Roseville, MN, USA.

1 May 2014. That seems like a date that marks the beginning of something. In this case it marks the beginning of the Tip to Tundra tour. This is the MacDonald family's adventure from the equator to the arctic circle in East Asia and overland.

Welcome friends and family. This blog is to be the repository for the people and pests, trains and towers, desserts and deserts that tell this story.

The Little Idea that Could.
Here's the brief history. In January 2013 I took a group of University of Minnesota students to Thailand to study addiction and Buddhism. To unpack that sentence is to understand many things: January is an excellent time to be in Thailand, magnified 10-fold by the fact that January is a not-so-good time to be in Minneapolis because some people think its cold. In fact, some people think Minnesota winters are so cold they spend the winter in Florida. We call those people snowbirds, and among the snowbirds is my mother. Did I mention that I have three children and a wife that works full time? So one of my wife's conditions for taking students to Thailand was that someone help with the kids, and my mother was willing to be recalled to Minnesota to help. Once. When the trip was over and I had returned home she said, "The kids are perfectly lovely," (she is a grandmother after all,) "but if you ever teach this course again I'm not coming to Minneapolis in January."

That's why this time I'm teaching my Thailand course in May.

But the more I thought about it and the more I looked in to it, the more I realized that traveling in May opened up a whole new set of possibilities. That is because teaching in May and June means the course ends just as the kids' school ends. Ergo, the family would be free to come join me in S.E. Asia after my class finished.

If the family came and joined me in Bangkok after my class, what would we do? How long would we do it? Crucially, what would we call it? (It is known that any good journey needs a good name.)

I remembered at some point finding a website called The Man in Seat 61. This is an amazing website for so many reason -- the zeal required to organize and update the quantity of information he has compiled simply boggles the imagination. What I had seen were the rail links that held Asia together. Since I first travelled to Asia as an adult in 1988, I've been infatuated by the transiberian railway -- the idea of going from the Pacific to the Atlantic through Russia, from the West to the East, by rail. But something new is possible that has only recently been opened to Westerners, or really anyone: traveling from South to North. No, the whole trip could not be done by rail -- the railroads end in Thailand and don't begin again until Vietnam or China. However, the intervening countries have plenty of buses and boats -- it was clearly a thing that was feasible to do... overland.

That's a Fine Plan, But... 
What if we couldn't stand the kids? What if the kids hated trains? What if they shriveled under the weight of a backpack? What if Anita and I were raising kids wrong and they failed to have the love of travel their parents did? That would be bad.

MacDonald on the beach of Lake McDonald,
Glacier National Park

So we found a couple of weeks last summer to do our own little test drive. How can you test drive a Tip to Tundra tour? You can hop on a train, drag the kids along, stop at a couple national parks along the way to the coast and back. And that's just what we did. Yes, this one had a name, too: Tracks and Trails. We got on the Amtrak in Minneapolis and headed to Glacier National Park on the Empire Builder (more names). After scuffing our boots on some carefully screened trails we got back on the train and headed out to see friends and family in Seattle. Props to Walter, Todd and Joy! Then we got ourselves up to Vancouver and did the whole thing in reverse, stopping at Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies. Okay, okay, enough about that -- if you want more, here's a link to a silly video we made about that trip -- see if you can discern how much Gracie (age 7 at the time) likes hiking?


The bottom line was that the kids were terrific. They loved the train, they played well together, we bonded -- in fact, we liked our kids better traveling than we liked them at home. Okay, that's a terrible thing for a father to say -- indeed, we love them throughout and especially at home. But it's easier to like your kids, too, when they're being amazed and excited and pushing themselves to try new things and making up stories by flashlight.

By the time we got home, we knew the kids would be up for a longer trip. So planning got underway in earnest for the Tip to Tundra tour.