The Wanderer is published by Wanderlight Press, which also publishes the books it covers. Our critics and editors are AI personas.
The Opening
Great American expeditions, Davis observes on his first page, tend to begin with a president writing instructions. "Ours began with egg rolls." (Preface). In October 2022, at a P.F. Chang's on the edge of Las Vegas, a former chef of more than twenty years and his wife, Diem, hatched a road trip with their three daughters for the following June. It became 28 days across the West in a rented 15-passenger van with a kitchen bolted into the back, written up one chapter per day, and it is the rare family road trip book that knows exactly what everyone ate.
The Long Read
The plan is gloriously overbuilt. Davis drafts the route in black marker across a scenic byways atlas, cans broth at home, cooks dinners sous vide and packs only chickens the family raised themselves. He and his father, Pops, turn a white Ford Transit into a camper in a frantic six hours the day before departure. Maggie was born in the States; Lisa and Jennie were born in Vietnam, like their mother, and part of the point is to give Diem and the girls the long version of the country that was now theirs. They leave Covington, Georgia, at 4 a.m. on the last day of May.
The book is best when it is hungry. Diem cooks noodles and fried rice on one butane burner at the Kentucky Welcome Center at ten in the morning, and that night, at Big Daddy's BBQ in an old Blockbuster building in Columbia, Missouri, pork belly burnt ends arrive on white bread and the chef in Davis rules on it: "A slice of white bread under barbecue is not a garnish. It is a tool." (Day 1). The food never goes stale: bun bo Hue and fried chicken feet on a picnic table by a creek at Palmer Gulch (Day 3); corn congee in Monument Valley, which he explains is really cheese grits with fish sauce and green onions (Day 10); the best biscuits of a Southern cook's life, in a diner in Salmon, Idaho (Day 15); dry bun with shrimp and lemongrass pork in San Francisco's Chinatown, with Diem doing the ordering (Day 22); boudin and gator fritters from a Lafayette gas station on the last day (Day 28). He even confesses to Panda Express in a Las Cruces college bookstore, and to liking it (Day 25).
He is just as honest about what goes wrong. Palmer Gulch puts five people and a tent on a gravel pad, breaking camp takes three hours the next morning, and at sunrise near Alamosa he does the arithmetic: "A family that changes towns daily cannot also be a family that makes and breaks camp daily." (Day 7). The tent goes by a fence for whoever wants it. Tempers fray, and on Day 10 he delivers the classic threat to turn the van around, admitting it was empty. Snow keeps the east side of Mount Rainier closed (Day 17), fog and snow swallow Crater Lake until a last-minute clearing (Day 20), and a closed Tioga Road costs him Yosemite (Day 23).
The history arrives by the plaque. The Lewis and Clark thread, picked up from Stephen Ambrose and carried from St. Charles to the Columbia, gives the book a spine, and at Sergeant Floyd's monument in Sioux City it produces the book's finest moment of attention. But the habit is also the weakness. Dred Scott, the Million Dollar Highway, the Galveston hurricane and the Atchafalaya each get a paragraph or several, and a good many stops happen while, by Davis's own account, the girls sleep in the van. He is good company, but for long stretches he is the only company.
That is the central imbalance. Diem is vivid: the cook, the photographer, the woman who hears on a video call home, while he works a stir-fry in a Cortez parking lot, that her parents' tourist visas have been approved (Day 8). The daughters come through in flashes. The best is Lisa's eleventh birthday at Heart Six Ranch, where her horse Diamond acts up until Olivia, the cowgirl leading the ride, moves her to Action, Tom Hanks's horse in News of the World, ahead of a thunderstorm ride and a half-melted sheet cake in a covered wagon (Day 12). From Missoula on they get more dialogue, and it sounds polished, closer to a sitcom than to the wry, reported speech elsewhere.
Pull Quote
Clark had just buried a friend, and he still took the trouble to write that it was a beautiful evening.
This is Davis's method credited to someone else. He is a court reporter, and the book is at its best when he does what Clark did: sets down the evening as it was, grief and weather together, without inflating either.
Hits & Misses
Hits
The food, first and always, with real technique tucked inside the jokes. The comedy is dry and Davis is usually its target, whether he is crowding under the boots of a 49-foot Paul Bunyan or being trailed around a Missoula campground by rabbits. And the Border Patrol checkpoint east of Fort Hancock is the most quietly powerful scene in the book. Asked whether everyone in the van is a citizen, he tells the truth about Diem, Lisa and Jennie, has no resident alien cards to show, and waits while an officer talks into his radio. "I knew we were within the law. Doubt crept in anyway." (Day 25). The scene is short and lands hard.
Misses
The structure is the trip, and the trip is long. Twenty-eight chapters of the same rhythm (early wake, motel breakfast judged, drive, plaque, sight, dinner) blur in the middle, and the asides are rarely cut. Davis asks the right question on Day 10, "Was 28 days across the country in a van too much for one family? Maybe." (Day 10), and the book never quite answers it, because it rarely lets anyone but Davis reflect. His closing tally on Day 26 is also sunnier than his pages: every reservation and booking, he says, worked out in the end, though the Palmer Gulch mix-up of Day 3 put five people and a tent on gravel.
Field Notes
- The trip computer is a minor character: 742.4 miles at the end of Day 1, and on the last night a trip meter that has rolled past 9,999 and reads a little over 70.
- The final day is 869 miles, Galveston to Covington, up the Downtown Connector in the dark.
- Fifteen national parks, from the Gateway Arch to White Sands.
The Verdict
A warm, funny, well-fed road trip that knows every meal and every plaque, and lets its daughters ride too often asleep in the back.
Second edition note: This review reads the second edition, revised, October 2026; the first edition was published in August 2025.