The Long Road to Here

One of my favorite childhood memories begins in the middle of the night.

I’m asleep in the top bunk above the cab of our Winnebago motorhome. The bunk rocks gently with the movement of the road, and somewhere after midnight, I wake up to the sound of my dad turning up the radio.

Afternoon Delight is playing.

I don’t remember where we were going.

I don’t remember what state we were in.

I don’t even remember how old I was.

I only remember the feeling.

My dad was doing one of his marathon drives, determined to get us to the next destination before morning. My brother Buck was sitting up front as his co-pilot because that’s where he wanted to be. He could have slept, but he’d chosen to stay awake with Dad and watch the highway roll beneath the headlights.

Meanwhile, I was stretched out in the bunk, gently rocking above them to the sounds of Top 40 radio.

That’s what summer felt like.

Freedom.

Dad had the freedom to drive through the night if he wanted to.

Buck had the freedom to stay up and ride shotgun.

I had the freedom to drift in and out of sleep while the music played and the country rolled by outside the windows.

At the time, I thought we were just taking family vacations.

Looking back, I realize something else was happening.

My dad was teaching us how to see the world.

Travel wasn’t simply recreation in our family.

It was education.

Adventure.

Curiosity.

Storytelling.

Long before I became a full-time RVer, travel was already woven into my family history.

My grandfather worked for the United States Department of Agriculture, which required frequent relocations. My dad spent much of his childhood traveling the country in a trailer before eventually landing in Los Angeles as a teenager.

Years later, he bought a Winnebago and gave his own children the same gift.

Every summer brought another road trip.

National parks.

Historical sites.

Museums.

Campgrounds.

Roadside attractions.

And occasionally, radio stations.

The funny thing is that I never thought radio stations were unusual destinations.

My earliest radio memories weren’t from road trips at all.

They were from visiting my dad at KHJ in Los Angeles.

Sometimes he’d bring us to work in the middle of the night while he handled engineering projects. I remember taking my Barbies with me and setting them up in the corner of a production studio while he worked.

To me, a radio station felt as normal as someone else’s office.

I didn’t realize until much later that most children weren’t spending time around broadcast equipment and transmitter sites.

Radio wasn’t a career in our family.

It was simply part of life.

Years later, my dad and I found ourselves traveling together again.

This time it wasn’t family vacations.

It was FCC compliance consulting.

We would load up the RV, gather public files from stations across the country, and combine work trips with family adventures.

One of my favorite memories from that era was a project at the University of Central Florida.

Dad and I spent one day working on station files.

The next day we were walking through Disney’s Magic Kingdom with my kids.

Then back to work.

Then EPCOT.

The trip was paying for itself while we traveled.

At the time, it felt practical.

Looking back, it feels like another thread in a much larger story.

When I started RV life a few years ago, I thought I was beginning something entirely new.

I was traveling solo.

I had a puppy named Kismet.

I was reviewing decades of journals.

I was figuring out what life looked like after years of caregiving, loss, and transition.

Like many people in the RV community, I considered starting a YouTube channel.

One evening around a campground in Quartzsite, someone asked me a simple question.

“Do you have a YouTube channel?”

Technically, I did.

I just wasn’t doing much with it.

At the time, I was documenting my travels, recording video, and sharing pieces of my journey, but I hadn’t yet discovered what the channel was supposed to become.

Then one night I woke up with an idea.

Not a complicated idea.

Not a business plan.

Just a realization.

I’m already traveling the country.

I could visit radio stations.

It was so obvious that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it sooner.

I had spent my entire life around radio.

I had worked in radio.

I had owned stations.

I had traveled with my dad inspecting stations.

And now I was already driving across America.

Why not combine the two?

That idea became Radio Is Not Dead.

Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to visit stations, meet broadcasters, hear local stories, and remind myself why radio still matters.

Not because radio is perfect.

Not because it hasn’t changed.

But because local voices still matter.

Local communities still matter.

And connection still matters.

The more stations I visited, the more I realized something unexpected.

I wasn’t creating something new.

I was returning to something familiar.

The roads were different.

The motorhome was different.

The destination was different.

But the thread was the same.

Travel.

Radio.

Storytelling.

Curiosity.

Community.

Even my writing feels connected to that thread.

The novels.

The interviews.

The videos.

The newsletter you’re reading right now.

All of it comes from the same place.

The desire to explore, ask questions, tell stories, and understand people.

When you’re living your life, the path rarely makes sense.

You’re too busy taking the next step.

It’s only when you look backward that you begin to see how everything connects.

The older I get, the more grateful I become for that realization.

My grandfather is gone.

My brother Buck is gone.

My brother Brad is gone.

My mom is gone.

My dad is gone.

And yet they’re all still here.

In the stories.

In the lessons.

In the roads I travel.

In the radio stations I visit.

In the questions I ask.

And in the life I continue to build.

I thought buying an RV was the beginning of something separate.

It wasn’t.

It was part of the sequel.

The road, the radio, the writing, the stories, the grief, the memory, the questions—all of it had been traveling with me longer than I realized.

Sometimes the longest road doesn’t take you somewhere new.

Sometimes it brings you to where you belong.

This Week’s Heart Lesson

This week’s excerpt comes from Chapter Three of Heart Lessons: Lessons in Listening.

It took me a long time to come to terms with the reality that my life was not mine. No matter how hard I tried to understand the lesson I thought I was supposed to be learning, I had to quiet my soul, stop asking questions, stop trying so hard, and wait for God to reveal His purpose.

Listening got me off the sidelines and into the game.

I finally listened to my heart, maybe for the first time since my brother Buck died. I found hope and direction in the connection I felt with him at the site of his grave.

On his headstone was Psalm 31:24:

“Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart, all ye who hope in the Lord.”

In the middle of heart failure, those words felt personal. As though my brother was reaching across time to remind me:

Your heart is going to heal.

Continue the Journey

This week’s video explores one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the past twenty years:

Sometimes the answers we’re searching for aren’t found by pushing harder.

They’re found by listening.

Listening to our hearts.

Listening to our faith.

Listening to the people who helped shape us.

And listening to the quiet thread that has been guiding us all along.

If you’d like to read the full story, I’m giving away a free digital copy of my first book, Heart Lessons: A Story of Healing in the Midst of Heart Failure That Will Inspire You to Follow Your Heart.

If you’re navigating a life transition, grief journey, career change, creative project, or simply trying to figure out what’s next, I offer complimentary confidential consultations.

Before you go, I’d love to hear from you:

When you look back on your life, what thread connects the different chapters of your story?

Leave a comment and join the conversation.