What I Learned Hitchhiking with a Bus Full of IDF Soldiers

I hope to keep you updated with a worthwhile story every few weeks as this adventure continues. Alongside these posts, I’m also working on a longer project that will bring together the experiences I’ve had, and the ones still to come, into something more complete. That piece will hopefully be published after this journey, but for now, this blog will serve as a way to share the road in real time. Writing every few weeks feels like the right pace ; enough time for the trip to unfold, but not so much that the details slip away. I’ve come to believe that staying in one place for too long is dangerous. It molds you into someone afraid of change, someone who mistakes comfort for safety. I felt that way after college. Comfort is a strange thing: part of me craves it, while another part resents it. Growing up, my neighbor once told me,“It’s a slippery slope.” That phrase still rattles around in my head. Now, at 23 years old, I’m writing this first entry from a diner in Page, Arizona, right near the Utah border. I’ve been on this hitchhiking journey for 21 days, and only now have I slowed down enough to start putting words to the experience. I want to be clear. We weren’t out here bumming it, sleeping under overpasses. The worst place I’ve crashed so far was a bathroom in Zion National Park. Aside from that, it’s been mostly Super 8s and the kind of $20 hotels that look better from the highway than they do inside. Some mornings, I skip a shower, not out of laziness, but because the bathroom feels dirtier than I do. For context, I had just wrapped up what my job calls “busy season”, which most people simply call summer. I work in concert production, and after months of running nonstop shows, I knew I needed some kind of change. Originally, I had planned to take an internship in Los Angeles this fall. Looking back now, it wasn’t the work that interested me, it was the destination. For some reason, I thought living in a place like Los Angeles would give me what I would call“worthless status.” But we won’t get into that.It wasn’t until the Fourth of July that things shifted. I got a call-from a friend and collaborator I’ve had an on-and-off creative relationship with since I first reached out to him on Instagram in 2021. For the sake of this blog, I won’t share his name. What’s important is that he has a passion for doing “50 states” challengesand documenting them for his audience.I remember the moment he asked me to join. It was the first time in a long time that I felt a real sense of excitement. Right then, I knew I would have to make a choice: the internship in Los Angeles or this adventure. Even now, as I write these words, I’m still questioning that decision.

In the end, I said yes. I told my boss about the trip, and the timing worked out perfectly. My job is essentially seasonal, so it felt like the right moment to step away, the perfect moment really.

STORY 1: How I Ended Up in Yellowstone with a Bus Full of IDF Soldiers

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK SEPTEMBER 14TH 2025

We were lucky to have crossed paths with Laura, a former Yellowstone employee who now runs an Airbnb just outside the park. Yellowstone being the most visited national park in the country, seems like fertile ground for such a venture, and Laura knew it well. She reached out to us, curious about our travels, and offered to show us some of her favorite corners of the park. To my surprise, Old Faithful wasn’t on her list. Too many f****** tourists, she said.

That made sense.

The day she gave us was mesmerizing. I remember calling my father and trying to explain what it felt like—one of those rare days that makes all the chaos and nonsense worth it. With Laura, it felt like we had a built-in tour guide, and in a way, we did. We drifted from overlook to overlook, the hours dissolving into conversation and small miracles.

