It was a cool February morning in 2017, and Ben Hollar sat alone in the kitchen of his southern California home, thinking. As a machinist by trade, rising early and working 80-hour weeks were commonplace. He’d been at it for the better part of a decade, ever since he’d married his wife, Meg, in 2006. But the work had taken its toll.
He had been an absent figure in the lives of his four young sons.
“I didn’t have much of a relationship with them,” Ben said. “I missed so much of their early years that I really felt like a stepfather to them rather than their own dad.”
Worse still, his marriage was on the rocks. As his workload increased steadily over the years, he and Meg had drifted apart. To deal with his stress and a growing feeling of loneliness, Ben began to drink.
“It was a coping mechanism,” he said. Although he never missed work or put his family in harm’s way, the amount of alcohol he consumed on a nightly basis began to affect his health.
“It wasn’t until I started getting sick in 2015, 2016 that I began to realize I needed to back off,” Ben said. His skin became yellow, a sign of liver malfunction.
Meg had been watching her husband’s struggles.
“He was working so hard,” she said. “Alcohol was one of the only ways he could mentally deal with the pressures of his job.” Ben’s deteriorating health was not easy for Meg to witness, so she decided to take matters into her own hands.
While homeschooling her sons, Meg transformed their suburban backyard into a thriving garden, kept chickens, made soap and skincare products from scratch, and led the family through several rounds of the Whole30 diet.
These efforts mended Ben’s liver and returned his skin to normal pigmentation. But despite this physical healing, the couple’s emotional wounds remained wide open.
Ben’s work, drinking, and the little time the two spent working through problems had caused lots of loud, angry fights. Lately, however, the fights had turned into calm, rational discussions about ending their marriage. The shift in tone scared them.
“We were best friends,” Meg said. “I wasn’t leaving. Because I knew who he really was when alcohol wasn’t involved.”
Change needed to happen, and fast.
So when Meg joined him for coffee on that February morning, Ben, in a last ditch effort to save his marriage, proposed something radical.
He said: “This is kind of crazy, but how would you feel about selling everything we have, hopping in a trailer, seeing the country like we’ve always talked about, figuring out where we want to go, buying land, and we don’t come back?”
Meg stared at him with a look of bemused shock.
Finally, she said: “Let’s do it.”
Across the Country
The idea Ben proposed to Meg that morning in 2017 was one they’d talked about for years. They wanted to buy a trailer and travel across the country. Only now, there was an addendum: to start fresh somewhere new.They took the rest of the year to get everything in order, refreshing their house and getting rid of a lifetime’s worth of junk. They bought an old Ford Excursion to tow the large trailer they would live in.
By December 2017, they were ready. They put their house on the market, and it sold in three days.
“That was when we realized, ‘I think we’re supposed to be on this path,’” Ben said.
Meg chimed in: “But it was also like: ‘Oh no! We actually have to do this now!’”
The journey’s start was not smooth sailing. The family of six was squished together into a 250-square-foot trailer. Unable to escape one another, Ben and Meg began to wade through their decade of unresolved issues.
“Traveling across the country, you learn each other real intimately,” Ben said.
Though his drinking had been touch-and-go since his liver scare, Ben hadn’t given it up entirely. The trip severely limited his intake.
“The mechanics of drinking heavily are such that you don’t want to be stuck in a car for 12 hours a day, driving. Unless we stayed put for a few days, I couldn’t drink,” he said.
By the time they reached Iowa, Ben had cut down dramatically on his drinking. With this, and the forced time together, Ben and Meg slowly began to find each other again.
Finding Home
By fall 2018, the Hollars had reached the East Coast and were chasing the foliage southward from Maine. They had visited many states on their “move to” list, but their hearts had yet to settle somewhere. That is, until they reached North Carolina.“The minute we crossed the state line, we knew,” Meg said.
As they backed the trailer into the spot at their final campsite, the Excursion’s power steering line blew. The timing was perfect.
“We literally couldn’t leave,” Meg said with a laugh.
