Moving Along talks with podcaster/blogger Craig Constantine during the final week of his and wife Tracy’s five-week Ford Transit van (“Panda”) trip across Newfoundland. Craig shares how childhood camping and Caribbean sailing—with heavy navigation and planning—shaped his approach to travel, watching his mom plan trips with paper and pencil, and why Newfoundland appealed as a place to “depressurize,” despite being more developed than expected. He explains balancing “non-negotiables” (especially prebooked ferry dates) with flexibility, using Crown land, campgrounds and the iOverlander app for overnight spots, and coping with variable terrain and weather.
Craig describes year-long preparation after buying the van, outfitting it with fold-down bed/table systems, organized crates, Starlink and a cellular booster for remote work, and on-trip improvements built from a local hardware store run. To avoid constant status updates, he built a microblog with AI that became travelog.place, and reflects on tight-space communication, driving too much and planning next year’s journey to Tuolumne Meadows near Yosemite.
00:00 Introduction to Craig Constantine
02:21 No Lighthouse
03:59 Growing Up in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania
09:59 Boondocking in Newfoundland
11:39 It’s a Big Van But…
12:55 Finding the Nuts
13:25 Finding Places to Sleep
15:57 Not Much Grows Here
17:09 Planning the Trip
19:50 This Is Like a Sabbatical
20:54 The Van Named Panda
21:49 Jerry-rigging the Van
25:14 Clever Solutions: Crafting a Wall of Storage
28:20 Make It Better, Have Fun, That’s the Whole Point
29:59 Pecking Order at the Campground
32:09 What You Do Defines Who You Are
34:14 You Have to Make the Ferry
35:58 Type A List Maker
39:03 From the Paper Tablet to the Travel Microblog
41:58 Builder
43:05 You Can Do This
44:38 Newfoundland Is an Hour and a Half…
45:07 Where to Next?
47:14 Any Oops?
48:31 Planning All the Problems Out of the Trip
49:06 It’s Birds
50:57 Shorthand: A Different Kind of Mindfulness
53:02 Books I Didn’t Touch
53:52 That’s Not How the Id Works
Links
CREDITS
Host and creator: Christi Cassidy
Contact: christi@movingalongpodcast.com
Artwork by Phyllis Busell
Music by Eve’s Blue.
Post-production help from Auphonic.com.
Show notes written with assistance from Descript and Claude.ai.
LINKS:
More information and to listen to past episodes: https://movingalongpodcast.com
Past episodes are here too: https://moving-along.simplecast.com/
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