"On July 21, 2020, it seemed that everything we’d experienced and labored over during our 40 years of married life was about to play into a story more grand than we could have ever written on our own.

I was wearing a T-shirt I’d found at a garage sale that read, “The Adventure Begins”, and we’d just finished our “goodbye lunch” with a close friend.

Just before we pulled out to our new life as nomads, she snapped the last pre-nomad photo of us next to our van. It was about 2 p.m. when we started our engines to our special nomad song—the Live at Bonnaroo recording of “Free/Into The Mystic” that begins with an epic violin solo and lands gently on the lyrics:

We live out in our old van

Travel all across this land

Just me and you

We’ll end up hand in hand

Somewhere down on the sand

Just me and you

Just as free

Free as we’ll ever be...

And just like that, I became a free-range human; Mark’s Paragina ― a female pilgrim. To the left was my Codega—the one who would walk along the streets in front of me with a spiritual lantern to light murky pathways and scare away the darkness..."

In 2024, Cindy's book about her and Mark's experiences living a full-time Van life was published by One Stone Biblical Resources. It is entitled One Hundred Churches: A Three-Year Journey to Witness the Joy of Authentic Christianity.

The book is part travel journal, part spiritual road map, part autobiography, part devotional, and part vanlife guide, and this podcast shares the front matter of that book, including the "About the Author", "Introduction," and "Preface" sections, and is the debut podcast for the One Hundred Churches series of stories that will follow.

Come along for the ride as Cindy shares encouraging and informative stories that some of her readers are calling "addictive".