This is part of Reason's 2025 summer travel issue. Click here to read the rest of the issue.
"It was a grueling three-hour commute to my Colorado office this morning. I left Telluride with a yellow day pack strapped to my back, and climbed north into the mountains through the golden glow of early-October aspens," wrote Steven K. Roberts in his 1988 book, Computing Across America.
Roberts made his way through the remnants of a mining camp before settling at the desk he'd cobbled out of industrial junk the day before. "My chair is an old dynamite crate; my computer a Hewlett-Packard Portable. I flipped open the display, fired up Microsoft WORD, and here I am at work—pattering into a mountainside text file," he wrote. "No, I'm not on vacation. I am a high-tech nomad—pedaling a recumbent bicycle around the United States with a portable computer while funding the journey with a sporadic outpouring of words."
