A journey that began with a baby in a pouch, a college dorm bed, and Thoreau’s pond. From solar cars to off-grid dreams, chasing the future at the pace of nature. How slowness, intention, and idealism still light the way.

The exercise of writing, editing, and picking the pictures to go in a retrospective book has many inconveniences (many if you’re among the people doing the heavy burden of the work), but also some advantages.

A surprising one is seeing things you did or participated in many years ago with fresher eyes. While going through our trip archives in search of some of our early stories, I found a trip we took to Massachusetts with our firstborn, who was just a little baby.

By then, we had been married for a little over a year and were living in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, walking and biking everywhere, and mainly buying fresh food in bulk (“a granel”), just as we saw some of the city’s Asian and South Asian immigrants. If we wanted some freedom to live deliberately, we’d need to be frugal first.

As I went through the pictures, I recalled that, in the summer of 2007, we flew to New York City and were invited by one of Kirsten’s many friends in the city—where she’d been working and living until recently—who had bought an apartment in one of the highrises in the Lower East Side.

Fresh eyes

Looking at the dates, I see we were already in New York in late May to make the flight as cheap as possible. We were already in Massachusetts in early June, although I can’t recall whether we flew, rented a car, or took the train.

Once there, we relied on the city’s European-level public transportation (by that, I mean everybody used the metro and buses, regardless of their income or social status). We visited Kirsten’s old college as she attended a reunion; I don’t know how we managed, but the three of us (Kirsten, I, and the baby between the two) in a college dorm room’s single bed, the narrowest bed I had seen until then.

The rough sleep in a hot and humid summer night at an old, mostly empty dorm while still jet-lagged was the type of experience we needed to get over the remnants of our jet lag, finally. I have no memories from the reunion, although once I saw the pictures, I immediately recalled that we were using a baby pouch, and the baby really liked it. It was comfortable for us, too. And yes, we were breastfeeding, so the pouch made it really convenient and private both for mum and baby when we needed to take a pause for a moment. I also recall that people didn’t smoke at bistros or bars when sitting outside, unlike in Barcelona, where it was still quite common (it changed soon after).

Those were days when everything in the United States felt fresh and foreign to me, a type of perception I’ve lost over the years as we continued to visit different places, meet family and many friends, and eventually even move here. I suppose that once you start living and participating in a community or place, you may miss the external referent to realize how or when it happened, but you become accustomed to things and, in many ways, become a local.

However, I’ve always liked the term “insider-outsider,” which I read somewhere many years ago. Those who, for some reason, have lived or live in between places and cultures develop mechanisms so that their potential longing or even alienation can turn into something much more nurturing and positive. I guess the goal isn’t to adapt in such a way that you lose some of the things that have defined you.

Third culture perception

When somebody brought it to us in a conversation years ago, Kirsten and I realized that our kids, which one could call “third culture children” (kids of parents that belong to different countries that also decide to live many of the family’s formative years in a third country, in our case France until recently), have developed ways to bring their sense of “home” with them, and learned to counterbalance some of the advantages of living somewhere since birth (for example, going through their whole elementary, middle and secondary education) by establishing bonds with other kids that had undergone similar cultural experiences.

But these considerations had little to do with our young family in the summer of 2007. Back then, Kirsten was learning to be a Barcelonian and excelling in doing so, for she managed to see and stay in touch with many more friends than I in town, and many friends from New York and California also visited the city early on.

Although our life in the US was limited back then to the summers, I was slowly getting to consider English and American culture as part of me, albeit not in an official way, with a solemn beginning; it just happened gradually. In any case, that was my first trip to Boston and the area around Cambridge where some of the most prestigious universities of the world cluster together in a mismatch of old New England brick buildings and expensive starchitect-style new buildings, which I remember as mainly detached from the place and devoid of the grown greenery that make old New England college campuses so enticing to the visitor.

