Like Asheville,
or Better
A midlife reinvention memoir: one family, a year on the road, and the search for a life that fits.
October 13, 2026 · 312 pages · Paperback $16.99 · Ebook $6.99
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or straight from three independent bookstores in western North Carolina.
“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.
If you are ready to ask a braver question of your own life, the journey starts here.
The universe is listening. The question is what you will dare to ask it.
For readers of
Wild
Cheryl Strayed
Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert
Nomadland
Jessica Bruder
Travels with Charley
John Steinbeck
Read the opening
Straws. Rocks. Knives.
Chapter one
I can’t point to the first straw. I can’t even point to the final straw. As I sit here in this hotel room contemplating where we are and what we’ve done, all I know for sure is that we did it. Yesterday, we sold our home and left Denver. Today, a truck and an RV become our new home and we’ll drive off into the sun with heads packed full of inspiration.
I’m gazing through full-length windows. It’s 4 AM on June 5, 2020, and the night horizon hints at shades of indigo and denim. In the adjoining rooms my wife, Alisha, and my two teenage children, Hailey and Bri, sleep soundly as I watch the sun begin its spectacular pursuit of dawn.
As I write my journal, I’m dreaming awake, filling my heart with the adventure ahead and reminiscing on the past few months. Right now, I’m bursting with exhilaration and hopes while a tiny dose of doubt swirls low in my stomach to remind me that we just gave up everything for a 30 foot RV. I ponder, “How many straws does it take to choose that?” A lot. But I know in my heart that the final straw probably wasn’t frustration, anger, or unhappiness at all.
It was love.
I suppose I’d have to look back ten months to find the first time Alisha and I began mulling an option that appeared nothing short of madness. The low background buzz of stress and familial angst had reached a point where we were openly asking each other if it was possible to quit our current life, our kids’ school, our entire conventional existence, and head off around the world for a year’s sabbatical. But why would we even do that? We had good, secure jobs; we enjoyed bountiful vacations with our extended family, an awesome social life, and a wonderful home. By any conventional metric, we were doing great! Why would good parents even consider cashing in their chips for a year in an RV, however enticing it might sound to sleep on short, hard beds and regularly empty a black tank?
That’s why I’m, rather strangely, contemplating camel proverbs all of a sudden. Which straw broke the camel’s back? I couldn’t point to one big thing. It wasn’t one thing. As the saying suggests, it was many little straws. And it all added up to the conclusion that having a life that looked great was worthless if we didn’t have a life that felt meaningful. The reality for all of us, Alisha, Hailey, Bri, and I, was that the conventions assured us we were successful but all we kept asking each other was: “Remind me why are we doing this again?”
That’s the opening. The rest of the straws are in the book. Where to buy it
Where to buy
Paperback and ebook, out now.
On the shelf in western North Carolina
Four stores near home keep it on the shelf, and every one of them will ship it to you.
Downtown Asheville
West Asheville
Waynesville
Asheville
Anywhere else, your own local bookstore can order it through Ingram, and asking them to is one of the kindest things you can do for a small press.
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