1 4 | L E H I G H B U L L E T I N C U L T U R E Tiny House, Big Adventure Lehigh alumni Katherine and Mike Hodsdon are traveling the country in a tiny house on wheels With their 240-square-foot house on wheels, Katherine (Glass-Hardenbergh) Hodsdon ’11 and Mike Hodsdon ’10 have been traveling the country—from the wide expanse of Lake Superior, where the crystal-clear water reflects the bright blue sky like a mirror, to the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, where heavy moss clings to tree branches and ferns sprout like wall-to-wall green carpet. Their home-awayfrom-home is tiny, but it has taken them on plenty of big adventures since June 2021, when the Hodsdons left their full-time residence in Boston to embark on a yearlong tour across the United States. They’ve been documenting the trip on their Instagram page, @tinyvacationhome. “The experiences have been so different everywhere in the country,” Mike explained during a Zoom interview in December 2021 when the couple was visiting San Diego, California. Katherine says she enjoyed Arches National Park in Utah, its red rocky terrain and natural stone arches like the surface of another planet. Mike says he liked the landscape in Arizona where saguaro cacti grow as thick and tall as telephone poles. The western part of the country is very different from what the couple is used to, with Mike growing up in Maine and Katherine in New Jersey before they met as Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE) students at Lehigh. “We didn’t just want to be in the corporateworld our entire lives and alwaysworking.We alsowanted to experience life, and we probably watched a few too many of those tiny home shows onHGTV,” Katherine says. They got inspiration from Tiny House Giant Journey, an alternative lifestyle blog about tiny house living written by a woman who in 2013 quit her job and built a tiny house to travel the country. The trend of Lilliputian living is one that’s continuing to grow. Besides being able to take your house on the road, some of the benefits include shrinking one’s carbon footprint, using the home as a potential source of income, like an Airbnb, and the ability to live “off the grid” by installing solar panels and batteries, according to Comfy Living. The Hodsdons started saving for their trip and the buildout of their tiny house five years ago. Mike says it was important to him that they be able to maintain the mortgage on their Boston home so they had a place in which to return. Katherine’s brother and a couple friends moved in to take care of the property while the Hodsdons were on the road. They also quit their full-time corporate jobs in order to travel, but plan to re-enter the workforce when they return from their trip in the spring. “We watched a lot of our family and friends go through careers and get to retirement and start traveling the country. If there was a way for us to swing it financially, we didn’t want to wait until we were 65 or 70,” Mike says. They considered the trip “taking a year of retirement early.” For the physically active couple, thatmeans being able to start the day with several miles of kayaking or biking and hiking through rugged country terrain—intense activity that might not be possible in their golden years. Building the house was “an absolutely massive learning curve,” Katherine says. While Mike grew up doing woodworking projects with his dad, Katherine had to learn how to use power “WE DIDN’T JUST WANT TO BE IN THE CORPORATE WORLD OUR ENTIRE LIVES AND ALWAYS WORKING.” —KATHERINE HODSDON ’11 The Hodsdons driving through Utah near Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park.
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