Sometime during the summer of 2025, I realized I needed something in my life that had nothing to do with work. For the better part of two years, work had consumed almost everything. I had finally gotten a win after spending years chasing one, but strangely, getting what I had been chasing didn't fix much. Around the same time, a five year friendship and business partnership had fallen apart. My circle had gotten incredibly small. I was approaching thirty, looking at the way I had been living, and beginning to understand that some things needed to change. I needed something that was mine.
Golf had always been there. I had played competitively when I was younger, but somewhere along the way that part of me had disappeared. I missed having something to work toward. I missed competition. More than anything, I missed being accountable to myself. So in the beginning of August, on a Wednesday, I decided I was going to become a competitive golfer again. There wasn't a grand plan behind it. I found a tournament that Saturday and decided to enter it.
Then I stood on the first tee and snap hooked a three wood into the woods. I remember thinking almost immediately, What am I doing out here? I had decided three days earlier that I wanted to compete again, and now I was questioning the entire thing before I'd even made it to the first green. Somehow, I managed to save bogey from about eight feet. It would be my only bogey of the day.
Over the next seventeen holes, I played some of the best golf of my entire life. I played them six under par. I hit shots that genuinely blew my mind, not because I'd never hit shots like them before, but because somewhere along the way I think I'd stopped believing I still could. I shot 67 and won the tournament by a pretty wide margin. There are rounds where the number is almost secondary to the feeling you have walking off the course, and that was one of them. I had spent a lot of time questioning myself, the direction of my life, the decisions I'd made and what I was supposed to do next. Seventeen holes after questioning what I was doing out there at all, I had an answer. In some small but important way, I had proved something to myself. I was capable.
Around the same time, I had started a golf page called Feel Golf. It had 44 followers. There was no business plan, no content strategy and certainly no idea that any of this might eventually become something bigger. It was simply a place to document what I was doing and, maybe more importantly, to give myself a reason to keep doing it. Almost immediately after the tournament, I was off to Europe.
I booked a flight to Rome without much of a plan. There wasn't some carefully constructed European golf itinerary waiting for me on the other side. I didn't know that I was about to spend three weeks bouncing around the continent, and I certainly didn't know that I was about to meet people who would change the direction of my life. I just knew I needed to go somewhere, and Rome felt like as good a place as any to start.
A few days later, I got on a red eye and left. That became the beginning of my first real golf bender. Over the next three weeks, I would somehow fly into Rome three separate times. I rented two cars and an RV. I traveled by plane, train, automobile and boat. I drove through countries I had never seen before and slept in places I hadn't known existed a few days earlier. I played golf in Italy, high in the mountains, beside the Adriatic, above the Black Sea and beneath the Julian Alps. None of that existed when I got on the plane. There was only the next day.
I arrived in Rome exhausted, checked into a hotel and spent the afternoon wandering around the city. I ate great food, saw some of Rome and tried to recover from the overnight flight. The next morning was my first full day in Italy, and I had a tee time at Marco Simone, the course that had hosted the Ryder Cup less than two years earlier.
I called a cab and had the driver take me out to the golf course. When we pulled in, I realized Marco Simone was a pretty big complex, and it wasn't particularly obvious where I was supposed to go. I got out with my golf clubs and started asking the cab driver questions, neither of us really knowing what the other was saying. At almost exactly that moment, a guy walked by, looked at me and asked, "American?"
"Yeah, man."
"Just follow me."
That was Rob.
I had been in Italy for less than a day, standing outside a cab at a golf course where I had no idea where I was going, and this random American appeared and started showing me what to do. We walked toward the clubhouse together and started talking. He introduced himself and told me he was from New York City. Somewhere in that first conversation, he asked if I wanted to play together.
To be honest, at first I wasn't sure I did. I had come to Europe alone, and there was a part of me that liked the idea of playing alone too. I didn't know this guy, and I wasn't sure I wanted to spend the next four hours with him. Then I thought, You know what, dude? Sure. So we played.
It's funny to think about now because there was nothing monumental about that decision at the time. I wasn't standing there thinking this person was about to become important in my life. I was just a guy who was lost at a golf course outside Rome, and Rob happened to walk by at exactly the right moment. We spent the next few hours playing Marco Simone and talking, and we got along almost immediately. By the end of the round, this complete stranger didn't really feel like a stranger anymore.
Rob would eventually become one of my best friends and, later, my business partner. None of that happens if he walks out of the clubhouse thirty seconds earlier, if my cab arrives thirty seconds later, or if I simply say no when he asks if I want to play. That's one of the strange things about travel. You leave home thinking you're going somewhere to see places, and occasionally the most important thing you find is a person.