Once the truck was fixed, they began to look for a home. Their hearts had settled on buying a large property in the hills of western North Carolina, but their options were limited, and they were running out of cash. The Hollars bankrolled their entire adventure with the proceeds from the sale of their California home, and they had eaten through half of that nest egg.
Realizing they needed to change their parameters, and remembering how much they had grown in their old backyard, the Hollars determined that one acre would be sufficient to produce the majority of their own food. With this revised vision, they took a second look at a property they had passed on months earlier.
It was easy to see why the place was less than desirable. With only six extremely overgrown, junk-filled acres and a dilapidated mobile home for shelter, the property was much smaller and more of a project than they initially wanted.
With their new outlook, however, the property burst with potential. It was already equipped with a well, septic system, propane tank, and outbuildings. Six acres was more than enough for them to grow all of their food.
“This actually would work perfectly,” Ben said. They put an offer on it immediately but were held up for three weeks while some behind-the-scenes problems were sorted out.
“We thought we weren’t gonna get it, but all of a sudden all the problems cleared up and they said we could sign papers if we still wanted it,” Ben said. After 10 months on the road and visiting 45 states, the Hollars had finally found a home.
‘Why Are We Doing This?’
Having spent the rest of their nest egg purchasing their new property, the Hollars were in a financial pickle.“It was like a God thing,” said Ben. “Our views just skyrocketed. We went from making $50 a month to thousands of dollars a month. All of a sudden, all of our needs were met, and we could afford to rebuild this mobile home, get animals, and do all our projects. It was the weirdest thing.”
Originally created to let their family and friends in on their homesteading and cross-country adventures, the channel had, for a long time, provided no real income. This fact nagged at the couple. They asked themselves: If it isn’t making money, why are we doing it? The answer came during their trip.
At a Missouri seed festival, Meg and Ben were approached by a pastor and his wife who recognized the couple from YouTube. Ben recalled, “He said: ‘I want to thank you for sharing your story and showing that people actually can fight for their marriage.’”
His words hit them. That was why they were making videos. They were letting people in on this crazy journey to show them that if you work, forgive, and keep loving one another, a marriage can be saved.
Heralding the Change
They had come a long way, but Ben struggled to adapt to YouTube-funded homesteading life.“For the entirety of our marriage, I had always been somebody who worked. I didn’t realize how much of my self-worth was wrapped up in a job title,” Ben said.
He hadn’t entirely given up drinking either, and frustrations were mounting as a result.
“Why are we repeating this?” Meg had asked.
Ben thought he didn’t have an answer, but something deep within him began to speak.
“Every time I touched the bottle, I heard this voice saying: ‘You’re missing it. You’re missing it.’ That’s when I decided. It’s not worth the fights. It’s not worth missing out on my family,” Ben said. He became sober in July 2019 and hasn’t looked back.
The move to North Carolina has come with its own blessings. Since 2019, the Hollars have renovated the old mobile home, added numerous livestock and gardens, and expanded their family. They welcomed their first daughter in 2020 and are expecting another baby in May.
Ben has also made terrific strides in his relationship with his sons, now teens and preteen. On top of Ben’s constant presence, they’ve connected through homestead projects and the martial arts classes they’ve taken since 2022.
“Every time I get punched in the mouth, it’s worth it because of what it’s done for my relationship with all four of them,” Ben said.
“I see that from the outside,” Meg added. “I see the change. They see him as their dad.”
“It’s like I’ve got a second shot at it,” Ben said.
As for their YouTube channel, the Hollars have always taken a cinéma vérité approach. They’re not interested in achieving big goals to grow the channel. Instead, they prefer to share their adventures as they come. They’re currently building an addition to their mobile home and preparing their gardens for what they hope will be a fruitful summer.
Reflecting on their seven-year vlogging journey, Meg said: “It’s all been worth it. Even if we lose our YouTube income, we will figure out a way to keep Ben home and live this life. Our relationship as a family unit has become so important that we’re willing to do just about anything to keep this life going.”
