Steve was only a few weeks into seventh grade when I got the call: He was being suspended for three days for fighting. The call wasn’t unexpected, but the suspension was. Steve had never liked school. Every year he stalked into the classroom, surly and stubborn. Every year I would get a call. “He doesn’t cause trouble, exactly,” his teachers would say. “He just doesn’t do anything he’s asked.”

Eventually I put words to it: oppositional behavior. Steve was smart and inquisitive; he could figure out how things worked, and he had a good heart, but he was determined to do what he wanted at his own pace.

A suspension for fighting was a new low, however. Ever since the switch to middle school, Steve had struggled to find his niche on the social food chain. This latest infraction was an attempt to fit in with the crowd he had identified as “cool.”

“What are we going to do?” I wailed.

“We could just leave,” my husband joked.

It was as though a key turned in a lock. I could almost hear the “click.” Crazy as it seemed, a radical change appealed to me deeply, and I thought it might do the trick for Steve, too. Steve and Julia, his ten-year-old sister, were the only children left at home. Both my husband and I were self-employed. The time seemed right.

So we left. We sold our house and cottage, the back forty and the fine china. We bought a monster truck and a trailer that had tiny bunk beds in the rear. A year later, on September 19, 2000, we hit the road.

We didn’t have a plan. We didn’t want to exchange one harried life for another, one set of deadlines and obligations for new ones; we didn’t want to see all the state capitols or national parks. Steve had been reading The Black Pearl and wanted to visit La Paz, Mexico, where the book is set. That seemed as good a place as any to spend the winter, and it was as close as we came to an itinerary.

For the next year and a half we meandered through the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. We did visit some national parks and state capitols, but mostly we stuck to byways and back roads. We traveled the length of Highway 1 in Baja California, Mexico, and stayed a month in lovely La Paz. We followed the migration of the gray whale up the west coast of the U.S. and spent another month on Vancouver Island. We meandered through British Columbia, along the Rockies, and down the Rio Grande. We visited New Orleans and the Gulf Coast before the devastation of Katrina and wound our way back up the Mississippi River and east along the Natchez Trace, stopping at the birthplace of the blues in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and of Elvis in Tupelo.

The trip was a magical, transformative experience, and it gave the kids a far richer education than they could have gotten at a desk in school. But there were some unexpected effects as well.

For one thing, since we were completely disconnected from all electronic crutches—no TV, no Internet, not even a cell phone—the kids were forced to entertain themselves. They learned to read for pleasure, and they devoured books. Boxes of them. We stormed used bookstores throughout the country and begged relatives to send more.

They built a palm-frond shelter (a “palapa”) at one camping spot in Mexico and a debris hut at another in Indiana. Steve lashed driftwood together to make six-foot stilts at our winter campground on the Gulf Coast and became adept at stalking through the dunes like a crane.

In Texas, he spent the night alone at the top of Guadalupe Peak, kayaked down the Rio Grande, and started an RV-washing business in Castroville.

The kids learned about astronomy when we visited national observatories, but they also saw the dazzle of the night sky in the pitch black of open desert. They learned about geography and land forms and rocks and fossils. They identified the creatures that live in tidal pools, oceans, rivers, forests, and deserts. “Today I saw a manta ray, an eel, a whale, and a starfish,” Julia said once with a satisfaction I totally understood. And it wasn’t even noon yet.

They became kids again. On the cusp of adolescence, we snatched back a few more months of childhood. They fought, of course, but they also played together like children. Once, camped by a backwater of the Arkansas River just as twilight fell, I became aware that my kids were laughing. They were playing blindman’s bluff in the soft dark, and they were laughing the full-throated laughter of childhood. I hadn’t heard that sound from them in a while.

But then, we all became kids again. We were wandering through a natural wonderland, encountering new and marvelous things every day. We all recaptured a childlike ability to play, to learn effortlessly, and to live in the moment.

When we returned—to the same state, but to a different community, the kids reentered school at their grade levels. While the trip didn’t magically make Steve a model student or change his recalcitrant attitude, it did change his image of the world and of himself in it. Steve spent his junior year as an exchange student in New Zealand, and managed to graduate, not without prodding, with his class the following year. He said to me once, “I’m not sure what would have happened if we hadn’t gone on the road, but I don’t think I would have done well.”

Certainly, this isn’t a solution for everyone, but it does illustrate that there are many approaches to educating our children. Rather than continue slogging down an academic path that clearly isn’t working, it might help to think outside the box. What are your child’s strengths and weaknesses, personally and academically? What environment might appeal to his learning style? What creative approach might succeed? I found that when we approached them positively, school personnel were willing to work with us. They gave us curriculum suggestions and books for the road and accommodated our unorthodox situation when we got back. Many teachers even admired the experience the kids had had. One lesson I learned from the trip is that it is possible to do more than I ever imagined. It’s a lot more fun to explore possibilities than to live with limitations.