David Alm | Longreads | October 1, 2026 | 5,726 words (24 minutes)

I got off Interstate 81 to give my soul a break. The back roads of southwest Virginia wind, crest, and plunge through lush valleys of oak, poplar, birch, and maple trees. It’s easy to lose track of time and distance there. People drive slower. Cows graze in pastures. And there are no placards festooned with Motel 6 and Starbucks logos, flattening the American landscape into a homogeneous blur. Any signs you might see are low to the ground and handmade, protesting a data center, for instance, or thanking Jesus.

I’d gone to this rural pocket of the country for the 90th annual Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, an independent city of just under 7,000 near the North Carolina border whose population, for six days in early August, balloons to around four times that. They arrive in RVs and Casitas, camper vans and cars to stake out 20-by-35-foot plots in Felts Park, a 28-acre fairground in the heart of Galax, transforming it into a massive, muddy parking lot sprinkled with portable toilets and a cluster of food trucks, offering loaded potatoes, funnel cake, and blooming onions.

The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.

There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs. 

One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited. 

In the 1980s and ’90s, cars lined up days before the gates to Felts Park opened. The fairgrounds got so full back then that people slept in the horse stables that used to line one end of them. Once, Elizabeth Taylor made a surprise appearance with her then-husband, Virginia Senator John Warner. Rumor has it that members of Old Crow Medicine Show and Leftover Salmon have shown up at Galax, under the radar, just to jam. 

And yet, despite appearing well attended to my virgin eyes, the Old Fiddler’s Convention’s numbers are down from the pre-pandemic years, and way down from peak Galax. Folks say it’s not like it was. Maybe, as one long-time attendee speculated, it’s that more kids are choosing devices and passive consumption over face-to-face activity with other humans, or that more and more young adults are fleeing southwest Virginia due to the gutted coal, tobacco, and manufacturing industries. Or maybe it’s just that people around there are dying faster than they’re being born. Glen Alexander, a 55-year-old fiddler who’s been going to Galax since he was a child, put it bluntly: “We’re all scared to death this is gonna go away.” 

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Tara Linhardt, a professional mandolin player from Leesburg, Virginia, with thick, curly hair and a determined gaze, has been going to Galax since she was in high school, and was happy to advise me on how to survive my first time. Buy what you need locally, she told me; it was cheaper than New York. It will probably rain, so bring mud boots. Find a high patch of ground, because rainwater pools in the low spots. Afternoon jams were open to anyone, but unless I was dead good, I should just observe the nighttime ones, where the “thoroughbreds” play so fast that a newbie like me would only drag it down. 

Tara and her husband, Ian, pulled into Galax late Saturday afternoon, just in time to get a bite before parking their Four Winds RV by the dumpsters behind the Applebee’s at the edge of town. She told me to sleep in my car there, since the church parking lot was already full, and Applebee’s, unlike Hardee’s, doesn’t mind. We’d need to queue up by the gates to Felts Park before seven o’clock Sunday morning to ensure we’d get decent campsites. First-come, first-served. 

I’d arrived earlier that afternoon, hours later than Google Maps had predicted, because I forsook the interstate. The day before, I’d left my home in Brooklyn only to spend two hours driving five miles to reach the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey. I was spat out onto I-78, which at some point blended into I-81, hauling me across Pennsylvania to Staunton, Virginia, where I slept in a former sanatorium. I had recently been laid off from a job I’d held for 13 years, editing reports for a geopolitical risk advisory firm, and needed reprieve. I sought my escape on Route 11. 

In the trunk were a guitar and two banjos, instruments I was determined to spend the week playing in the Blue Ridge Mountains in lieu of applying for jobs and fretting about AI in my Brooklyn apartment. It was the first long road trip I’d taken alone in a quarter-century, and I’d hoped for a reset. Call it a midlife crisis if you want, but I drove cross-country a lot before I moved to New York, always on back roads. America is best seen up close.

After chatting awhile with Tara, Ian, and a luthier named John Hamlett, who’d also parked his RV behind the Applebee’s, I folded myself into the backseat of my Chevy Trax rental and more or less slept. I awoke at 6 a.m. to a downpour, rain pelting the roof of my car like fingertips on a conga drum. 

The four of us caravaned into town, where we waited until almost 9 a.m. to enter the park. We figured it was due to the rain. In fact, it was because of an issue with the gate itself. My source for this intel was none other than the Galax chief of police, DeWitt Cooper, who was directing traffic into Felts Park that day and hails from the Bronx. I’d see Chief Cooper again a couple days later, at Willie’s Food Truck inside the fairgrounds, where we chatted over catfish and collard greens about his philosophy of policing. “Don’t judge based on appearances and treat people with love,” he told me. 

I chose a plot on the far side of the fairgrounds, near a fence and a row of portable toilets, with Tara, Ian, and John all nearby. Our little commune wouldn’t last; the next day, Four Winds got stuck in the mud and Tara had to summon a Moose—one of the men of Moose Lodge No. 733, a fraternal organization that’s managed the Old Fiddler’s Convention since the beginning—to drag it out with a tractor. They found higher ground by the tennis courts and I stayed put. That night it rained again, and I awoke at 5 a.m. in a half-inch of water that had pooled in my tent overnight, soaking my sleeping bag, pillow, and clothes.

