We’d always wanted to go, almost went once, but I just didn’t feel… Now I wished I had.

My great-grandmother said this to me the other day while she was sitting on the couch watching Westerns on TV. She and my great-grandpa had always wanted to go out to Kansas and look at the cowboy towns, the movie sets, they never did. He’s passed on now, and while he’ll always be with us and I don’t consider him gone, it is certainly not the same. I’m going to take her, now, the two of us. We’re going to make that drive and photograph every moment- this will be one of the defining pieces of my life. It will change me, it will stay with me, and each second that passes after we return to our home in Tennessee those moments with exponentially compound in value and meaning.

It won’t always never been to late. I live by this- not as a fear mongering excuse for impulsiveness or disillusionment- but as a reminder of the impermanence of our days, our opportunities. Chances, options, possibilities last only as long as we do, as our people do. Places and people and time goes away- I’ve found that the only thing that can’t be replaced are memories and people and love and time. Those which cannot be bought, cannot be sold, cannot be contained in a package or shipped through the mail or waited for. Things will be there later, Amazon won’t run out.

Take that trip with your person, your dog, all on your own, go. Excuses are as replacable as things on a shelf. Your life and your love are not.

You deserve to change and grow, to experience sunrises from parking lots and drive through the night to the beach and to run through the desert and gen-u-ine crawfish po’boys from a roadside stand in Louisiana and get lost in music and memory and moments and redefine what you call happiness and rediscover what makes your heart sing and give yourself stories to tell, to share, to think about while you fall asleep at night.

I’ve had far too many conversations with family members and strangers telling me that they wished they had done something. That I should take advantage while I’m young. That they had intentions and never followed through. If so many decades later they still remember those plans, those trips, those dreams and cannot look back on them with pleasure, but regret… This obviously matters. This supersedes fear and work and non-obligation obligations (we all have those and we all know what they are.) I want you to be able to say that you took the trip, to spend hours telling your family and friends and random strangers stories from those trips, from those revered moments.

Perhaps one of the best stories I have to share about swapping road trip stories comes from my time working as a barista saving up for some camera equipment and a trip out West. This fella in his 70s came in once a week in a motorcycle jacket, got a scone and a latte, and sat alone on his phone. I started asking about his bike (I love motorcycles, sorry dad.) He started telling me about his trips, the rides he goes on, how many places he’s been and seen. I told him about my trips, my goals, what I want to see and feel while I’m out there. A few days before my final shift and I headed out West he slipped me a 100 dollar bill and told me to be safe. I’ll pass that 100 off to someone else one day, some bright-eyed kid ready to take on the world. He told me about everything he went out and took advantage of, what filled his heart were small, little moments- colors, signs, stores, sunsets, the bike he was on, the patches on his jacket, the people he was with, the food he tried, the dirt beneath his boots. What matters, above all else, is not being filled with regret but being filled with love- true love.

If you want to know how I curate meaningful, attainable, road trips with photography packages that provide generational treasures which increase in value from the moment that they’re taken please holler at me! Let’s do the damn thing.