Wake Forest Magazine December 2002 - Past Issues - Wake Forest ...

Steeles on wheels
Couple finds vagabond lifestyle has
set them free.
The first of two letters destined to
change the course of the lives of Mark
and Donia Whiteley Steele arrived at
their Alexandria, Va., home sometime in
late 1993 or early 1994.
Donia (’65), an editor at Time-Life
Inc., and Mark, a former Time-Life Books
editor and building contractor who
owned a home-inspection business, were
reasonably content. Then, Donia’s daughter
sent them a clipping about a couple
that had sold their house and possessions,
bought a recreational vehicle, and traveled
full time.
“I remember sitting at the breakfast
table and telling Mark I could envision
us doing that in retirement,” recalled
Donia, who, as the daughter of a career
Navy man, had lived in 13 states by the
time she entered college. “Mark looked at
me and said, ‘Say what?’” Added Mark:
“Gradually, over the next three years,
something that had started as ‘Say what?’
became more and more attractive.”
And so, over the course of several
months in 1997 and early 1998, Donia
took early retirement, Mark sold his
business, and they sold their house, sold
or gave away most of their possessions,
and bought a 34-foot trailer and a heavyduty
pickup truck. At last, in June 1998,
they hit the road with their dog.
40 W ake Forest Magazine
C l a s s N o t e s
Four years and 110,000 miles later,
the Steeles have never looked back. Over
interstate highways and off-the-beatenpath
byways, they have visited all 48
contiguous states, sampling the continuous
variety this vast country has to
offer—Amish food in Indiana, blueberry
klatches in Iowa, crawfish pie in southwestern
Louisiana, and a week of lobsters
in Maine; the blaze of fall in the
Tennessee Appalachians, a lantern tour of
the Mammoth Caves in Kentucky, a fiddlers’
championship in Idaho, and Death
Valley Days in the California desert;
fields of bluebonnets in the Texas Hill
Country, a Habitat for Humanity project
in New Mexico, sunrises on Cape Cod,
and sunsets on Great Lakes beaches.
They’ve encountered the occasional bump
in the road–inadvertently dumping septic-tank
waste all over their campground
site; impaling the trailer on a gas-pump
protection post–but always, they roll
merrily along, with no end in sight.
This year they published a book,
“Steeles on Wheels: A Year on the Road
in an RV,” which chronicles their adventures
their first year out and provides tips
for would-be vagabonds on topics ranging
from getting mail with no permanent
address (a service forwards their mail,
care of general delivery, to a town they
know they’ll be at a week in advance) to
accessing e-mail and the Web (they’ll
borrow a merchant’s phone jack to dial
up their ISP). Copies of the book can be
purchased through their Web site at
www.steelesonwheels.com.
Their annual itinerary is loosely
structured around occasional visits with
friends, Mark’s parents in Georgia, and
Donia’s two children in the Northeast
and trips to about a half-dozen bridge
tournaments around the country, where
Mark can indulge his passion. “The nice
thing about visiting friends—for us and
them—is that you bring your own guestroom,”
said Donia.
Their 322-square-foot trailer is a
paragon of efficiency, with all the comforts
of home—ingenious storage spaces,
stove, refrigerator, shower, TV and VCR,
queen-sized bed, and slide-out sections
that provide additional living and sleeping
space when parked. “We aren’t
tourists—we’re nomads,” Mark pointed
out. “We lead normal lives.” Indeed, on
certain nights of the week they make sure
to park at campgrounds with electricity
so they can watch their favorite TV
shows along with the rest of us.
They live on Donia’s pension of
roughly $3,000 a month, which seems
pretty economical, given the cost of fuel
and nightly campground fees. “One of
the best ways to be free is to learn to live
on less,” Mark said. “You’ll be free in so
many ways.”
If the Steeles have learned three
things about human nature in their travels,
they are that people are diverse, they
are friendly and helpful, and they worry
way too much over imagined calamities.
“There are people out there who are way
different from us,” they wrote in a follow-up
e-mail message. “Only in getting
away from our back-home crowd of suburban
homeowners with big-city professional
jobs did we realize how amazingly
varied Americans are. The RVing
lifestyle is a great social leveler; every
day we live side-by-side with every
imaginable type of person, from homeless
tent-campers to well-heeled retirees.
But social status is irrelevant. What
matters is how considerate of fellow
campers you are, and how interesting
your conversation is.”