It’s no fun to wake up in a puddle, but when it rains in your tent, or the fairgrounds get so muddy that you watch a young woman lose a Birkenstock forever to the muck, or you start to stink because there’s only one public shower in Felts Park, it all feels incidental to what matters more: There’s pickin’ to do. You hear it all around, all the time. A lone fiddle at dawn, guitars easing into the afternoon, jams that grow in size and volume throughout the day, until night falls and Felts Park erupts in a surround-sound jamboree of syncopated banjos, arpeggiated fiddles, and bass notes so low and driving that they cut through it all at ground level. When it’s not raining, those jam sessions continue through the night, practically until the early morning’s still air is broken anew by someone’s fiddle.

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My first jam came on Day 0, after the rain abated and I’d set up camp. The Old Fiddler’s Convention wouldn’t officially start until Monday night, with the astoundingly good kids’ competitions—the reigning bluegrass fiddle champion herself, Hollace Oakes, was 14 when she won the adult contest last year—but everyone in Felts Park was eager to pick.

Tara wanted to introduce me to Bill and Nancy Sluys, a couple in their early 70s who’ve been going to Galax every summer for some 50 years. We walked to their site, where Bill, a towering figure with a steady voice and a long, white, braided ponytail, emerged from their Airstream to invite anyone who might “wish to partake” to join Nancy and a few others inside. I told Bill I’d thought of bringing edibles to Galax, but the convention website said state laws concerning drugs and alcohol are “strictly enforced,” and Google’s AI bot, Gemini, warned that law enforcement would be crawling Felts Park with K-9 units, even though recreational cannabis is legal in Virginia for adults over 21.

Bill laughed and said that hasn’t been true in more than 40 years, though it used to be, on account of a music festival that happened once, half a century ago, about 15 miles up the road. Stompin 76 featured Bonnie Raitt, John Prine, and other big names from the time. The festival attracted a huge crowd, including a motorcycle gang that allegedly wanted to keep the party going after the festival wrapped, so they rolled into Galax on their hogs, stocked with methamphetamine, moonshine, and guns. Mayhem ensued. The authorities cracked down after that, ostensibly to maintain law and order in fiddleland. By the mid-’80s, they realized that the Old Fiddler’s Convention really was a family affair and let the fiddlers be. 

A group of six or seven people had gathered outside the Airstream by this point, all brandishing instruments. Bill, who grew up on Long Island, assumed his position behind an aluminum upright bass from the 1930s, while Nancy, a fiddler and banjo player roughly half Bill’s height who grew up in Connecticut, emerged from the Airstream with her fiddle. She sat down on a folding chair, called “Soldier’s Joy” in the key of D, and kicked it off at breakneck speed. This was an old-time jam, and “soldier’s joy” was a Civil War-era euphemism for morphine. Galax had begun.

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An old-time jam goes something like this: Anywhere from two to umpteen musicians gather in a circle, knee-to-knee, and someone—usually the fiddler—calls a tune. Before you know it, you’re carried away by a cyclone of fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, all locked into a swirling rhythm that can, when it’s good, take you to church. 

The tradition dates to the mid-1700s, when Scots-Irish immigrants first settled in Appalachia. Even then, coastal property was for the elite, forcing poorer immigrants inland and south, through the Shenandoah Valley to southwest Virginia, where land was plentiful and cheap. Their music quickly took root. “The Scots brought fiddles and liquor,” Ted McAllister, one of my neighbors in Felts Park, told me. “The Germans brought church music and beer.” 

Over time, Scottish fiddle tunes evolved, as oral traditions do, and began to mix with the musical traditions of enslaved Africans, who had brought with them gourd instruments that would evolve into the American banjo, along with rhythms the Scots had never heard before. Old-time music, in other words, is the music of diasporas, fed into a blender and then worked into a froth. A lot of traditional folk songs came out of this period, too. One that I learned at Galax, “Going to the West,” tells the story of a young man who leaves the mountains of his birth, “where labor is in vain,” to seek the fertile plains out west. It’s the story of my own Scottish forebears, who settled in South Dakota before moving to what is now suburban Chicago, and later, Florida. 

Bluegrass, by contrast, was born in the 1940s, when Bill Monroe and The Blue Grass Boys took those mountain sounds, combined them with Southern church music and blues, and tightened it all into something you might call an uncle of rock ’n’ roll. There’s a reason that Billy Strings plays to sold-out arenas and pickers from around the world can play classics like “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” at the drop of a one-chord. 

Where bluegrass is punchy and clean, designed for the stage, old-time is ecstatic, designed for participation. Bluegrass jams attract spectators who marvel at the players’ pyrotechnics; old-time jams get people on their feet. At Galax, some folks drag big pieces of plywood around the fairgrounds looking for old-time jams, where they’ll lay the board down at the edge of the circle and dance. Flatfooters they’re called: the percussion section. 

