It's 0-dark-thirty—one of those predawn pockets of time that journalists and farmhands know by heart. The world outside the garage is a hush of star-spangled black, but inside I can feel the morning's pulse beginning to run. My right knee bounces like a piston, 120 beats per minute, give or take the stutter of nerves. Pure anticipation, cut with a ...

There's a certain romance to traveling the back roads in a forty-two-year-old VW Vanagon camper named Josie. She's no sleek modern marvel, but she has something better: character. Josie is a boxy, unhurried beast, painted a faded shade of Assuan Brown and Samos Beige that once gleamed in the sun, now softened to suede by decades of weather. Her eng...