4th Time's the Charm: Climbing El Potrero Chico and Road-Tripping to Punta de Mita From a Border Office Standoff in Coahuila to a Music Video Shoot in Nayarit — This Is the Mexico Trip That Finally Worked El Potrero Chico, Nuevo León. Where limestone goes to be extraordinary and families go to discover their limits. There is a specific kind of humility that comes from being turned away at the same international border twice. The first time, the Mexican border officer at Piedras Negras informed us that Base Camp — our converted school bus, our beloved rolling home — was registered as a "bus" and therefore could not receive a Temporary Import Permit (TIP). "No se puede," she said, with the serene finality of someone who has delivered this news before and is entirely comfortable delivering it again. We drove thousands of miles back to Maine to re-register it as an RV. We spent a summer working. We came back. The second time was the...

Denied Entry to Mexico in a School Bus: Two Border Crossings, Zero Stamps, One Hard Lesson A cautionary tale about vehicle weight limits, bureaucratic technicalities, and the humbling perspective that comes from standing at the wrong side of a border. When people asked us about our adventures after we returned to Maine for the summer, they expected the highlights reel. And honestly, we had a spectacular one. We could have talked about Base Camp — the school bus we'd bought from the local district, gutted, and rebuilt into our rolling home after our sailboat Tiny Bubbles II sold. We could have told them about the manatees that joined us while we swam in the crystal springs of Florida, floating alongside us with the serene indifference of creatures who have never once had a schedule to keep. We could have described the world-class bouldering at Hueco Tanks , 32 miles northeast of El Paso — a 4,000-year-old landscape of pocketed syenite rock that climbers fly in from...

At Home in Water World: We Swallowed the Anchor and Landed in Eleuthera, Bahamas A sailor's guide to the most beautiful island you've never heard of — with a healthy dose of self-inflicted adventure, questionable decisions, and a manatee. There is a moment in every long-distance sailor's life when they look at their boat — really look at it — and think: what if I just... didn't? For us, that moment arrived in the Bahamas. Our sailboat, Tiny Bubbles II , was hauled out of the water and parked on dry land in Virginia like a very expensive lawn ornament. And we — the crew who had been living aboard and sailing the eastern seaboard — had done something radical. We had stopped moving and gotten jobs . On an island. In the middle of the ocean. At a place called The Island School on Cape Eleuthera. I want to be clear: this was not a failure of nerve. This was a strategic pivot. (It was also partly because someone offered us a place to live that wasn't a b...