslist. 

I cut a three-quarter-inch piece of plywood to size and lay it over the wheel wells as a makeshift sleeping platform. Like a coffin. As I drive I listen to the ultimate overlanding novel, As I Lay Dying, in which the progeny of a deceased matriarch build a coffin and, with her corpse inside, hitch it to a wagon, and venture overland to her desired burial ground. They get knocked into the river and the wagon capsizes, but they keep going.

I took the Old National Highway, the first transcontinental road, through the Midwest. Each day I drove till sundown, then started looking for a suitable place to camp, limiting my stops to State Parks and National Forests. It had been a minute since I’d lived on the road like this. In 2014, at age 23, I tried to walk across the country. 

I walked for a hundred days, from Philly to Colorado. I had a paper atlas—no smartphone. I’d walk till dark each day and set up a one-man bivy tent roadside. It took me 30 days just to get across Pennsylvania carrying a backpack. Over the last 70, I walked across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas, pushing a Schwinn bike trailer—my first overlanding rig, you might call it.