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The New York bluegrass community has a Signal thread, and through it I met Harrison Corthell, a banjo player from Queens who was camping in what he called the “gayborhood” of Felts Park: two tents and a rainbow flag. Corthell offered to introduce me to Tyler Hughes, who was also camping in the gayborhood. Hughes serves as the executive director of the Crooked Road Heritage Music Trail, a nonprofit founded by the Virginia Assembly in 2004 to boost tourism through music. Alsace has the Route des Vins, and Kentucky the Bourbon Trail. Southwest Virginia has the Crooked Road.

I found Hughes Thursday afternoon as he was setting up the Crooked Road’s information booth. Musicians were streaming by for the clawhammer banjo competition, which was set to begin any minute. As we sat on a park bench, I told Hughes that I’d begun to think of its music as the region’s chief international export of the past 100 years. “I think that’s a fair assessment,” he said, but stressed that he resists thinking of Appalachia’s musical traditions like a natural resource such as iron or coal. “We really try to stray away from an over-commodified, over-commercialized vision of southwest Virginia,” Hughes said. 

Musical traditions can be packaged and sold, after all. Last winter, an Appalachian folk musician named Murphy Campbell discovered that her videos on YouTube had been used to create AI clones of her voice and banjo playing. Someone then used Vydia, a music distribution platform, to share those clones via streaming services and to make copyright claims on Campbell’s own videos. Campbell described her ordeal on Instagram, including trying to address the matter with “agents” at those streaming services: “I’m telling robots to take down music robots made,” she said. Her posts went viral, causing Vydia to ultimately withdraw the copyright claims and ban the user responsible, according to reports. “It’s the wild west,” Campbell said in one of her posts. “And it can happen to anyone.”

I asked Hughes what percentage of the people in southern Appalachia play an instrument of some kind. He guessed around 70 percent. I’d heard the same number from Daniel, a 32-year-old banjo player I’d met earlier in the week, who works at a sawmill in Grayson County. “It’s kinda the only thing goin’ on around here,” Daniel said. He explained that when the cotton mill in Grayson County closed in the late 1980s, “everyone” started using meth. Then opioids. Within the next 20 years, drug overdoses had become a leading cause of death in southwest Virginia. Getting together to pick, Daniel said, “helps you through real hard stuff.”

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The guitar I took to Galax is a 1989 Takamine I’ve had since I was 14, when my parents indulged my desire to learn Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix songs on the condition that I take classical guitar lessons. I spent my first day or two in Felts Park carrying it around like a security blanket, but I was there to play the banjo. Upon arrival, I realized that I might have been the worst banjo player in Galax. 

I picked up the instrument in 2024, at age 48, in part because my maternal grandfather played one and I was always curious about it. More than that, I wanted to build a mountain banjo, the rustic kind people in Appalachia made from whatever wood they had nearby, animal skins for heads, and guts for strings. I liked their warm, thuddy sound, totally unlike the piercing banjos of bluegrass with their steel strings and resonator backs. So I learned everything I could about how to build one and called my dad to ask if he’d help. I knew the banjo; he knew wood. 

That summer, we spent a week together in his shop in Illinois, building a fretless eastern Kentucky-style mountain banjo out of walnut and ash. Most people in New York ask what it is; everyone at Galax identified it instantly. I’ve since built seven banjos and acquired three more, all different styles. This spring, I carved a neck from a piece of walnut entirely by hand, no power tools, for a 19th-century-style tackhead, the kind played by enslaved Africans on plantations and by Civil War soldiers around the campfire. It’s not just that I’m fascinated by the instrument. As my actual trades—crafting sentences and teaching others to do the same—are increasingly devalued by technology and a society that no longer reads, building banjos gives me one thing that I can hold onto. 

Shortly after my banjo obsession began, I started going to old-time jams in New York City, and later, bluegrass jams. I didn’t—and still don’t—actually listen to old-time or bluegrass music; my tastes trend melancholic. But I missed playing music with other people, something I hadn’t done since college and had begun to crave during the endless, isolated days of the pandemic. In early 2025, I started going to a regular jam session at a bar in Brooklyn called Sunny’s, whose owner has turned it into an institution of roots, bluegrass, and folk music. Some of the best pickers in the tri-state area turn up there each week, along with people like me, there to learn. It took me months to lead a song without blacking out. They call it “jamnesia,” and it’s humiliating. 

After one week among the pickers of southern Appalachia, I got tighter, faster, as if the place itself does some of the teaching. A fiddler friend from New York, who’d been to Galax in the 2010s, was more succinct: “It seeps from the earth.”

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Galax is hardly the first fiddlers’ convention; it’s just the oldest one still left. In the days before the railroad and automobile, let alone the World Wide Web, fiddlers’ conventions brought the people of Appalachia together, allowing songs and picking styles to spread like gossip over those hills. They could get pretty wild, and early-days Galax was no exception. Women and children did not go to Galax back then. It was a place where men gathered to let loose—“outside of the eyes of their preacher and their wives,” Rex McGee, a multi-instrumentalist from North Carolina, told me.

