Introduction | Page 1

In February of 1994, I was 22 years old, lost, depressed, and still recovering from a suicide attempt.

Not knowing what I was going to do with my life, I had a wild and magnificent idea to give me something to look forward to, something to live for.

I dropped out of college, bought a one-way ticket, and disappeared across 11 countries with nothing but a backpack, a sleeping bag, a journal, and my camera.

I had no idea what I was doing.

I just knew I needed to get away.

For the next 100 days, I wandered through 11 countries. I reconnected with old friends, made new ones, fell in love in France, drank for free in an Irish pub, survived a snowstorm in Stockholm, got a tattoo in Spain, and took photographs everywhere I went.

I was young, scared, curious, and determined to see what was on the other side of the horizon.

I took most of my pictures on black-and-white film — cheap, forgiving, and perfect for a broke backpacker. Color film was much more precious and expensive, so I used it sparingly. Color slides (transparencies) were the rarest and most special of all — beautiful but unforgiving, with almost no margin for error.

For nearly 30 years, my journal, my negatives, those precious color slides, my backpack, and a small box of mementos sat untouched in my family home’s basement.

As I read my journals and scanned my photographs, I wasn't simply remembering where I had been. I was meeting the 22-year-old version of myself again — the kid who had left Nebraska not knowing exactly what he was looking for, but somehow believing he would know it when he found it.

I began rebuilding the story from those original journals and photographs.

And then, in July 2025, my family’s home burned to the ground.

My family barely escaped with their lives.

Almost everything else was gone.

But my box from Europe was already safe with me.

My journal survived.

My negatives survived.

My photographs survived.

My mementos survived.

And suddenly, the decision I had made the year before to finally open that box felt less like coincidence and more like grace.

Because if I had waited another year, this story might have disappeared forever.

It didn't.

Instead, more than 30 years after I first put on that backpack, I find myself sitting down to tell the story of what happened.

This isn't just a story about traveling through Europe.

It's about a young man trying to find his way back to himself.

It's about friendship and loneliness, fear and freedom, faith and doubt, love and loss, and the strange moments that can change the course of a life.

It's about the photographs I took because I was determined to have proof that all of this really happened.

And it's about the things I couldn't possibly have understood at 22 that only became clear decades later.

I thought I was going to Europe to see the world.

I didn't realize I was going to discover myself.

*****

When I was in Europe in 1994, I was, for all practical purposes, completely cut off from my friends and family back in Nebraska. Being in totally different time zones, I communicated sporadically with them using phone booths and expensive pre-paid international calling cards, which kept our conversations short, and air-mail postcards, which kept our letters even shorter. I wandered around Europe with nothing but a guidebook and a small European train timetable to guide me to my next location.

That desperate, bold trip didn’t just help me find myself. I also found God.

In my teens and twenties I had flirted with atheism, and, because of where I was at in life, I was angry at God — if He even existed — enough so to try to take my own life without thinking of the consequences to my soul.

But alone on those long train rides, time seemed to barely exist outside of knowing when trains departed or arrived. I lost track of what time zone I was even in while walking quaint European streets, exploring ancient cemeteries - and especially sitting quietly inside cathedrals and churches far older than America itself, something shifted. I began to feel a connection.

Some of the things that happened to me on that trip — and in my life since, especially the miracle of my family surviving the fire last summer — have only deepened my faith.

I now believe in God and in angels watching over us more than ever, and in a real purpose to my life.

That backpacking journey when I was 22 became the foundation for the rest of my adult life — teaching me how to keep going, how to find myself in times of chaos, how to love and accept who I am, and how to trust that I’m never truly alone.

I’m excited, grateful, and fired up to share this experience with you.

This is more than old travel photos and journal entries. This is the story of how I found my way back to myself… and how those memories were saved after almost being lost forever.