42 States of Grace

After the sudden death of her husband, a woman in midlife sets off in a large motor home with her golden retriever to explore her country and to find her true self and a new life. In 2003, following the accidental death of her husband of thirty-three years, Maureen Hovenkotter was lost and confused. The choices she had made as a younger woman no longer fit, and she could not live an authentic life if she continued to blindly follow those paths. So, in the spring of 2007, she took early retirement, sold her home and nearly all possessions, and set off with her golden retriever Charlie on a year-long coming-of-age journey. It was a pilgrimage to rediscover herself and make sense of her new life, while exploring the country she had served as an aide to a U.S. Senator for ten years. This is the true story of a 25,000-mile journey in a Class A motor home that visited forty-one states and one Canadian Province from north of Seattle to Key West, Florida, from San Diego to Bar Harbor, Maine; the places seen and the new faces who became friends in between. It follows the sometimes-humorous travels and travails of a single woman learning to live the RV lifestyle. More importantly, it chronicles an interior journey-the story of spiritual quest and a path to God. And it follows the sometimes circuitous path taken that helped the author come to terms with major changes in her life and that finally enabled her to feel at home in the skin she now wears.