Like Asheville,
or Better

“Better.” We all want it. Few of us can define it. Fewer still go looking.

If you have ever felt quietly stuck, living a life that seems to have chosen itself while you were not looking, this is the true story of a family who stopped wondering and drove straight into the question.

In June 2020, while the world was locking its doors, Jonathan Baurer’s family opened theirs and walked out for good. They sold their home, packed two teenage daughters into a truck and travel trailer, and set out across America with a map of the whole country and no idea which way to point it. They carried one audacious ask: better. They could not have told you what it meant. Money, mountains, purpose, peace, some new version of themselves. That was the point. They would know it when they became it.

What followed was a year that tested everything: frozen furnaces in the Tetons, breakdowns on the Devil’s Highway, a marriage negotiating thirty feet of trailer, and a parade of roadside strangers who kept showing up carrying exactly the message the moment required. Somewhere along the way, the search for a new hometown quietly became a bigger one, a search for who you are when every label you have ever worn is left behind.

They ended up in the mountains outside Asheville. But this is not a story about arriving. The family that pulled into those Blue Ridge hills had discovered the real secret: better was never a finish line. It is a way of living. Life does not hand us its meaning. We uncover it, through gratitude, through courage, through what we choose to believe is possible.

Told with disarming honesty and laugh-out-loud humor, Like Asheville, or Better is for anyone who has ever dreamed of walking away from a life that no longer fits and starting over. For the restless, the road-trip dreamers, and everyone hungry for a genuine reinvention.