They started off rolling through New Hampshire and Maine, making a stop at Lake Champlain in New York and the sand dunes around Silver Lake in Michigan before heading to the Dakotas. Their strategy involved hitting northern locations during the summer months so the house wouldn’t get stuck in snow. The trip itself is a “giant counter-clockwise loop” around the country, Katherine says. They considered the trip “taking a year of retirement early.” For the physically active couple, that means being able to start the day with several miles of kayaking or biking and hiking through rugged country terrain–intense activity that might not be possible in their golden years. If there was a way for us to swing it financially, we didn’t want to wait until we were 65 or 70,” Mike says. “We watched a lot of our family and friends go through careers and get to retirement and start traveling the country. They also quit their full-time corporate jobs in order to travel, but plan to re-enter the workforce when they return from their trip in the spring. Katherine’s brother and a couple friends moved in to take care of the property while the Hodsdons were on the road. Mike says it was important to him that they be able to maintain the mortgage on their Boston home so they had a place in which to return. The Hodsdons started saving for their trip and the buildout of their tiny house five years ago. Besides being able to take your house on the road, some of the benefits include shrinking one’s carbon footprint, using the home as a potential source of income, like an Airbnb, and the ability to live “off the grid” by installing solar panels and batteries, according to Comfy Living. The trend of Lilliputian living is one that’s continuing to grow. They got inspiration from Tiny House Giant Journey, an alternative lifestyle blog about tiny house living written by a woman who in 2013 quit her job and built a tiny house to travel the country. We also wanted to experience life, and we probably watched a few too many of those tiny home shows on HGTV,” Katherine says. “We didn’t just want to be in the corporate world our entire lives and always working. The western part of the country is very different from what the couple is used to, with Mike growing up in Maine and Katherine in New Jersey before they met as Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE) students at Lehigh. Mike says he liked the landscape in Arizona where saguaro cacti grow as thick and tall as telephone poles.
Katherine says she enjoyed Arches National Park in Utah, its red rocky terrain and natural stone arches like the surface of another planet. “The experiences have been so different everywhere in the country,” Mike explained during a Zoom interview in December 2021 when the couple was visiting San Diego, Calif. They’ve been documenting the trip on their Instagram page, tinyvacationhome. Their home-away-from-home is tiny, but it has taken them on plenty of big adventures since June 2021, when the Hodsdons left their full-time residence in Boston to embark on a year-long tour across the United States.
With their 240-square-foot house on wheels, Katherine (Glass-Hardenbergh) Hodsdon ’11 and Mike Hodsdon ’10 have been traveling the country–from the wide expanse of Lake Superior, where the crystal-clear water reflects the bright blue sky like a mirror, to the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, where heavy moss clings to tree branches and ferns sprout like wall-to-wall green carpet.
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