Earlier this year my cat, Grace, lost her fight with cancer. She’d been with me a long time, and the house afterward was very quiet.
Kayla and I both work remotely, and a few months ago we realized we were rattling around that too-quiet house alone for the first time ever. So we did the thing an empty calendar and a little grief make possible: we packed bags and went to see the people we love. About a month, mostly living out of a suitcase — Los Angeles and California’s Central Coast, then Austin, then Cedar Rapids, then two small towns in Indiana. Mostly flights between the regions, an uber or a familiar face waiting once we landed, and a lot of mornings in our family’s kitchens and hotel rooms.
The one thing I brought to hold it together was coffee. Before we left I put together a compact kit that could make a real cup anywhere, and doing the same small thing each morning turned out to matter more than I expected. This is a trip journal with that kit — and that month — running through it as a thread.
The kit
Three pieces, chosen to be small, durable, and independent of whatever the room happened to provide:
- TIMEMORE Chestnut C2S Manual Coffee Grinder — a hand grinder so I wasn’t at the mercy of pre-ground gas-station coffee. Stainless burrs, packs down small, and grinding by hand is a weirdly nice way to wake up.
- Hario Zebrang V60 Flat Dripper — a collapsible/flat pour-over dripper that takes up almost no room in a bag but still makes a proper V60 cup.
- Nicewell Portable Electric Kettle — dual-voltage (110–240V), 316 stainless, six temperature presets, an LCD, 370 mL, fast boil, auto shut-off, keep-warm. The dual voltage and temp control are the whole point: hot water at the right temperature in any room, no borrowing a hotel coffee maker.
Grind, boil to temp, pour. Everything but the water fit in a packing cube.
Los Angeles & the Central Coast
California was really two trips stitched together — and, oddly, the only part planned before any of the rest of this. I’d had the Rush tickets for months: the Forum in Inglewood, on a Tuesday, their second show of the tour and their first in more than a decade, at fifty years in. Worth the whole trip on its own. This was the leg we drove: down from home in Walnut Creek with a stop in Atascadero to break up the miles, then a few days in Pasadena as a base for the show. Afterward we headed up the coast — a few nights in Solvang, then a few more in Lompoc, where my cousin’s oldest daughter was graduating from Cal Poly — before the long drive home. Rolling vineyards, a Danish-storybook town, and one of the old Spanish missions.
This leg was a good shakedown for the kit — a mix of hotel rooms and my cousin’s kitchen, a different counter every few days, and the grinder-and-pour routine settling into the same first ten minutes no matter where we’d landed.
Austin, Texas
Austin was the one stop with no family in it — a deliberate detour to break up the long haul to Indiana. I’d never been, I love live music (New Orleans is probably my favorite city, if that tells you anything), and I’d somehow never had proper Texas BBQ. So we gave ourselves a few days of exactly that: brisket, breakfast tacos, a different band most nights, and at least one evening of two-stepping at a honky-tonk.
This is where the kettle earned its keep: hotel-room mornings, no decent coffee downstairs, and a small ritual of grind-and-pour that reset the day before heading back out into the heat.
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Then the family stretch began. Cedar Rapids first, to see one of Kayla’s nieces and her husband — a quieter few days after Austin’s noise. Public murals downtown, a small art museum, and the slower Midwestern pace.
Auburn and Liberty, Indiana
The last stretch was small-town Indiana. Auburn up north, where we stayed with my mom and spent time with my sister and her girls, then Liberty down south near the Ohio line, at Kayla’s parents’ place, surrounded by her side of the family — including the newest arrival, a baby born the day before we flew out. Two-lane roads, courthouse squares, and long green evenings.
Out here the kit mattered most — someone else’s kitchen every morning, a full house, a lot of comings and goings. Being able to make the exact cup I make at home, in a place that isn’t home, was a small anchor at the start of days that were otherwise full of other people.
What the kit was really for
I told myself I packed the grinder and the kettle so I wouldn’t have to drink bad coffee. True enough — but it wasn’t the whole thing. Grief makes the ordinary feel a little unsteady, and doing the same small thing every morning — grind, boil to temp, pour — was a way to carry a piece of home into every kitchen that wasn’t mine. Five very different places, one steady first ten minutes of the day.
Grace would have slept through all of it and judged me faintly for the noise of the grinder. I missed her the whole way. But going to be with family was the right thing to do, and the coffee gave each morning somewhere to start.