When Angus King left office as governor of Maine several years ago, he set out the next day on a motorhome trip of nearly six months with his wife, Mary, their daughter, Molly, who was 9 years old, and their son, Ben, who was 12.

King said neither he nor his wife can remember who first thought of taking the children out of school and hitting the road, but it turned out to be the perfect move.

As King explains in his new book, Governor’s Travels, when you leave high political office, the change is abrupt. For eight years as governor, he had a busy schedule of appointments, received constant attention from the press and public, and was protected 24 hours a day by state police. All that disappeared instantly when he left office in January of 2003.

“One day, you’re the Man,” he writes, “and the next you’re simply a man—and your chief function is to bear the blame for whatever goes wrong that your successor has to cope with in the first couple of years.”

Instead of sticking around to read the newspapers and follow state politics, King left immediately on a long family vacation, traveling south to Florida, west to California, north to Washington state and then back home to Brunswick, Maine. The trip would cover 15,000 miles across 33 states.

In Governor’s Travels, King describes the trip and also gives advice on transitioning out of full-time work, offers a brief guide to buying an RV, and advocates traveling without a fixed itinerary.  The book includes vacation photos, humorous asides, shrewd observations and perceptive comments on the places they visited.

But most of all, King said, “The book is a long love letter to RVing.”

Trial Run
King, 67, an attorney, has a varied background. Twice elected governor as an independent, he has served as a host on public television, taught at Bowdoin College, and been involved in wind-power development.

Before their cross-country trip, King and his family had been RVing only once, testing their affinity for it by renting a motorhome for a week’s vacation in Arizona. King said he learned two things from the rental experience: that if you are going to spend a lot of time in an RV, the bigger the better, and that you need a tow vehicle. King bought a new 40-foot Newmar Dutch Star, and modified it to fit his family by installing bunk beds in the space where the standard model had a hutch and a sink.

King took delivery of the motorhome while he was still governor. Since he was going to be leaving office in the middle of winter, he didn’t want his first experience driving a big rig to be in a Maine snowstorm, so while the weather was still good, he and a state trooper drove the motorhome to a campground in Virginia and left it there. On the way to Virginia, King made a couple of rookie mistakes, ripping off a side mirror at a toll booth and missing a sign that warned against getting on the Merritt Parkway with a vehicle more than eight feet high. He got off the parkway in his 12-foot, six-inch tall Dutch Star just before a nine-foot high bridge.

The day after leaving office, King, his wife and children piled into their Honda van and drove to Virginia, where they hooked up the Honda to the RV as their tow car. From there they crossed the country, visiting all the places you would expect, such as New Orleans, Carlsbad Caverns and the Grand Canyon, plus other spots that were off the beaten track but became favorites, such as Big Bend National Park in Texas and Port Townsend in Washington. One perk as a former governor was a chance to visit with filmmaker George Lucas at his Northern California ranch. The invitation came because of Lucas’ interest in education reform and King’s initiative providing computers to all seventh graders in Maine.

For most of the trip, they didn’t have an itinerary, and King said that was one of the keys to its success. They were free to go where the weather was good or wherever they heard or read about places that shouldn’t be missed.

In his book, King says that most people don’t realize the stress they put themselves under by running their lives on a tight schedule. “I had no idea the amount of strain I had been under until it went away,” he writes.

Lots to Learn
The children, Ben and Molly, were home-schooled along the way, but King said he was a lax teacher. He followed the advice someone gave him: “Don’t let their education get in the way of their education.” In other words, he didn’t insist they stay inside to finish their math work when they could be outside exploring the Grand Canyon.

The children were at a perfect age to take on a cross-country trip, King said. A year or so later and the oldest would have been a teen-ager unwilling to leave his friends, and a few years earlier and the youngest would have been too young to appreciate what she saw.

By the time they came home, King said, the children had become bored by all the hikes up canyons and the rides on sightseeing trolleys, but they had gained memories that will last a lifetime. And King and his wife had the joy of watching their children discover the wonders of man and nature.

During the trip, King reported about the family’s experiences every two weeks on National Public Radio and maintained a website called wheresmolly.com that began as a means of helping daughter Molly’s third-grade classmates keep up with her travels. The reports on National Public Radio brought attention to the website and many people followed the journey.  Those blog entries provided material for the book that became Governor’s Travels.

When King and his family returned home to Maine in June of 2003, they sold their motorhome for about 85 percent of what they paid. Although they loved RVing, King said, they didn’t think they would use their motorhome enough to justify keeping it. They didn’t want to leave Maine to travel in the summer, King said, and that’s when he had free time from college teaching and other work.

However, when I talked by phone recently to King at his home in Brunswick, he had just been looking online at new RVs. Molly, his youngest child, will be going off to college before long, and when that happens, King said, he and his wife want to travel the country again in a motorhome, visiting some of the places they missed the first time around, such as Glacier National Park and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  Just about anywhere you go in this country, King said, there are interesting sights to see.

We hope King follows through on his RVing plans and writes another book. Governor’s Travels is a delightful travel memoir that merits a sequel.

Write to Mike Ward, editor at RV Life magazine, 18717 76th Avenue West, Suite B, Lynnwood, WA 98037 or e-mail editor@rvlife.com.  Find First Glance online at rvlife.com.

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