Chris Smith: The Holt family journey starts in Healdsburg and will end where it ends

We probably all know, or know of, people who are bittersweetly pulling up stakes in this blessed but challenged portion of California and leaving for another state.

Amateurs! Sonoma County’s Ben and Brianne Holt and their four daughters are packing up to quit this state for all of the other lower 47.

They’ll depart Healdsburg on Monday in a Chevy Suburban towing a used Layton travel trailer. Rather than continue any longer to be educated at home, 14-year-old Mackenzie; Madison, who’s 10; and Maebel, 6, will make their classroom the entire contiguous part of America and its national parks and monuments and countless other points of history and awe. The girls’ little sister, Maliya, who’s nearly 2, will take it all in, too.

The adventure, said their dad, “is also part of finding the place we want to be.”

Ben and Brianne, both 34, intend to sell their sweet but outgrown 100-year-old home in Healdsburg and to use the proceeds to purchase a house with land — lots of land — somewhere else.

“Our goal is to have 10 to 20 acres, and raise animals,” said Ben. He and his wife and daughters grew what food they could in Healdsburg, but there’s only so much farming to be done on 4,500 square feet of land.

“We’ve wanted a little more space,” Ben said.

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HE AND BRIANNE have ideas as to where they might like to start anew on a piece of property the likes of which they could never hope to afford in Sonoma County. Internet research has turned up appealing and potentially suitable homes with land in the Great Smoky Mountains region of Tennessee and North Carolina.

But Ben said his family intends to explore every state, and to be open to being drawn to settle someplace they hadn’t considered. “What if we find something in Arkansas?” he said

Though the COVID-19 crisis and its resulting shutdowns look to be easing, the Holts know that restricted access may prevent them from seeing everything they’d like to see. They don’t plan to spend much time in campgrounds but to instead sleep in the boondocks and on Bureau of Land Management property open to camping.

Ben said, “I have family in Wisconsin, so we’re going to stay there a little bit.”

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IT WAS COOKING that connected Benjamin Holt and the former Brianne Fellbaum, a native of Sonoma County and a 2004 alum of Windsor High.

“We met at culinary school in New York,” said Ben. They married in 2009.

Both worked in restaurants for a time. Brianne treasures her time in the kitchen of Jeff and Susan Mall’s former Zin in Healdsburg. But it came to be that restaurant work wasn’t compatible with satisfactorily rearing a growing family.

Brianne was a teacher at Healdsburg Elementary and Ben worked for BiRite Foodservice Distributors until both resigned in preparation for hitting the road.

“Yesterday was my last day,” Ben said Saturday.

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THE IDEA IS to spend four to six months exploring the country. Friends and relatives and others who are interested will follow the family’s journey through its website, www.growingupholt.com.

On that site is a link to the Holts’ YouTube page.

If you watch the introductory video, you’ll see that Brianne says outside the place in Healdsburg, “Don’t get me wrong, we love our home here. But we’ve been here. And you know, been there, done that. We’re ready for our next adventure.”

She and Ben intend to find a place to settle in time for the three older girls to start school there in the fall.

As Monday, Departure Day, approaches, the kids are one minute excited for the adventures and discoveries that lie ahead, upset the next minute while pondering the friends and relatives and knowns to be left behind.

“It’s definitely up and down,” their dad said.

Very soon, it will be onward and upward.

You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.