Return from the Open Road: The Final Blog Post for the Third Trip of Peter and Donna Thomas as Wandering Book Artists

Well, it is over. We are home. We started the eastward leg of the trip in August of 2014. In October we left the truck and book arts wagon in Winston-Salem NC and flew home for the holidays. After the CODEX book fair, in early February of 2015, we returned to the truck and trailer and started our westward/homeward trip. Although the whole trip trip has been documented in previous posts, we want to share a few highlights of the trip using a few photos as visual aids.

We traveled a total of 13,332 miles: from the heat of the desert in summer to the leaf peeping color of the east coast in fall, then from late winter snows in the Appalachian mountains to spring and wildflowers through Texas and the southwest.

Fossil Butte, WY

Richmond, VA

Brasstown, NC

MTSU, Murphreesboro, TN

Texas bluebonnets and paintbrush

We spent exactly 120 days on the road, oddly enough they were divided exactly in half 60 days each direction.

Vedawoo, WY

We stayed in 17 state parks, 2 national parks, 5 RV parks, and 7 nights in Walmarts. We also stayed 41 nights in friends driveways, 8 on college campuses, 20 something at the John C Campbell Folk School and then a few more at places including an automobile repair yard waiting for it to open and fix our truck.

We visited 56 university special collection libraries.

Washington University, St Louis

We taught 15 book arts classes.

We gave 35 book arts talks.

We created 1 editioned artists’ book with students as visiting artists at MTSU, TN.

We gave 5 papermaking demonstrations.

Baylor University, Waco TX

We held 10 book arts folk song sing-alongs.

We made a video of this sing along. Here is the link.

Rutgers University

And we hosted endless numbers of visitors, who wanted to see into our tiny artists’ book home.

We found a few other tiny homes on the road, but none were like ours:

SCA event Lumberton MS

Haysville, NC

We visited 5 music libraries to gather information about the origins of jug band music.

Tulane's Hogan Jazz Archives

And we played music:

Peter taught two week-long beginning ukulele classes at the JCC FolkSchool: The assistant teacher Dave Peters made music videos during each class. Those are links to the videos.

http://youtu.be/J4Ls4NKLLkQ

https://youtu.be/1Y9Lxgzm5JM

We are looking forward to spending time in the studio and at home and don’t have any immediate plans for a fourth trip, but then who knows when we will next hear the call of the open road.