Rhys Martin is an author and photographer from Tulsa, Oklahoma. His love of travel was awakened in 2009 when he sold all of his possessions and left the country. For ten months, he lived out of a backpack and explored southeast Asia and Europe. When he returned home, it was with fresh eyes for his home state. As he drove the back roads of Oklahoma, Rhys discovered the significance of historic Route 66 to the greater American story. He has traveled all 2,448 miles of the Mother Road and continues to seek out the quiet Main Streets of the Midwest.
Rhys’s travel writing and photography has been featured in numerous local, regional, and national publications. He wrote the book Lost Restaurants of Tulsa, which features the stories of nearly 50 iconic eating establishments from the city’s past, and was a contributing author for Route 66: 100 Years which released this past November.
Rhys is the current President of the Oklahoma Route 66 Association and serves on multiple boards and commissions related to the Mother Road, including the Route 66 Road Ahead Partnership. Since 2024 he has also worked for the National Trust for Historic Preservation as their national Preserve Route 66 manager. He loves to connect with people and share his experiences.
Instructor: Chris Willers
We are Chris and Aaron, a married couple who have been traveling the country while running our online fitness and nutrition coaching business since January 2019. Prior, we both worked corporate careers in management, sales, and operations in Minneapolis, MN until we realized our passions were elsewhere. These were spending time with each other, the love of food, maintaining a healthy lifestyle with fitness, and traveling this amazing country.
After being inspired, or you could say awakened, by a documentary about a couple living and traveling in a schoolie bus, we planned, saved, and bought an Airstream Sprinter van to start our new life and business on the road. After 2.5 glorious and successful years of travel, we sold our van to move into something with more living space and bought a new Ford F350 Tremor and Outdoors RV 26 foot travel trailer. The new RV took a few months to build so we decided to have a little adventure in the meantime and spent the summer of 2021 in our truck and rooftop tent boondocking throughout Colorado. We are now in our new RV and will keep the rooftop set up for quick remote camping getaways. We look forward to adventurous bursts of overlanding, balanced with the comforts of our RV back at basecamp.
Chris is a certified personal trainer and nutrition coach working online with clients all across the country. Whereas Aaron is on the tech side creating/maintaining the website (Irene Iron Fitness), as well as doing all of the YouTube video productions. About 6 months into our travels we started a YouTube channel (Irene Iron Travels) to share our lifestyle and experiences with others just as we had been inspired a few years before. The channel is a reality-style showing the day-to-day mobile living as well as our travels around the country.