One of those miracles began a few days earlier at Wall Drug, a roadside attraction that is equal parts capitalist hallucination and prairie fever dream. Imagine a carnival that never quite ended, fossilized in neon signs and cheap souvenirs, propped up by bottomless coffee and animatronic cowboys. Wall Drug is less a store than a hallucination in broad daylight. Amid the noise, I spotted a man wearing a West Virginia Mountaineers cap—my alma mater. I couldn’t help myself; I had to say something. What followed was a long conversation about the state, its hills, its people. We shook hands and parted ways, two strangers momentarily bound by memory. Flash forward to Yellowstone. My travel partner and I stood at Artist’s Point, staring out over the falls and the endless forest.And there he was again. Same cap. Same man. Same smile. I’m not usually one for invisible strings or divine intention, but I couldn’t shake the sense that this reunion had been arranged somehow. We spoke again. His wife prayed for us, pulled us into a hug. They were the kind of people who remind you that the world still tilts toward good. After nearly seven hours in the park, we decided it was time to head south toward Jackson, Wyoming. Laura, generous as ever, offered to drive us the whole way. We didn’t let her. She had already given us more than enough. Some gifts you accept, and some you protect by leaving them whole. Laura dropped us at the south entrance of the park, where the road met the interstate that would eventually lead to Jackson. We said our farewells and started waiting, holding signs that read “JACKSON“ The sun sank lower and lower. I grew nervous. All we had was a bag of clothes, a Canon ES55 tape camera, and a small bottle of bear spray. I didn’t want to be stuck in Yellowstone overnight. We waited and waited. At one point, a man offered us a ride, claiming he could get us to Jackson in three days. We had to turn him down—we needed to stay on schedule. He offered us Camel cigarettes instead, which we accepted, and we waited some more. Waiting is thrilling in a way, though daunting as hell. Here we were, entirely reliant on strangers to make sure we didn’t get trapped in the park before the sun set. After about two and a half hours, a bus pulled in. One of those buses that probably shuttles retirees between grocery stores and community centers. At first, I thought maybe the passengers were stopping to use the string of porta-potties at the pull-off where we had been parked. But no one got out except the driver. “Where are you off to?” the man, no older than thirty, asked. “Jackson, WY”, we replied. “We’re headed there too, who are here on vacation.” he said.“I’ve got a bus full of Israelis”I wasn’t fazed by the fact that the bus was full of Israeli tourists. I was just relieved. We had a ride. We quickly , with no questions asked, grabbed our bags and were greeted by chants when we got on the bus.Now before I go any deeper into this story I think its important to note that I am in no means a geo-political expert, I have a strong idea what is happening between Israel and Palestine as I write this but I want it to be clear that I am in no way claiming any political ideology with anything I am about to write, this is simply a story and something that happened to me. It was thrilling. In the first five seconds of boarding the bus, we felt welcomed. A cold Coors Light was handed to us, and looking back, it might have been the best beer I’ve ever had. Hours of waiting in the hot sun will do that to you; sometimes water just isn’t enough. We began to explain our journey to the men on the bus. They were genuinely interested, though the conversation was fairly run-of-the-mill at first. I turned to one of the few who spoke perfect English and asked, “What brings you guys here?” “We’re on vacation here in America.” he said. “We’re in the IDF and decided to come”

It struck me. There are very few places Israelis can easily go on vacation, and the United States is one of them. Something I learned from these men, and something I hadn’t really thought about before. I felt a flicker of trepidation. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. I didn’t want my own political ideas to cloud the way I treated them. The golden rule seemed simple: treat others as you want to be treated. I was in no position to debate politics. The only thoughts I could summon were simpler: a spliff and a pillow. I remember there being one woman on the bus sitting next to a man wearing a U.S. Marines hat and a Tennessee Vols football pullover. I thought, surely they cannot be from Israel? After talking to her, I learned that neither she nor her husband were Jewish or Israeli. They just “liked Israel” and ran an organization that brought IDF soldiers to see the country’s national parks. It was strange, unexpected, but oddly interesting.

Our driver had one condition before reaching Jackson: a stop at a hot spring by a river. Of course we agreed. We pulled into an empty parking lot. I opened my second beer, threw on my swim trunks, and followed the group. They asked,“What do you know about Israel?” I knew the question’s weight, but I wasn’t willing to bite. I remember the sun setting over the steaming water. There I was, a suburban American kid in nothing but my boxers, sitting in a hotspring with fifteen active-duty IDF soldiers. I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all. A full-on “what the fuck is my life” moment. And yet, as strange as it was, it felt deeply human.

We shared beers, food, and stories. They didn’t have to stop for us. They didn’t have to make us dinner at the springs. They didn’t have to welcome two random Americans into their day, but they did. Nothing was expected in return. It was a reminder that in a world where everything is so often reduced to politics, labels, or sides, there is something powerful in seeing people for who they are rather than what they represent.

We got to Jackson on schedule. The bus emptied, and we parted ways. I carried with me the warmth of that evening, the quiet knowledge that even in a fractured world, human kindness still exists-and sometimes, it arrives in the most unexpected forms. By the time we rolled into Jackson, the sun had fully surrendered to night. The park behind us felt almost otherworldly, a liminal space where borders, allegiances, and politics seemed suspended. I couldn’t ignore that these soldiers, members of the Israel Defense Forces, come from a country deeply entangled in one of the most complex geopolitical conflicts in the world. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, tensions with Gaza, and its regional alliances cast a long shadow over any casual interaction. Yet here they were, hundreds of miles from their reality, sitting in a hot spring with two Americans, sharing beers and laughter without any discussion of war, policy, or ideology. It struck me that politics often reduces people to abstractions, flags, statements, affiliations but human behavior rarely fits neatly into those boxes. Generosity, curiosity, and humor exist outside those frameworks, and sometimes, they arrive in the unlikeliest forms: a busload of strangers from halfway across the globe, offering food, warmth, and a fleeting glimpse of common humanity. For a few hours, the world felt less like a map of conflict and more like a network of choices, chance encounters, and unspoken agreements-reminders that even amid real-world strife, the capacity for connection persists.