In 2005, I was halfway through a deployment in Iraq when I took mid-tour leave and flew to Germany with my wife. That trip — just 14 days — flipped something in me that I didn’t fully understand at the time. It was the first time travel felt like more than just movement.
We landed in Frankfurt and stayed with friends in Wiesbaden, easing into civilian life like stepping into warm water after a long patrol. The pace was slower. The days had structure, but no mission. I could breathe — and that felt strange.
After a few days, we rented a car and drove north to Dinklage, where my wife’s family is from. That’s where we met Martin — a kind stranger she had been emailing about the Schweiger Mühle, a mill her many-greats-grandfather had built centuries ago.
Martin took time off work to show us around, translate, and be our quiet ambassador. He gave us context and connection. He walked us through the old mill. He sat beside us while we met distant relatives, letting this history I had only ever heard about come alive in real time. It felt like being handed a storybook and realizing it was your own family’s journal.
We kept driving after that. Berlin. Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Munich — where, in one of those once-in-a-lifetime coincidences, we arrived just in time for Oktoberfest. Garmisch. Baden-Baden. The autobahn blurred behind us like time speeding up and slowing down at once.
What I remember most wasn’t the beer halls or castles — though those were incredible — but the feeling of being dropped into a culture I didn’t know. I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t understand all the customs. But I wanted to. It felt energizing to be the outsider — to learn, to listen, to try.
It felt good to not know things.
When I look back now, I realize that trip taught me what travel could be — not a vacation from life, but an encounter with it. It was a spark. A seed. The beginning of the idea that would eventually become Roam Less Traveled.
Because even back then, even in between combat missions and cultural confusion, I understood something:
You don’t have to know where you’re going to feel like you’ve arrived somewhere worth being.