I’d heard of the McGee jams already, where “things get weird,” according to a woman I met Monday morning while I waited in line for the shower. Their camp sits right inside Felts Park, steps from the food trucks, identifiable by a 1974 Ford school bus painted an ominous matte grey. They call it the Muddy Creek Bus, for the band that Glen Alexander’s dad formed in the 1970s and soon became the back-up band for Rex and his brother Ralph’s grandfather, Ralph McGee the First, aka the Old-Timer. The Muddy Creek Boys could party as hard as the Old-Timer; it didn’t hurt that they could pick too. By the 1980s, the real show came after hours. Dozens of people would gather outside the bus to watch the Old-Timer, then in his 80s, fiddle with just about anything he could find: a toothpick, a comb, a “coon dick”—literally a bone from a raccoon’s penis. And it was loud. (For any curious fiddlers out there, you can buy four of these on eBay for $39.95.)

Felts Park is a galaxy of legacy camps like the Muddy Creek Bus. Almost everyone I met told me they’d been going to Galax for 40, 50, even 60 years. Their stories are legion, and they love to tell them: The year it rained so hard that one group holed up in an RV for six days with eight people, an upright bass, and “a little bit of cocaine.” The year a couple of young women got into a fight over a guy, went to fisticuffs in the mud, and ripped each other’s shirts off in front of scores of onlookers—“no one wanted it to stop,” one man recalled with a chuckle. The year several people went mudsliding on the tire tracks, which, for reasons unclear, were composed of raw sewage. 

Jimmy Kidd, an 86-year-old Dobro player who’s been going to Galax since he was 29, regaled me with the time he won the guitar competition, in 1969, by playing the Dobro because there was no Dobro competition then. His daughter, Vicky, told me she met Elizabeth Taylor when she came through Galax, in 1977, when Vicky was 12. Taylor was in a wheelchair, Vicky said, and she wasn’t very nice.

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Leo Lindblom sat on a low stool cradling a mandolin, his sister Lucy beside him. They’d taken the stage in the kids’ mandolin competition on Monday night, and Leo was focused. With flawless timing and dexterity, the 12-year-old picker dazzled the audience, Lucy accompanying him on guitar, for roughly two minutes. Then he rose from the stool, took a bow, and, with Lucy, exited the stage. 

On Thursday, I met Leo, Lucy, and the rest of the Lindbloms—Marina, Jon, and their nine kids, all but one of whose names begins with an L—at their bus in a gravel parking lot just across the road from Felts Park, where it was a little quieter than Galax Central. The Lindbloms first went to Galax in 2021, after discovering bluegrass at a gift shop in North Carolina while on a family vacation five years prior. All nine of the kids responded instantly to the “happy, upbeat” music coming out of the speakers, and mom and dad bought the CD on the spot. 

The kids, who range in age from 12 to 28 and were all homeschooled, each chose an instrument and formed their two bands, Headin’ Home and The Brothers Five. Now, when they’re not home in Bloomingdale, Georgia, they’re on the road playing festivals and gigs across the country. I asked what makes Galax special. Libby said it gives them a rare chance to slow down, to not have to be “on” all the time, and just spend time together. 

As we sat outside their bus, all 11 of them and me, I asked: Why bluegrass? After all, Marina and Jon met at the Eastman School of Music and played in the Savannah Philharmonic for 10 years. They know Tchaikovsky and Brahms just as well as Bill Monroe and the Carter Family. They could teach their kids classical music, or any other kind. “Our goal, in everything we do, is to glorify the Lord,” Marina explained. And with bluegrass, she said, they are able to give people a bit of happiness, a chance to tap their feet and forget about their troubles for a little while. It’s an act of service. 

Then I turned to Leo, the youngest, who was perched on Lucy’s lap, and asked what he likes about playing music that, surely, most kids his age don’t know anything about. “Everything,” he said, before checking my presumption: All the kids he knows play bluegrass or old-time, he said. He’s met them all through places like Galax. 

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I’d registered for the clawhammer banjo competition a month before Galax opened its gates, but by the evening of the contest, I was so worn out from five semi-sleepless nights, as many days packed with conversation and playing, and a dubious diet of beer, bananas, and cheese sandwiches that I decided to sit it out and trekked up the hill to Main Street for some Chinese food. Besides, I don’t even play clawhammer banjo. I’ve developed a hybrid style: I use finger picks, like bluegrass, but keep rhythm by striking the strings with the back of my middle finger, like clawhammer. After five days of watching virtuosos of both styles create magic on their instruments, I wasn’t about to do my mishmash in front of a panel of judges.

