On the road
Family travels from Tuolumne County to Argentina
She was a climber and carried a pager and walkietalkie for Yosemite Searchand-rescue. He was a climber who worked for a tree crew in the national park.
The couple met and married in Tuolumne Meadows and later started building their dream home on Sawmill Mountain Road months before the 2013 Rim Fire exploded. They eventually grew weary of their day jobs in the Bay Area, pulled their 6-year-old daughter out of kindergarten, and undertook a daring road trip from Tuolumne County to Argentina that began in September 2017.
Their journey covered more than 29,000 miles in three-and-a-half years. They traveled in the wake of an 8.2-magnitude earthquake, dodged hurricanes, and faced an angry mob in Mexico. They skirted the roadless jungle of Darien Gap between Panama and Columbia. They mixed with Venezuelan refugees at the Colombian border, and drove into a Bolivian revolution. And they coped with exploding battery breakdowns, and a dead engine between Ecuador and Peru, as well as months of COVID-19 lockdown in Argentina.
Mary Hollendoner and her husband, John Stanfield, and their daughter, Lillian, left their place on Sawmill Mountain Road on Sept. 23, 2017, turned east on Highway 120, and took Tioga Road to connect with U.S. Route 395 before turning south to embrace their adventure and the unknown.
They were in their 1999 Ford E350, an eight-cylinder V8 with automatic transmission. They called their vehicle Vancito, and she still calls it a “vay ocho,” the way she described it to so many people in Central and South America who had never seen a vehicle so large.
The best road food snacks they found were in tropical parts of Mexico and Ecuador, where they’d pull up and find tables of amazing fresh fruit for sale, including avocados, mangoes, or papayas.
The best street foods they found were in Oaxaca, where abundant options included “tlayudas, like pocket pizzas, and tamales and tacos,” Hollendoner said. “All these people cook food in their houses and walk into the street and set up tables and sell the food. In Oaxaca the street food culture is so delicious and homemade.”
Asked about the tensest moments of their travels, Hollendoner said, “There was a roadblock southeast of Oaxaca. There were always crowds of people at every roadblock, people trying to sell things. John assumed it was the same at this one, and he tried to drive through without stopping. But the people got angry and stood in front of the van. John stopped and they asked for money.”
Her husband asked why? The toll booth was up ahead, that’s where they were supposed to pay. Then people started shoving and pushing and shaking the van.
“We could see some were younger men with beer bottles,” Hollendoner said. “Then two of them picked up rocks and started banging the rocks together and looking at John. I opened my window and talked to an older man in fluent Spanish. He said their homes had been destroyed in a recent earthquake, and they were trying to raise money to rebuild their homes. Then the police showed up, sirens blaring, and waved us through. There was nobody in the toll booth. It was strange.”
Later that same day, they pulled Vancito up at a lake to camp and a family was there selling chicharrones, home-made pork rinds. The chicharrones vendors were packing up to leave, then stayed and chatted with the travelers from Tuolumne County for hours, and invited them
home to spend the night.
“They showed us a crack in the wall from the most recent earthquake,” Hollendoner said. “Some of them slept outside and in the doorways because they were afraid of another terremoto coming. The next day they cooked a big lunch for us. Here they were, their house falling down and selling chicharrones for a living, and they were hosting us and they were so generous.”
Another big scare came when she and her husband and their daughter were on a sailboat between Panama and Colombia. The van was on a larger cargo ship en route to Colombia.
“John and I got super seasick,” Hollendoner said. “It was dark and the boat was rocking back and forth and there were very low, thigh-high railings on the deck. We were worried that Lillian could fall overboard because we were so sick. We were desperately throwing up over the side and we couldn’t keep an eye on her.”
They survived those scrapes and numerous others, many times with the help of more generous strangers.
Asked about the challenges of living in a van on the road for months on end, Hollendoner said, “Constantly having to find places to buy food, get water, and do laundry. Every day, every week we were in a different town, a different country, and it was totally different as you traveled from one place to the next. It’s challenging in an interesting way.”
In spite of the thousands of miles they racked up, coping with endless road trip boredom was not a big issue.
“We’d drive two hours a day and stop for a few days,” Hollendoner said in a phone interview Thursday. “We drove less in a day on average than our friends in the Bay Area commute to work every day. Sometimes we’d do homeschooling while driving. For Lillian, she did lots of reading. Sometimes we’d play I Spy.”
The main thing Hollendoner wanted to emphasize is the kindness of strangers they encountered all along their travels, especially in Colombia. The second time Vancito’s battery exploded they were in a propane filling station and the owner, instead of telling them to leave in a hurry, invited them into his home and served the visitors fresh, home-brewed coffee from beans grown on his property. He also offered to store their van and help them fix it.
“Time and again people would stop and welcome us and ask if they could help direct us,” Hollendoner said. “People were very curious and friendly, in every country. We had so many people help us and extend their kindness.”
She and her family and Vancito eventually made it to Patagonia in Argentina, in January 2021. They returned home to Tuolumne County in March last year and enrolled Lillian at Tenaya Elementary in Groveland.
They have since moved to Salt Lake City, to be more centrally located in a community with decent job prospects and schools. They have not sold their home and property on Sawmill Mountain Road, which they view as their “forever home, where we hope to retire,” Hollendoner said. They left Tuolumne County in July.
Hollendoner has blogged about her family’s adventures and she self-published a book, “Monkeys on the Road,” a month ago. The book has gained traction among some readers, and she says it was recently Amazon’s No. 1 bestseller in Family Travel and Adventure Travel. On Thursday this week, it was Amazon’s No. 1 bestseller in Ecuador and Galapagos Islands Travel.