The People You Meet Between Here and There

Regretfully, I’m not much of a Christmas card person. But I always loved those heartfelt letters my parents used to get from distant relatives or old friends—the ones that gave a full update on their year en masse, printed out in 12-point Times New Roman on some kind of novelty 8x11 seasonal greeting paper, stuffed into envelopes, and mailed to as many people as their stamp budget allowed.

It was always amusing to read life updates from people you barely knew, often filled with all kinds of superfluous details about who graduated, got married, or had a kid. With just a few specks of information, your imagination starts asking questions and filling in the blanks. But there was something timeless about these letters before widespread social media and email. They captured the highs and lows of a year that you could hold in your hand, giving you an excuse to sit by the glow of the tree with a cup of tea, soaking in the cozy winter ambiance.

This time of year has a way of inviting that kind of reflection, doesn’t it? It’s when you take stock of the year—what mattered, the cast of people who crossed your orbit, and the twists that gave the year both tension and storylines. For me, it was getting shingles in March, which hurt like hell and knocked me down for two weeks before this huge adventure even began.

I don’t know if I’ll make a tradition, but after writing this, I kind of want to.

This year, my Christmas reflection starts at Lipan Point in the Grand Canyon, watching a sunset that looked like the gods had commissioned it. Purples, maroons, reds, and golds splashed across the canyon, fading into a curtain of long shadows that shifted with every second as the sun sank lower and lower. I’m not sure which branch of the military it was from, but a C-130 did laps overhead, deliberately circling, as if even the sky couldn’t resist soaking it all in. It wasn’t just beautiful—it was a little disorienting, like the canyon itself was alive and breathing.

I watched in silence, minus the plane. So did everyone else—parked in their adventure vans and overlanding rigs, scattered in the parking area along the rim. A quiet, unspoken reverence settled over the group as we stood there, strangers united by the breathtaking vastness of it all.

Getting there was a 20-mile drive through the desert on Highway 64, past the South Rim Gate and the little outpost of Grand Canyon Village. It’s a well-traveled route, but on a Monday afternoon in early May, with minimal crowds and perfect spring weather, it felt like my shot to make it my own.

Along the way, I pulled over at a random overlook. An older couple from West Virginia, judging by their license plate, parked next to me. I was mid-routine, taking ridiculous pictures of myself on my Ninja FrostVault cooler as part of my 6,500-mile road trip across the United States to promote Ninja Kitchen’s outdoor category on BroBible. I’m deeply proud of the work I created for this project—how we brought the romanticized open road to life with their products in a way that felt both like a travelogue and something wildly original.

For this stop, I posed with the canyon backdrop while eating a sandwich I picked up earlier that afternoon in Flagstaff—a recurring segment I called “scenic sandwiches,” named for how the cooler’s cold dry storage drawer kept my food perfectly chilled. I might’ve also blended a smoothie—partly for the content, partly because showing off Ninja gear in epic locations just felt right, per the goals of the partnership and project. 

The couple struck up a conversation—the kind of small talk you only have with strangers at scenic pull-offs. The husband joked about how early Western pioneers must have oohed and awwed back in the day, before the National Park, tourists, and modern roads made such a place so accessible—a classic “dudes rock” observation. His wife, with a thick Appalachian accent, delivered a line that stuck with me: “Well, we drove all this way, and you just look at it.” She was unimpressed, flat, and a little over it. It felt like something ripped straight from National Lampoon’s Vacation.

For them, this was just another stop on a Great American road trip, much like mine—one of many. I imagined how, over the weeks, it must have become harder and harder to truly take it all in. Maybe she wasn’t sleeping well in motels and motor lodge beds. Maybe the constant stimuli—the effort to stay alert, the miles blurring together—was wearing her down. Maybe each new wonder was starting to blend into the last. Maybe there were kids or grandkids back at home with whom she wanted to spend time, or a vegetable garden that she was neglecting before the summer. But the husband, at least, seemed determined to hold on tight to his dream of exploring America's open roads, trying to drink as much as possible before the trip inevitably ended.

It got me thinking about road trips and how we experience the world. You go, you see, you move on. But there’s something more to it, isn’t there?