As I sat in my air-conditioned booth, hovering over a plate of garlic chicken, I got a call from Tara. Was I going to compete? I told her I’d spent the whole day interviewing people and was exhausted. “You have to participate!” she countered. “I triple-dog dare ya.” I was just delirious enough to bend. Thirty minutes later I was backstage rehearsing my song with John Garrison, who has gone to Galax each of the past 46 years. After a few runs through an instrumental version of “White Freightliner Blues” by Townes Van Zandt, I checked in, slapped a number on my chest, and took the stage. Tara squatted right in front to take video, smiling wide. Our pickin’ was clean, but we landed way outside the money: I bastardized the form and played a copyrighted song. We still got a big round of applause. 

My style served me better in the jams, where more than once people assured me that if it sounds good, ain’t no reason to change it. Some of the best sessions I went to were inside an A-frame tent adjacent to the gayborhood and maybe 100 yards from my campsite. On Monday night, I played fiddle tunes and shared a jar of moonshine in that tent with three young guys who lived just down the road, near the town of Fries, in Grayson County. One of them built a fiddle from scratch; it took him years. I did my version of “White Freightliner Blues” with them, and when we finished, one yipped, “That’s how it’s done!”  

Thanks to the moonshine, I forgot about Tara’s advice to sit out the nighttime jams and hopped over to a bluegrass jam that was really crackin’. At least 10 musicians stood in a circle, and the tempo was hot. I asked a guitar player if I could join. “You’ll have to ask him,” he replied, motioning to the only banjo player in the group. They did not expand the circle to let me in, and I hung awkwardly on the periphery for a song or two before going back to my tent. 

It was one of only two times I felt unwelcome at Galax. The other came after the guys from Fries learned I was a journalist from New York City. I’d gone back to their tent Tuesday afternoon to jam but ended up talking with Daniel, the sawmill worker, instead. He was without his banjo, so while the other guys picked fiddle tunes, I told Daniel I was there to write about Galax and asked if I could record our conversation. He cheerfully agreed, but after that—and I could very well be wrong about this—I sensed that the other guys looked at me sideways. 

Daniel, on the other hand, remained inviting and warm. One afternoon late in the week, I was sitting by my tent when he wandered over to say hello. He wanted to give me a leaf of galax, the rubbery, low-lying evergreen from which the town takes its name. “I thought you’d like this for your story,” he said, and stayed to visit awhile.

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I broke camp Saturday afternoon and packed up my car. Before I left Galax, however, I dashed over to catch the “43rd Yearly International Kazoo Championship” a few campsites down from Bill and Nancy’s Airstream, as Tara had assured me it was “not to be missed.” Reporters don’t spend much time at the Old Fiddler’s Convention, and Tara was concerned that I might focus too much on the negatives in my writing—the mud, the gastronomic limitations, the attrition. Like everyone I met in Felts Park, she wanted me to return to New York with a real sense of why they keep coming back, year after year, and of what could be lost if they stopped.

Several dozen people were gathered at the “soup kitchen,” a community tent where, two nights prior, Chief Cooper had served hundreds of Styrofoam cups filled with venison stew, made by Nancy herself, from deer she and Bill had hunted on their property. Now, the ground was muddy and more rain was imminent. The contestants were undeterred, ready to blow their hearts out on plastic kazoos. 

I soon understood Tara’s insistence. The International Kazoo Championship pokes a little fun at the rigidity of the main stage. One by one, each contestant was disqualified for breaking at least one of the competition’s 12 rules, which included “No Fun Not Allowed” and “All Participants Must Be Present In Order To Attend.” They were then each invited to perform again, and one by one, each was named the winner. Then all the contestants and judges second-lined through Felts Park in the rain, led by a trumpet and trailed by a banjo, blowing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on their kazoos.

After a quick walkabout to say my goodbyes, I drove north on Route 221, past the Applebee’s and the Walmart where, at Tara’s urging, I did most of my shopping for the week. That night I met up with a friend from New York, who’d invited me to a 40th birthday party at a 19th-century cabin deep in the woods north of Roanoke. We stayed up late, drinking bourbon and talking about music. I’d rather have been playing it. 

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On Sunday morning, I got in my car and continued north on Route 11. As I wound through the mountains, catching the occasional glimpse of semis and cars streaming by on I-81, I played a recording I made of “Going to the West” through the car’s stereo. Brian Muller, who placed third in this year’s mandolin contest, led us in the jam, his plaintive baritone providing the perfect soundtrack to my drive: I leave you here, in this land that you love, ’mid scenes so bright and fair, where fragrant flowers are blooming and music fills the air. I imagined bringing the song to New York jams, and wondered if it would fly.

Passing through the town of Buchanan, a few hours from Galax, I saw a familiar face. Ted McAllister and his wife, Debbie, were getting out of their car just outside the Buchanan Baptist Church. I pulled alongside them, rolled down my window, and said, “Fancy seeing you here.” Ted, guitar case in hand, told me to come inside.

A few dozen people were gathered in the Fellowship Hall for a potluck lunch to celebrate the Buchanan Baptist Church’s 190th anniversary. A preacher named Bill Hartsfield welcomed me at the door. (“Like a field of hearts,” he said with a firm handshake.) Then he walked with me to the serving counter, where I fixed a plate of fried chicken, cheese casserole, and ambrosia salad. We sat down with the McAllisters and two other local musicians, Alan Berry and Mike Lee. “Galax is a subculture of a subculture,” Ted explained as we ate. Music is woven into everything from Sunday morning church services to holiday parties and family picnics. 

