50 States. One Year. The Trip That Started Everything.
In the year I turned 60, I drove through all 50 states.
I have been moving my whole life. Family road trips as a kid in a custom show van… criss-crossing the eastern seaboard. Backpacking through Europe every summer for what felt like a decade – Greece, Norway, Portugal, France – the whole continent as a personal playground. A career in event production that put me in some extraordinary places, if I was willing to stay a few extra days and actually look around.
The wanderlust was always there. It just had to share space with everything else for a long time
Then I turned 59 and started thinking about what 60 was going to mean. And I came up with a challenge: visit all 50 states in the year I turned 60. Not a sprint, not a highlight reel… a slow, deliberate wander through a country I thought I knew, with a camera and on occasion with a cat named Penny… with no particular deadline.
What This Series Is
I shot video the whole way. Each episode follows a state, not as a tourism guide, but as a photographer’s road journal. What caught my eye. What surprised me. What the light was doing when I showed up.
I was 60 years old, traveling alone, moving slowly, and paying attention. That’s the lens everything is shot through.
Some episodes are polished. Some are raw. All of them are honest. And somewhere between the first mile and the last, something shifted… I came back with a different sense of what the next chapter was supposed to look like.
This project is where Chasing Light & Story began.
Watch the Series
All the episodes are on YouTube! Find your state, or start from the beginning and follow the journey from mile one.
The Deeper Story
The videos tell you what I saw. The stories tells you what I was thinking.
As I build out this site, I’ll still be adding written companion pieces to the journey and the stories behind the footage, the moments the camera missed, and the slow realization that this trip wasn’t really about 50 states at all.
It was about figuring out what the second half looks like when you finally stop long enough to ask.
Subscribe below and I’ll let you know when those stories are ready.
Some roads change direction. Some change you!
— Michael