Alternate Route: How We Ended Up Off Route 66
From Tiny Houses and School Buses to Downtown Living, Our Search for Home Took the Long Way Around
Our Story
Ryan and I were bound to adventure almost immediately.
Within our first year of marriage, we left behind nearly everything we thought we were supposed to be and built a tiny house to live in the middle of nowhere.
And here we are, over a decade later, in a little house off the beaten path.
How did we get to this unknown land?
That answer starts years earlier, somewhere between quiet dissatisfaction and curiosity.
Ryan and I stumbled across minimalism at exactly the right moment. Tiny House Nation arrived like clockwork. We were already primed for something radically different because the reality we had been taught to expect wasn’t holding up against the version of the American Dream our parents had worked so hard toward.
The conventional path felt increasingly unstable, expensive, disconnected.
So we asked a dangerous question:
What if we simply went after the life we imagined?
Not someday.
Now.
First came the tiny house.
Designed, built, and moved in …within six months.
We committed fast, maybe irrationally fast, but once we locked onto the idea, there was no casual curiosity left. We were in.
Tiny house living. Off grid. A cabin through winter. Then a school bus project waiting on the horizon.
We were tested more times than I can count.
Moments that invited us to quit. To return to normal life. To take the safer route back into familiar systems.
But we found the Kodiak School Bus.
That spring, we rebuilt it.
And then we lived in it.
For over a year, our home was a converted school bus parked at a KOA campground.
Campground showers.
Tiny living.
Neighbors grilling dinner. Wood smoke drifting through the evening air.
Strangely, it felt like community.
Like a temporary village where everyone had quietly agreed that life was meant to be lived fully, enjoyed intentionally, slowed down enough to notice.
Peaceful.
Simple.
Alive.
A lot like our new little neighborhood off Route 66. The wood pecker is busy in the cool evening breeze. The birds chirping eagerly. The smell of new wood in the fire.
But we couldn’t live at the KOA forever.
Our original plan had been to head west. Desert land. Wide open possibility. We never would have made it out there.
Then Missouri entered the story almost accidentally.
A friend surfaced with an invitation to stop at his new compound. Just seeing Missouri through fragments of his Instagram feed was enough for us to make an absurdly bold decision:
We bought five acres sight unseen.
Within months, the pandemic was beginning to tighten its grip, especially in New York where we were living. We were already planning to leave behind the Metropolis… why not now?
So we gave away our car.
Let go of everything that didn’t fit in the bus.
And set sail toward unknown lands.
Why Missouri?
That question has followed us from the beginning.
And now I can finally answer:
Because that’s where Lebanon, Missouri, is.
Because somehow, through all the twists and detours, we were always heading toward this little bungalow.
Not as a finish line.
As an anchoring point.
Roots for the next chapter of the adventure.
But Route 66 was not a straight line.
Before Lebanon, there was Versailles.
Three years of mostly off grid living in a 100 square foot school bus with two black cats in the middle of the woods. Adopt a ridge.
We were mesmerized by nature’s simplicity.
Trees.
Birdsong.
Weather as a daily companion.
…and perhaps the neighbors wondering cow.
The quiet beauty of needing less.
Honestly, we could have spent the rest of our lives there.
If it weren’t for being human.
Because humans need more than beauty.
We need connection.
Community.
Belonging.
Eventually, we sold the bus.
Later, the land.
And moved back toward people.
From downtown to uptown. A historic motor inn somewhere in the middle.
In some ways, we drifted too far back into the very systems we had once intentionally walked away from when we first accepted this improbable quest to become adventurers in our own lives. Together.
Our philosophy had always been simple:
“Learn from creating your own experience.”
Not from theory alone.
Not from inherited narratives.
From living it.
From testing it.
From seeing what remains when the fantasy meets reality.
Eventually, what we found ourselves seeking was not escape from the rat race, but balance.
Our first stop outside the woods was a small railroad town. A place that had drifted quietly off the beaten path sometime after the railroad’s decline.
It didn’t quite fit.
Or maybe we didn’t.
But for a while, it held us.
We found unexpected belonging at a historic motor court, where an extended family called the place home while inviting travelers to step backward into another era. Mid-century nostalgia. Roadside stories. Temporary neighbors becoming familiar faces.
There was something comfortable about it.
Something human.
By then, we had been removed from bigger cities for years. And curiosity has a way of tapping us on the shoulder just when we think we’ve settled.
So when we discovered a dynamic studio apartment in an downtown capital city, curiosity won.
We traded humble bus living for boujee hermits downtown.
Suddenly, our world looked very different.
We could step outside for a latte just a few doors down.
Browse a bookstore on an afternoon walk.
Slip back into the rhythm of density, culture, convenience.
It was exciting.
Refreshing.
A reminder that parts of us still loved the pulse of city life.
But like some of the environments before it, it didn’t offer the deeper peace and community we were actually seeking.
Timing is always impeccable.
One thing pulls while something else pushes.
And somehow, almost before we realized it was happening...
we relocated further south.
The beautiful Ozarks.
The winds carried us to a railroad town off Route 66.
Now we have our little house.
We have trees.
Bugs, birds and bunnies.
Flowing water.
Peaceful neighbors.
Downtown nearby.
Space to slow down.
Space to root.
Not quite wilderness.
Not quite city.
Something in between.
A place where adventure and stability finally agreed to share the same address. Space to anchor before the next leg of the journey reveals itself. Because this isn’t really a story about tiny houses, buses, minimalism, or Missouri.
It’s the story of two people willing to question the map they inherited, build a life through direct experience, and keep becoming who they were always meant to be.
Your Muse,
Cheryl Crow