We finished our plates and went into the chapel, where, for the next 90 minutes or so, Ted, Alan, Mike, and a banjo player named Kim Wood played bluegrass versions of church hymns for around 20 people. Two little girls danced in the aisle, swept up by the music. Halfway through their set, as I sat in my pew, Ted walked to the pulpit and introduced me. He explained that we’d spent the week as neighbors in Galax, talking, telling stories, picking songs, and he was delighted to show me a little more of “how we do things ’round here.”

I hadn’t been to church in decades, and a couple hours of Southern hospitality won’t make a believer out of me. But hearing Ted and the others play, watching children dance, and meeting people who looked me in the eye and didn’t rush the conversation felt deeply familiar. I may have spent almost my entire adult life in New York City, but I grew up on the Illinois-Iowa border, on the banks of the Mississippi. Church backrooms, potlucks, and ambrosia salad were all part of my childhood. 

By 2:30, I really had to get going. For the second time in two days, I said goodbye to Ted, got in my car, and was on my way. 

A week later, I was back at Sunny’s Bar in Brooklyn, playing songs with a dozen or so people in the bar’s backroom. I called “Going to the West,” and after a quick run through the chords on my latest banjo build, a resonator back with a dragon fretboard inlay that I’d played on stage in Galax, I started singing. It was a little shaky at first, but by the second verse everyone was locked in. 

When we finished, one of the musicians remarked that it was a beautiful song. I agreed and asked if he knew it already. “No,” he said. “But I’m going to learn it now.”

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David Alm is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. His work has frequently been included in Longreads‘ Weekly Top Five and annual Best Features lists. He also teaches journalism at Hunter College-CUNY, where he focuses on feature writing and creative nonfiction.

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Mark and Betsy Blondin | Longreads | September 22, 2026 | 2,702 words (10 minutes)

We left Boyne City, Michigan, in the fall of 1996 in a 34-foot Coachmen motorhome towing a minivan, with three children, a golden retriever not originally part of the plan, and a desktop computer on a stand bolted to the floor where a chair used to be. We stopped in Flint to say goodbye to family and retrofit the motorhome for the road. Mark’s father had died that June. His mother was devastated, and for a while the question wasn’t which route to choose but whether to go at all. We left Flint on October 4. Five miles later, the motorhome shut down.

A loose fuel line.

A few miles after the fuel line was fixed, we were surprised by a flat tire on the van’s tow dolly, and then, unbelievably, we bent a bumper while putting the van back on the dolly. It was past seven in the evening. We were finally on our way to Cleveland, Ohio.

That was day one. What we built over the following nine months—25,000 miles through 40 states—would go on to earn a Yahoo! Cool Site designation, a presentation at a US Department of Education national conference, and a place in the federal Education Resources Information Center archive. On the road, we filed over 1,500 emails and website dispatches from museum lobbies, hotel reception desks, libraries, and wherever we could find a phone jack and someone willing to let us run a telephone cord to their wall.

Google would not exist for another two years. The word “blog” had not yet been coined. We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.

Blondins’ Assignment America was both the name of our trip and the website we built in real time as we traveled. We had a partnership with Northwest Academy, a science and technology charter school in northern Michigan in its first year of operation, that made it possible. We had prepared to make the case for why our children—Donald, 14, and twins Kelly and Stacy, 11—would not attend the 1996–97 school year in a conventional sense. The school board didn’t just accommodate us; they encouraged us. Northwest Academy loaned us a laptop and a 1.2 MP digital camera, and we took their curriculum on the road.

The idea had been circulating for some time. For over a year, we had been looking at our future and considering ideas for our next step. Watching The Bridges of Madison County and the questions it raises about the road not taken confirmed for us that we could do something unconventional and educational. Our adventure was also, after Mark’s 12-year career run at Coca-Cola, exactly what we needed.

Red flags of risk waved. In Betsy’s 1996 site bio before the trip began, she wrote her own reasons for going: “I hope [the children] learn that although it is not always easy, unconventional choices in life can be made. Quitting my part-time job as a writer for The Citizen in Boyne City for this adventure was not easy for me. Neither is the financial risk, but I believe it will be worth it.”

What emerged was a family travel journal published to the web, which we updated continuously with photographs and written dispatches. On the site we invited visitors to submit their own travel stories and organically grew a readership we couldn’t really see or measure. Blondins’ Assignment America, our family’s online home, resided at blondins.com, running on Microsoft FrontPage 97.

It is still there. We have not updated the code. The link list on the homepage points to AltaVista, HotBot, and WebCrawler. Many of the links are broken. It is an archive, broken links and all—a well-preserved time capsule.

We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.