Early days of solar sailing: a solar car from MIT

We were already publishing articles and very short videos to *faircompanies, mainly focused on practical, everyday life environmental sustainability for a young family (so we read the early TreeHugger and Hank Green’s amateurish Ecogeek, as well as MNN and many others). Soon we’d get to know more people in that world, and through a common friend, ended up breaking ground with a couple of small SoHo apartment renovations by the founder of TreeHugger, Graham Hill, after he’d sold the blog.

But in the summer of 2007, our site was a technical mess; we weren’t quite finding an audience interested in learning about biodegradable soap, biodegradable diapers (which we used), greywater gardening, early electric and pedal-powered vehicles, permaculture gardens, and the like. That didn’t deter Kirsten from coordinating a few stories in and around her alma mater after the reunion.

I remember the adventures and stories from those few days felt very prescient to me, for they encompassed many stepping stones of American culture. I slept on an impossibly narrow student bed at an old New England college dorm, and then we chose to pursue two explorations of the past and future of the American ethos and soul.

First, we went to MIT to meet a few enthusiastic students who had been designing and racing a solar electric vehicle. They were happy to show Kirsten their latest generation car, which was a Batmobile-looking vehicle covered in solar panels. They called it Tesseract. They claimed to have reached speeds of over 80 mph, and during the 2005 North American Solar Challenge, they had cruised at a sustained speed of 50 mph over a 2,500-mile course.

The “car” felt very low, flat, and cumbersome, far from any practical short-term application. Yet, it blew our minds since, until that moment, we had not thought about the real possibility of cruising the USA aboard a vehicle (some sort of solar campervan perhaps?) that could run exclusively on solar. Solar sailing! It was possible!

A marsupial family’s train trip to Concord and Walden Pond

We had a baby, were starting a site, and reporting on interesting stuff, and all sorts of things seemed possible looking at the future (that is, despite the fact that we were living on savings and trying to be as frugal as possible).

And, after a peek at the possible future of automation, a world of solar sailing that I already could depict in the aesthetics of The Incal, the comic book series by Chilean writer Alejandro Jodorowski and French Illustrator Jean “Moebius” Giraud, we took the train to Concord, Massachusetts, and spent one day in Walden Pond, visiting the site where Henry David Thoreau had built his cabin, and also the replica built not far from there.

And so, I also felt that the place had a special significance, not because it was part of the intellectual construction of what it means to be an American, but because the 1854 book seemed so much in sync with the way we saw the world. The little book Thoreau wrote there, not far from the comforts of his home in the then already prosperous Concord.

The two little adventures we had with our marsupial firstborn, who barely left the pouch if she could sway her way through the day, from sleep to breastfeeding to mellow talking, to playing a bit with us, and then sleeping again.

At that moment, concepts such as simple living and simple parenting weren’t used at all, and permaculture gardens, water (and greywater) reuse, micro-apartments, transformer furniture, alternative transportation, etc., were grassroots-driven and very niche, as we soon discovered in our visits to several places in Sonoma County, San Francisco, and the San Francisco East Bay that same year.

Early days of commercial EVs

We flew from New York to San Francisco instead of sailing cross-country on a solar-powered electric campervan, but the idea followed us and we started to cover more and more startups trying to bring EVs to the mass market, including an early video and photo documentary at the first Tesla shop, right when they were ramping up their first roadster and were working on their Model S.

I remember asking them whether they were going to the mass market and also about charging standards, and we got the idea that, yes, they wanted to build cars for the broad public and no, they didn’t want to agree with the rest of the industry on charging standards because they didn’t want to wait on anyone, period. They wanted their own fast chargers everywhere, so drivers could go about their day in their car without dealing with any tradeoff: driving EVs could be better.

To their credit, they have implemented many of the things they experimented with early on, and now the conversation has progressed enough for people to consider an EV as a conventional purchase, at least in many places, without much deliberation.

