Mention Carole and Steve Ford to Paltzonians of a certain vintage – those who attended the Campus School, the New Paltz Middle School and/or High School between the mid-1970s and early 1990s – and you’ll see eyes light up and hear fond memories recalled of the Arts Community Youth Theater. The Fords created a nurturing backstage family for many a creatively inclined youngster, introduced more than a few future thespians and theater professionals to the stage, and provided the community with years of high-quality live entertainment.
“Theater was never the primary career” for either of the couple, says Carole Bell Ford. “It was always an avocation.” Steve taught math at New Paltz High School, and Carole also had a long career in education before taking up writing as her main jam. Now she has a new book out, On and Off the Beaten Path: The Best Road Trips in 20 Years of Travel in the US and Canada (Lightwood Press). Some of the travel stories she tells first appeared in this publication’s predecessor, the Huguenot Herald.
Born in Brooklyn, Carole Bell originally planned to become an opera singer, attending Juilliard Prep. She taught musical theater at summer camps while pursuing her BA in history at Brooklyn College. She later came to New Paltz to obtain her master’s degree and an advanced certificate in school administration and supervision.
By 1976 she’d been hired as a professor at Empire State College – a long relationship that included teaching remotely, in prison programs and even at the Culinary Institute of America. Eventually she went on to obtain a doctorate in teacher education at Columbia University Teachers’ College, doing her dissertation on education for minorities, immigrants and women. Her first book, The Girls: Jewish Women of Brownsville, Brooklyn, 1940-1995, was published by SUNY Press in 1999. After that, she says, “One book led to another.”
It was during her early teaching years in Brooklyn that Carole Bell met and married Steve Ford. They spent a year working in England together, during which time both Steve and their young daughter were recruited to act in traditional pantomime shows. British friends introduced them to backpacking and car-camping.
Upon their return to the US, with a Renault hatchback they’d bought overseas, they tried using it as their base for a trip to Quebec in April. Sleeping in the car was not a success, says Carole: “It was freezing.” So, in late 1995, with a sabbatical semester beckoning, they decided to buy an 18-foot 1987 Winnebago Warrior camper van and outfit it with a computer, so that she could write The Girls while on the road. The “master bedroom” was a platform above the cab, accessible by ladder. They set out in January, on the heels of the Great Blizzard of ’96, and headed south.
That was the beginning of more than 20 years of wandering the backroads of the US and Canada, taking their home-away-from-home with them, whenever they had an extended school break. After a decade, with the van “just about on its last legs,” they traded up, purchasing a 2003 Coachman in 2006. “It was only bigger enough to have a bedroom – about four feet longer and a little higher, and more modern,” she says.
Voyages of discovery
Besides working on her scholarly project, on the 1996 road trip Carole began keeping a travel journal. Their adventures en route to the Florida Keys make up the first chapter of On and Off the Beaten Path, their trek out to the West Coast immediately afterward – from Baja to Vancouver – the second chapter. Subsequent accounts cover Arkansas in 2000, Maine and the Bay of Fundy in 2004, the Great Lakes in 2006, the Maritime Provinces in 2011, the Natchez Trace in 2014, and Cape Breton in 2016.
Genrewise, On and Off the Beaten Path falls into a grey area between practical tour guide and first-person memoir. Carole’s matter-of-fact, user-friendly tone invites the reader into the couple’s voyages of discovery, bringing home the realization that much of what makes travel memorable consists of experiences that defy attempts at planning.
While she utilized various print resources to map out goals for their various destinations, sometimes the attractions they sought weren’t open when they got there. But invariably, something unanticipated and just as delightful would take their place – a small museum devoted to some offbeat, highly specific subject of local interest, for example, such as mustard in Wisconsin or foxes on Prince Edward Island. “Most of the time, you just happen on something. You might get to take a private tour. That happens to us a lot, because we travel off-season.”
The enforced hiatus from travel since Covid-19 hit has enabled Carol to go through her journals and albums from their multitudinous journeys and expand her initial impressions with research about the history of the places they visited, as well as to update information about amenities such as hotels and restaurants that might no longer exist. The result is a guide that’s perfect for travelers who want to balance preparation with serendipity. It also serves to pique the reader’s curiosity about out-of-the-way places that might not already be high on one’s tourism bucket list.
Go wherever you want
While Carole is quick to insist that On and Off the Beaten Path “isn’t just an RV book,” it will prove particularly useful to anyone who decides to tour that way. There’s a chapter devoted to recipes adapted to easy preparation in a tiny camper kitchen, using fresh local ingredients, as well as a list of space-saving, multipurpose essentials for equipping your home-on-wheels. She makes life in a camper sound like an eminently doable way to see the country: “I love it. It’s so liberating, because you can go wherever you want to go.”
What comes next, once people can travel freely again? Now in their vigorous 80s, the Fords still own that Coachman van, and they’re overdue for a visit to Montreal, one of their favorite destinations. That might be their first stop en route to Newfoundland, a place Carole says she has always wanted to explore. Meanwhile, she’s working on organizing the journals from the couple’s past trips to Europe, with an eye toward publishing some articles on the Lightwood Press website. Portugal is a possibility, though “not the more popular tourist areas. Maybe the Alentejo region in the south, or Minho in the north.”
With a cover graced by Todd Koelmel’s painting Reservoir Sunset, On and Off the Beaten Path is available in paperback for $16.99 from the publisher (https://lightwoodpress.com) and on Amazon (www.amazon.com/off-beaten-path-twenty-travel/dp/1735441007), as well as from Inquiring Minds Books on Church Street in New Paltz. Take a dive in while you’re dreaming about your next travel adventure. As Carole says, “There are so many wonderful things out there to see. You just have to go.”
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