This archive holds more than our travel dispatches. Each family member had their own web page. Donald created Donald.com on GeoCities, a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free. He dated his site-building career to November 27, 1996—54 days into the trip. One section with links to tutorials existed to teach strangers how to build websites of their own. The note for November 18, 1997, reads: “I have photoshop! Major site changes are coming.” 

The photographs were 640 by 480 pixels, because anything larger would take a reader minutes to load; we could feel our audience’s patience through the phone line. We uploaded our dispatches whenever we could find a connection—this fundamental part of our publishing process was not on a schedule, nor was it guaranteed. Seven weeks in, parked in Sarasota, Florida, Mark wrote in his journal that he hoped to get something on the site before we left. The week before, in Jacksonville, three days had passed with no update.

When we were lucky, we were able to upload our accounts of adventures on the day they happened.

Stacy posted on October 15, 1996: “Dear Journal: Today was not my favorite day, but it was okay. We spent half the day looking for a place to check our e-mail and were successful. Then we went to the Portland Museum of Art where we saw some neat artwork by Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, etc. Later that night we went swimming while Dad and Donald went to Maine Internet Connections. Kelly and I had lots of fun playing at the pool. We slept once again at the college police parking lot.”

Kelly wrote about our hike on the Lost Mine Trail in the Chisos Mountains of Big Bend National Park in Texas on January 9, 1997. “The trail was supposedly five and a half miles, but straight uphill. We made it back down in about 45 minutes. When we got back, we did some laundry. For dinner, we had barbecue chicken in tortilla shells. There was still snow on the Chisos. There is a legend that there is gold in the mountain.”

Our stories traveled unfiltered into the world for anyone anywhere to read. 

In our 34-foot home, the dinette was the flat surface where we spread out school work and projects and wrote in our journals. It also converted to a bed for Donald. When he wanted to sleep before the rest of us, the cry went out to clear the dinette—a plea or a command, depending on the night. Years later we could still hear echoes of “clear the dinette!”

The web of 1996 was not yet monetized in the way it is today. The internet then wasn’t flooded with platforms competing for your attention and harvesting and selling your data, or algorithms constantly tuned to optimize for engagement. At the time, Yahoo! had editors—actual people employed to look at websites and decide which ones were worth surfacing to other people. That web lasted about a decade before it was dismantled, piece by piece, in favor of one that extracts profits from similar interactions. 

We were the beneficiaries of that architecture and didn’t know it was temporary.

Logistics in the physical world were more challenging than in the world online. Six weeks in, we were low on propane, parked in a friend’s driveway in Maplewood, New Jersey, taking the van into New York City on day trips. The only place that filled RV tanks was in Jersey City. We left the van behind and drove the motorhome onto streets built for nothing that long. Following sketchy directions, we stopped several times to ask for help. The horns behind us did not let up. We found the place, got the propane, and worked our way back through the traffic.

It was one of the worst days of our trip. 

Some of our best days resulted from meeting people while finding ways to get online. Back on day one at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, we told our story, and after a momentary pause, the receptionist at the information desk gave us her chair. We sat at her desk in that major museum and filed our dispatches while visitors walked up to ask for directions to the dinosaurs. We did our best to help. 

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, also in Cleveland, gave us free admission, a press kit, and a phone line. The Great Lakes Science Center nearby, and new that year, gave us free admission and a tour by their PR director. We got better at telling the story, and three charming children helped.

A man named Pierre at a Portland, Maine, YMCA spent an hour trying every phone line in the building to help us connect.

In New York City, our communication efforts found us, just a bit embarrassed, walking down the aisle in our travel clothes to seats five rows from the stage at The King and I. Mark had called the box office that afternoon and told a woman named Sandy our story. Our tickets were waiting at will call for a magical theater night.

A 7-Eleven outside Washington, DC, became a nightly ritual: We’d run a 50-foot cord to the backroom, upload the day’s pages, check and send email, and play a trivia game about the museums we’d visited. Correct answers were worth a Slurpee. That is what the technology was for.

Somewhere past the Four Corners Monument on the Navajo Nation, we ran out of gas less than a mile short of a station that had no can to sell us. A man drove past, saw our motorhome stopped on the shoulder, and turned around. He went home for a gas can and brought back enough gas for us to reach the pump. We never learned his name. This is what human kindness did.

We were the beneficiaries of that architecture and didn’t know it was temporary.

Betsy filed a few freelance columns for The Citizen from the road. Her parents mailed printed issues of the newspaper to whatever general-delivery post office or friend’s or relative’s address we could predict two weeks ahead.

The yeses got bigger as the trip went on. At the JFK Presidential Library outside of Boston, which also gave us free admission, Mark asked if we could park the motorhome in the lot overnight. The staff said yes, and after our visit they showed us where to park and locked the gate behind us. One family, one motorhome, one golden retriever, inside the locked grounds of a federal presidential library, with a view of Boston in the dark. Nobody had a policy for that. Someone had a key and decided yes.

When we needed someone to take Buddy for the month we spent in Hawaii, we found him a home through a golden retriever email list. It connected us to a breeder in Morton, Washington, who knew a young man near Seattle raising his own golden for a 4-H project. He needed the money; Buddy needed a yard. The family also had room for the motorhome. Nobody took a percentage. Nobody optimized the match.