Still, the dream of driving something that could charge with the sun as you go was still outlandish and very impractical due to many technological constraints: solar panels aren’t as efficient as they could be and deteriorate fast on the surface of a car, and EVs are heavier because their drivetrains rely on heavy batteries for power.

Despite being aware of these impediments, the idea of solar sailing continued to intrigue us. After reading about Aptera for years, a San Diego-based startup that aims to manufacture a solar electric vehicle, we had the chance to visit them in mid-July 2021. Back then, they’d gone a long way since their early prototypes.

Sunflower-style road trips

In 2007, back in the time of our visit to the MIT solar car team and Walden Pond, the solar panels on the first iterations of the Aptera were only powerful enough to power the car’s climate control, but when we visited 14 years after, the light 3-wheeler rig was getting most of its charging from the panels around the vehicle’s envelope, according to the company.

Along with Aptera’s co-founder Chris Anthony, we tested their light two-seat model with a kit to turn the car’s trunk into the most efficient, lightweight camper, a car that wanted to achieve a “never charge” status through a hyper-efficient drivetrain that could run on the solar input that the car’s panels could be getting on a sunny day.

Still, the prototype felt it was still in its early stages on many fronts. For one, the car’s suspension was rigid, and the driving felt slightly cumbersome, even though we were watching Anthony drive the car from the only available passenger seat. However, the dream was alive.

Then came and went the Lightyear, a Dutch startup attempting to manufacture an all-solar-electric car, the Lightyear 0 (formerly the Lightyear One), which looked as sleek and capable as any luxury sedan. We never visited Lightyear, but we read about its 5 m² (54 sq ft) of solar cells on its surface, or 782 high-efficiency solar cells in total, which could account for 70 km (43.5 miles) of range on a sunny day. What is the main issue with Lightyear? It had a price tag of €250,000 ($285,000). Plus, it wasn’t a camper.

Then we heard about someone trying to DIY their way into authentic, solar-powered driving, sailing on the road by charging exclusively from the sun. To do so, Joel Gregory Hayes converted a 2010 International EStar solar delivery van into a vehicle that could feed 120 kWh of battery power with an expandable rooftop solar array. Under ideal conditions, this array could recharge the converted EV camper’s maximum range of 200 miles in a few hours. He called it the Route Del Sol.

Slow travel

For the conversion, Hayes relied on Brett and Kira Belan, the couple behind the project Solarrolla, a small DIY shop transforming old trucks and vans into solar-powered homes on wheels (no need to plug in when on the road). The Belans had Hayes’ converted delivery van ready in 2018.

In the real world, Joel Gregory Hayes faced many hurdles with his DIY design, among them the delivery van’s curb weight of over 2,500 kg (5,500 lbs) and the fact that it had been designed for urban delivery routes, where constant braking helps batteries recharge, a very different environment than the open road where distances are bigger and range can decrease. Also, to deploy the 24,330 W rooftop solar array, the van needed to stop on the side of the road, taking up to 20 hours to charge the batteries, which power not only the converted delivery van’s drivetrain but the 90-liter refrigerator and induction cooktop.

Given the time required to charge, Joel and his team of fellow solar sailing enthusiasts described the experience of driving the Route Del Sol as Slow Travel. It takes a particular mindset to go with the elements and find the right spot to make a stop for a day while the van is charging instead of relying on a charger by the side of the road. Like old sailing, which harnesses the wind and accommodates its unpredictability, a solar EV van harnesses the sun and is also at the mercy and grace of weather and planetary rhythms.

Both ways of transportation have to embrace, by necessity, the slow travel philosophy, which, with the right mindset, evolves from an impediment into an advantage. One gives up on speed, turning the modern ideal of seamless and impersonal “point to point” transportation into the traveling ideal of yesteryear, where the journey is the actual destination. Like Thoreau’s reflections on simple living in Walden, solar sailing relies on self-sufficiency, for it prioritizes autonomy over speed.

Early adopter days

When we were still living in France and visiting the US mainly over the summer, we got in touch with both Solarrolla and Hayes and Kirsten edited one first video about the Ruta del Sol project before Hayes broke down in Mexico during his attempt to solar sail from Alaska to Argentina using only renewable energy, mainly sourced directly from the sun.

Despite the implosion of Route Del Sol, Solarrola kept evolving and getting conversion projects, and we quickly realized our old dreams of solar sailing were shared by many people, among them old such as legendary Pacific Northwest self-builder SunRay Kelley, who worked with Solarrolla in turning his wooden “gypsy wagon” into what Kelley called “a solar-power plant that goes down the road that you live in.”

Years went by, and one thing was clear: we aren’t reaching anything close to a commercialized solar-powered campervan capable of turning vanlife into a solar sailing experience. At Solarrolla, they kept working on a small batch of crafty projects, however. Always in touch with Brett and Kira Belan, we scheduled a 2024 trip to Southern California in which, among other things, we wanted to see first-hand an eStar EV delivery van conversion into a solar-powered camper and “giant battery” during blackouts, according to the van’s owner, SoCal musician Redfoo.

We arrived at Redfoo’s ranch in the Santa Monica mountains on a gorgeous April day with plenty of time and found him inside of his Solarrolla campervan having a conference call with somebody about music projects and branding; he also was explaining over the phone how he now could go with his wife and kid on the solar EV camper and had no need to plan for charging since the whole point was to let the 5kW solar array do the work.

Before reaching the musician in Southern California, the Solarrolla founders drove the campervan all the way from Wisconsin and stayed sometime after reaching their destination, but by the time we got there the Belans’ were long gone, so we got an interesting and thorough walkthru by Redfoo, as well as a drive test and endured a few glitches.

When the power went out all of a sudden, Redfoo decided to call Brett Belan, and he walked him through a technical fix over the phone. To Redfoo, that is part of being a pioneer, an early adopter. We talked about how much we’d like to travel cross-country, or perhaps across the entire Americas, from Northern Europe to Cape Town, or even going from Scandinavia to Japan, taking just one ferry before reaching the final destination, just going at the pace of solar sailing.

Frontiers that will trump walls

How long until somebody finally takes on the challenge and succeeds? It would show us ways of being in the world that would connect ways of understanding our environment deeply rooted in our past, as well as a new array of possibilities that the future can bring. But only if we are up to the task of mobilizing our ingenuity for the most idealistic and impractical projects, those that turn out to spark the best ideas from which we all benefit over the long term.

By the time we left Redfoo, driving back to the San Francisco Bay Area on our conventional yet fairly efficient combustion engine car, our firstborn was finishing her high school junior year and planning her senior year. Now, she’s about to go to college. But 17 years back, standing quietly at the edge of Walden Pond and trying to picture Thoreau while he listened to the wind stir the surface of the water in the same place, although over 150 years before, a feeling of impermanence and unity of all things hit me.

The marsupial baby was then in the pouch, and the water moved in concentric rings from diving birds and stones we threw. It was probably a threshold moment: we were beginning a family, we had quit our corporate jobs and didn’t have a reliable income yet, and our experimenting on how to live felt clumsy and full of risks.

Thoreau’s cabin was modest to the point of showing off, even to the standards of his time, but the ideas he explored there (of autonomy, of deliberate living, of seeing life whole and refusing to rush it) still felt radical and were worth trying out.

That summer marked the beginning of our journey into slow travel and self-propelled storytelling, into solar vehicles and micro-homes, and into the long conversation we’ve had with those trying to live more intentionally. Solar sailing, like Thoreau’s time at Walden, asks us to see limits not as constraints but as invitations. To shift from extraction to reciprocity. To move at the pace of thought.

In revisiting that moment now, many years and many stories later, I see more clearly how much of our future was already seeded in that past. Maybe that’s what writing this book has revealed most: that sometimes we set off chasing the future, only to find that we’ve been circling the pond all along.