This project was born out of the connections between people—the kind of chemistry that happens when you’re on the same frequency, the same energy. It’s amazing how that vibe can stoke an idea that can turn into the adventure and, as far as my business at BroBible is concerned, a content project of a lifetime. The whole thing was brainstormed in January over a pre-dinner beer with a marketing buddy Jordan, sitting in a bar at The Venetian in Las Vegas during a conference, before we each went to our respective work dinners. I’d flown myself there on my own dime at the beginning of the year, banking on a gut feeling that something would come of it. I didn‘t mind, because I‘ve learned over the years that, as long as your patient, BroBible is a pretty precise input-output machine. The more energy you put into it, the more you inevitability get out of it.

I jumped at this project because it was a chance to get my Kerouac on. To merge my deeply adventurous spirit with a major branded content project. It's such a uniquely "me" thing to my core. I had to go for it and give it my all.

Top Five Moments—and Why They Don’t Matter

At a happy hour I hosted in Nashville, someone asked me to rank my favorite spots from the trip so far.

Here’s the list I came up with on the spot:

1. Smoky Mountain National Park – Seeing actual bears with my mom in Cade's Cove during golden hour and twilight.
2. Arches National Park – Like visiting Mars, but with breathable air. Moab smells like sandstone and adventure. I want to go back.
3. Black Canyon of the Gunnison – Followed by the Million Dollar Highway to Durango, then chilling in a hot spring after that white-knuckled high altitude drive through the Rockies. It was remote and stunning. Every time I fly east coast-to-LAX, I spot this place on the setback map. Seeing it on the ground? Incredible.
4. Grand Canyon at Sunset – The silence at Lipan Point was breathtaking, as was the view.
5. Monument Valley, Utah – The Painted Desert blew my mind. Driving miles of desolate highway before those sandstone columns appear on the horizon, towering like sentinels, scraping the sky. It's classic American West iconography. Unreal to experience it.

But honestly? That list is meaningless without the people. Road trips aren’t about the places. The places are just markers—where you pause to refuel, rest, or snap a photo.

The moments between are what stays with you.

The people who make the road feel alive. The random conversations that veer into unexpected depths. Beers shared with strangers who somehow feel like old friends. The way your comfort zone gets rattled and stretched in ways you didn’t expect. It’s the fleeting, unplanned connections that linger long after the miles blur together.

That’s the real magic of the open road—the reason us Kerouac-as-gospel types can’t help but romanticize it. If you hit the road and don’t feel that—if you’re just going through the motions, like the woman at the Grand Canyon seemed to be—you’re missing the very thing that makes the journey worth taking.

In 2006, I took a big road trip with my grandparents after returning from traveling around the world on a study abroad trip called Semester at Sea. They drove out to San Diego, and together we crisscrossed the country, taking in the big sights at National Parks across the American West and sharing a bunch of laughs. I wrote a passage on this site about that earlier this year. That trip stayed with me—it shaped me in ways I still reflect on—and I thought about it often over the course of this project.

One moment, in particular, brought it all flooding back. I was eating alone in the only open restaurant in Mexican Hat, just down from Valley of the Gods, right next to the San Juan River. There wasn’t another place for at least 100 miles in any direction. One of the other diners was a woman my age, presumably a van-lifer and rock climber, eating with her grandparents on their own road trip from Monument Valley to Moab. Watching her with them—seeing how much they clearly meant to her, how central they were to her path and adventurous spirit—brought me back to that 2006 trip with my own grandparents. The stuff that makes us tick comes from somewhere, right?

But the most special parts of this road trip were the ones I got to share with my parents. That 2006 journey had always stayed with me, and I’d hoped to recreate something like it with my mom and dad. So when I had a semblance of an itinerary, I invited them to pick a leg of the journey.

They chose the stretch from LA to Austin, through Arizona and New Mexico. They flew into Tucson, where I picked them up, and we set out together. We stayed in an Airbnb, drank prickly pear margaritas, and watched the sun set over the towering cacti of Saguaro National Park. From there, we drove to New Mexico to explore White Sands, spent some time in Marfa in West Texas, and finally made it to Austin, where we ate a frankly embarrassing amount of BBQ at Terry Black’s.

This was its own kind of magic—different from that trip with my grandparents, but no less meaningful. I'll cherish it forever.

But when I talk about "the people," I’m not just talking about family. I mean the strangers you cross paths with or the people following the journey on my personal or BroBible’s socials who said, “Hey, let’s meet up!”

For example, I met a wealth manager from Long Island at a vinyl dive bar on a Saturday night in Santa Fe. It was a long, white-knuckled drive from Midland, Texas thanks to a band of thunderstorms on the open prairie. I needed to chill out and calm my nerves.

We both had that “we don’t look like we belong here” vibe and quickly struck up a conversation about music and New York City. We were drinking High Lifes while a DJ in her early 30s spun boogie-woogie records. He told me he was in Santa Fe because a client and close friend had recently passed away—a wildly wealthy man who loved horses.

At the cowboy funeral, the man’s horse wore his boots, and, as he described it over the screechy music, the horse cried. He said it was one of the most emotionally intense things he’d ever seen—a moment that shook him to the core. He was clearly still processing it, feeling raw and existential, looking to blow off steam while grappling with the meaning of it all.

We talked about family, mortality, and how his friend’s wealth, which had once seemed monumental, suddenly felt meaningless in the face of death. He described his friend with a mix of admiration and regret, trying to reconcile the wildness of his life with the reality of his loss. It turns out, we even knew some of the same people in New York.

He was in his late 50s or early 60s and didn’t care about fitting in with the millennial vibe of the bar. He was unapologetically himself, full of wild stories about working with rock stars and big personalities like Dickey Betts and living a life that defied convention. It was the kind of stranger-in-a-bar conversation that sticks with you—not for its novelty, but for its emotional heft.

We exchanged emails afterwards, but that was that.

While writing this, I realized it felt like a scene ripped from A Christmas Carol—a glimpse at a Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, perhaps disguised as a New York wealth manager in a dive bar in the Land of Enchantment, whispering truths about mortality, wealth, and what truly matters.

I think about the Charles Dickens-esque energy of that exchange often.

The road trip kicked off in Los Angeles with a sunset send-off at Penmar Golf Course—a low-key goodbye party to close out my life for the next few months. I was just coming out of the fog of shingles (a charming little reminder from my immune system that I’d been overdoing it) and still processing the loss of my buddy Mo’s bar. For three years, it had been the nucleus of my social circle, until LA’s insatiable appetite for rent hikes finally claimed it. It felt fitting to gather my people, say goodbye, and set off into the unknown.

The next big stop was Denver, where I rented a U-Haul to scramble with the help of my BroBible co-worker Tom and his wife Emily to build a giant throne out of Ninja Coolers—an outrageously fun centerpiece for the event I threw near the ballpark. It was a solid turnout: I reconnected with old friends from Chambersburg, caught up an assortment of Denver friends I've met through my job over the years, and, especially, with Adriaan, my former BroBible business partner. The next night, we hit a show at the Comedy Works with comedian Jared Freid, who used to write for us back in the day. He's crushing it in his career, Netflix specials and all. A highlight? Spending time with my brother and his girlfriend, Liz. Also, grabbing wings at my favorite Grateful Dead-themed wing bar in the universe, Fire on the Mountain, with my old Los Angeles buddy Liam. Seriously, their wings are so good I stuffed bottles of their sauce into my Ninja cooler to keep cold on the drive back to Los Angeles. Shout out to Liam for making that happen.

Austin was a different flavor altogether. I caught Leftover Salmon at a brewery thanks to Will, a longtime BroBible reader turned Instagram friend, who tipped me off about the show. Will used to live in Austin but now calls the Bay Area home. We talked music, beer, California, and how strange it is that the internet keeps pulling people like us into each other’s orbits.

On a Friday night, I found myself at Austin’s Soho House with Dillon, the creative force behind Dude Fridges, mingling with Austin's tech-setter class. Dillon and I talked shop—social media businesses, potential collaborations, and the oddly parallel vibes of DUDE Fridges and BroBible in our respective eras and lanes. It was one of those hangs where the networking didn’t feel like networking, just good conversation over better drinks.

Later that week, I met with the Washed Media guys, whose success in digital media comes from doing it the right way: being themselves. Always a good time to swap war stories about the content lanes we’ve each taken. That same weekend, I bonded with my Airbnb hosts—a video game developer and his software-engineer girlfriend—who let me take over their backyard for an all-day barbecue experiment. It was my first time smoking a brisket on the Ninja Woodfire ProConnect grill, a labor of love that stretched from sunrise to well past 10 PM. Because.... Texas. The result? Juicy, tender, and deeply satisfying. Cooking a brisket that good felt like an accomplishment worth bragging about.

Texas forever, as they say in Friday Night Lights.

Nashville came after a scenic detour through Pigeon Forge and a humid summer afternoon exploring Smoky Mountain National Park, where we spotted a few bears and more than a few curious tourists. It’s a day’s drive from Chambersburg down I-81, so having my mom—a die-hard Nashville fan—along for the ride made it all the better.

We hosted a BroBible open bar at Von Elrod’s, a German beer hall with just the right vibe. Unlike the Broadway bars—overrun with bachelorette parties in rhinestone cowboy hats and $12 canned vodka seltzers—Von Elrod’s had a more laid-back music city vibe. That night, I raffled off a Ninja Cooler and a Woodfire Pizza Oven as door prizes, enjoyed the buzz of a crowd that felt like my kind of people.

Among the attendees were Grayson W., our BroBible college football writer, Trent, an Instagram buddy from our shared music scene turned real-life friend, and Corey F., a fellow internet publishing insider whose wife spent the evening happily chatting with my mom. The beer garden buzzed with music-loving kindred spirits swapping stories, sharing laughs, and leaning into the kind of camaraderie you can only find when the tunes are good, the beer’s cold, and the company’s even better.

Afterward, Trent took my mom and I to a cocktail bar for a nightcap. The libations were thoughtful and the vibe perfectly low-key. It was fun to have a spontaneous adventure for the afters.

The next day, my mom and I toured a world-class recording studio owned by a southern legend, at the invitation of one of the party attendees.

Watching her, a former music teacher, light up at Liberace’s old piano—still bearing faint impressions from his iconic rings—was something I’ll never forget. We both regretted later that she didn’t play it; surely no one would have minded. Seeing her in that space, filled with artistry and history, felt like a full-circle moment, impossible to fully articulate. That night, we went to the late show at the Grand Ole Opry and saw Lainey Wilson, Meg McRee, Terri Clark, and Wynonna—an unforgettable lineup that capped the Nashville leg in a very Music City way.

Back in Pennsylvania, before heading back to Los Angeles, I took a side quest to visit my sister and her gaggle of nieces and nephew on their farm—a chaotic, joyful pit stop that reminded me how grounding family can be. Then it was back to Chambersburg, my hometown, where my family surprised me with Chambersburg stickers for my cooler. It was a small gesture, but it landed with the weight of something far bigger.

That cooler, now covered in stickers from all the faraway places I’d passed through, had become an artifact of the trip—a piece of lore in its own right. And with Chambersburg represented in the final homage, it felt like a full-circle moment, tying my adventure back to the origin of all my life's adventures. It was their way of saying, We see you. We see what this trip means to you.

At some point, I started keeping a note of everyone I met on the trip. Memories tend to get a little blurry in the intensity of hitting deadlines, coordinating with teams, and putting together the campaign deliverables to pull off the marketing goals of the trip.

This was a more important list than rattling off a bunch of places. You can open up Instagram and get bombarded by clout-chasing influencers in places. Strangers, old friends, people I only knew from the internet, family who joined me for stretches of the drive. That list became the trip, far more than the destinations ever could.

I think about the van-lifers I see online, the ones chasing backdrops with perfectly staged sunsets. Are they meeting people? Are they having conversations that stick with them? Are they sharing that wisdom? Or are they just snapping photos and moving on?

...No judgment if not. There's no right or wrong way to have an adventure.

But Christmas seems like the perfect time to reflect on this. It’s not about where you are or what you’re doing. It’s the people who make life worth showing up for. This year, I’m grateful for the strangers who shared their stories, the friends who joined me for beers, and the moments that made the road feel full of life.

What a ride it’s been. Here’s to the next one.