No matter where we were, the realities of our past intruded on our adventure. The family parked the motorhome in Pacifica, California, and waited while Mark flew back to Michigan. He had been fired by Coca-Cola Enterprises in March 1995, and his age-discrimination suit had reached the deposition stage. It ran from nine in the morning to 5:30 p.m. His mother waited at the house our family still owned but no longer lived in. With the retirement savings spent down, much was dependent on the court case going well.

One family, one motorhome, one golden retriever, inside the locked grounds of a federal presidential library, with a view of Boston in the dark. Nobody had a policy for that. Someone had a key and decided yes.

We returned home in June 1997, rich in experience and financially broke. A brief exchange at a campground became an unforgettable memory. Betsy had told an elderly man she was worried the children wouldn’t understand or appreciate what the trip had been. He thought about it. “Maybe it’s not a matter of appreciating it as something unique or separate,” he told her. “It will simply become part of who they are.”  

We spent the summer running an ice cream and yogurt business, and planning the future. While researching, we discovered a request for abstracts from the organizers of a US Department of Education conference called “Families, Technology, and Education.” We were accepted as featured speakers and off to Chicago that October.

A PowerPoint to help tell our story and a video our children had made in Big Bend National Park on its plant and animal life fit the conference title in every way. On a stage in front of 400 educators from around the country, we made our presentation. During the Q&A period, Donald fielded several questions like a pro. Our paper, People Make Dreams Come True, and Technology Expands the Possibilities: An Educational Journey across the United States, seemed close to becoming a template for the future of education—and we had played a role.

In June 1998, an email arrived from a stranger in New York.

His name was Ted Sammons, and he worked in the editorial department of Broadway Books. He had seen Blondins’ Assignment America on Yahoo!’s “Cool Site” listing and had been impressed—and, he admitted, a bit jealous. He believed the story of our trip would make a good book, and he wanted to know if we’d thought about writing one. Of course we had.

We made our pitch, but ultimately, the editorial board passed. Their stated reason was not enough tragedy. 

In 1998, our story was: family leaves, family travels, family lands well. We both began new careers. It’s an adventure with an enviable ending. Eventually, Donald went to Berkeley, and Kelly and Stacy went to Harvard.

In December 1997, we put the Boyne City house on the market, loaded the motorhome for its last trip, and landed in Carlsbad, California, one of our favorite cities discovered on our journey. It was there that Betsy began work as a managing editor and Mark went into the technology industry. Our children thrived. 

The household that once ran a 50-foot cord into a 7-Eleven backroom to send the day’s mail now talks on platforms that eavesdrop on what we say.

A decade passed, and the publisher Betsy worked for went under. Cloud computing came for the company Mark worked for, and then for the storage business he started. In 2009, we lost our Carlsbad house.

Getting from Carlsbad to a city on the Portuguese coast took 10 more years and three continents worth of seeking. But that isn’t this story.

Today, the children are grown and our family is scattered across four countries. The household that once ran a 50-foot cord into a 7-Eleven backroom to send the day’s mail now talks on platforms that eavesdrop on what we say.

Our children’s dispatches still live where they filed them, and how they perceive the trip is not a question we have to ask in 2026. We see it in them. In their curiosity, courage, and adaptability that can partly be traced back to Cleveland. The older, wise man at the campground had predicted correctly. It has indeed become a part of each of us.

Recently, we went looking for who still visits the site. The statistics page is a dead link; it has outlived the instrument that measured it.

We both still write, and Betsy still edits, from a town on the Portuguese coast—a domain renewed annually, hosting billed monthly, a newsletter on a platform that takes its percentage. Every function we had for free in 1996, now itemized. The North Central Michigan College server had hosted our website and asked for nothing.  

While the early web afforded us online advantages, the real-world experiences and connections we enjoyed would not have been possible without the human kindness and generosity we found along the way. Both human and online access made our adventure possible.

Our story is a record of an internet that no longer exists: the one with human editors, not algorithms, discovering and surfacing content worth seeing. The one that offered real access and possibility, resulting in a federal agency highlighting our work and an editor at a major publishing house discovering our project. The one that connected us to a host family for our dog and motorhome in rural Washington, no strings attached. That internet—serendipitous, kind, free, and open—is gone.

Nine months, 25,000 miles, 40 states. Three kids who were there for all of it. A golden retriever who died years later in Carlsbad. A motorhome that is long gone. 

And a website that is, in the most literal sense, still on its way to Cleveland.

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Mark and Betsy Blondin are living and writing in Vila do Conde, Portugal, currently at work on a memoir of the thirty years that followed Assignment America. Betsy is a longtime writer and editor at WordMetro.com who compiled and published Migraine Expressions: A Creative Journey Through Life with Migraine. Together, they published At Home Abroad: Today’s Expats Tell Their Stories. Mark’s work has appeared in The Humanist, and he writes at markblondin.com and Material Witness.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens