Campervan Covid
The epic motorhome journey that took Joel Krutz, Michelle Narciso, their children and Narciso’s mother to two dozen national parks across the United States before they all caught Covid-19, at the same time, got underway with a PowerPoint presentation.
It was Krutz, a 47-year-old New Zealander living in New York City, who desperately wanted to go. But he knew that Narciso wasn’t keen on the whole idea of showering in cubicles and taking toilet cassettes to dump stations. So he began working on what in corporate lingo is known as a deck — a series of beautiful slides and persuasive bulletpoints. “There’s nothing that a great PowerPoint cannot solve,” he says.
Krutz called the presentation “Roadtrip USA 2020”. It featured a floorplan of the vehicle (a beast of a campervan, 10 metres long), images of destinations (from Yellowstone National Park to the Great Smokey Mountains) and a lot of numbers: 29 states, 39 days, 8000 miles of travel. The trip was meant to be some well-deserved time with family for two hard-working executives. When they finally went, it turned out be so much more than that.
Krutz has angular features and the kind of neat stubble managers grow on holiday. Born and raised in Taranaki, he left New
