What do you get when you combine an independent-minded, sixty-year-old mother with her adventurous seventeen-year-old son who hit the road together for his junior year? Consider the offbeat year when Mary Lois Sennewald and Ryan Costello left home to pursue learning in the wider world. Throwing conformity to the winds, the pair set out in August 2002 in a 1987 Volkswagen campervan, wandering up the Mississippi, across Canada to Newfoundland, down through New England, farther down into southern Mexico, concluding in Colorado high country. In this provocative memoir of foibles and family,...

What do you get when you combine an independent-minded, sixty-year-old mother with her adventurous seventeen-year-old son who hit the road together for his junior year? Consider the offbeat year when Mary Lois Sennewald and Ryan Costello left home to pursue learning in the wider world. Throwing conformity to the winds, the pair set out in August 2002 in a 1987 Volkswagen campervan, wandering up the Mississippi, across Canada to Newfoundland, down through New England, farther down into southern Mexico, concluding in Colorado high country. In this provocative memoir of foibles and family,...