At that point in my life, my world had become very small. I had maybe two people outside my family who I really considered to be in my corner. A lot had been stripped away over the previous few years, some of it by circumstance and some of it because of decisions I had made myself. Then I went halfway around the world, got out of a cab looking completely lost, and met somebody who would become one of the most important people in my life. That became a recurring theme of the trip. Golf kept putting people in front of me.
From Rome, I started moving north. I took the train to Florence and played Le Pavoniere, an Arnold Palmer designed course in Tuscany. By then, I was beginning to understand that golf could give structure to a trip without requiring the trip itself to have much structure at all. I didn't need to know where I was going to be four days later. I just needed a golf course somewhere on the horizon and a way to get there. Everything else seemed to work itself out in between.
From Florence, I got back on the train and headed for Venice. When I arrived, I took a cab to pick up an RV that I had rented for the next leg of the trip. I had never done anything like this before. I was alone in Italy with my golf clubs, loading my things into an RV that I was about to drive into the Dolomites. By this point, the trip was beginning to take on a life of its own. I wasn't following an itinerary I had put together months earlier. Most of the time, I was making a decision and then figuring out how to make it work.
I headed north from Venice, and the farther I drove, the more Italy changed around me. The cities disappeared behind me, the roads tightened, and the mountains grew larger until eventually it felt like I was driving directly into them. Alta Badia sits high in the Dolomites, surrounded by enormous limestone peaks that almost don't look real. There are places where golf dominates the landscape, and then there are places where the landscape is so overwhelming that the golf course almost becomes secondary. Alta Badia was the latter.
I remember standing there looking around and thinking about the sequence of events that had brought me to that exact place. Not long before, I had been home questioning what I was doing with my life. Then I decided I wanted to compete again, shot 67 and won a golf tournament. Now I was living out of an RV in the Italian Alps with my golf clubs. Nobody was telling me where I needed to go next, and there wasn't really anybody waiting for me when I got there. For the first time in a long time, I had almost complete freedom.
Something else started happening in that RV that I didn't fully understand yet. I began imagining what it would be like if this wasn't just a trip. What if I had a van of my own? What if I could put my golf clubs in the back, travel from place to place and let golf determine where I went next? This was before the van. It was before I was making films about golf travel. I hadn't rented an RV because I already had some grand vision of the life I wanted to build. It was almost the opposite. Living in that RV gave me the first glimpse of the vision.
I liked waking up and realizing that everything I needed was with me. I liked the mobility of it, the simplicity of pointing the thing toward another place and going. I liked having golf clubs in the back and mountains outside the window. Somewhere in the Dolomites, I had this very clear feeling that this was something I wanted more of. I didn't know what form it would eventually take, but I knew I didn't want this to be the last time I lived this way.
I was also beginning to realize that freedom could be both exhilarating and uncomfortable. When you remove the normal structures from your life, the meetings, obligations, familiar people and routines, eventually you're left with yourself. There isn't much else to hide behind. I had gone to Europe because I wanted to get away and play golf, but the farther I traveled, the more time I was spending alone with my own thoughts. I didn't understand it completely at the time, but that was becoming as important to the trip as any of the golf courses I was playing.
After my time in the Dolomites, I drove the RV back toward Venice and returned it. Then the trip changed forms again. I wanted to play Circolo Golf Venezia, which sits out on the Lido, so this time getting to the golf course meant getting on a boat. I found myself making my way through Venice with my golf clubs and eventually carrying them aboard for the ride across the water.
There was something wonderfully absurd about the whole thing. A train had taken me from Rome to Florence, another train had taken me from Florence to Venice, a cab had taken me to an RV, and the RV had carried me into the Dolomites and back. Now I was sitting on a boat in Venice with a set of golf clubs, headed toward another course. None of this had been planned much in advance, and somehow that was becoming the point.
I think this was when the phrase golf bender really started to make sense to me. This wasn't a traditional golf vacation where everything had been booked months in advance and every day had a schedule. I would wake up somewhere, play golf, meet somebody, hear about another place and start figuring out how to get there. Golf gave me a reason to keep moving, but increasingly I realized the golf wasn't necessarily the destination. It was the excuse to see what else was out there.
Eventually, that excuse carried me out of Italy entirely. I flew east to Bulgaria. Feel Golf was still tiny. I was posting pieces of the trip as I went because I thought what I was doing was cool and wanted somewhere to put it. There wasn't really an audience yet. Nobody was waiting to see where I was headed next. I was documenting it for myself as much as anybody.
Then I arrived at Thracian Cliffs. There are golf courses that make you understand immediately why somebody decided to build a course there. Thracian Cliffs is carved into the cliffs above the Black Sea, with holes running along an enormous stretch of coastline and shots played from elevated tees toward pieces of land that seem impossibly small from above. It was unlike anywhere I had ever played. I had gone from Rome to Tuscany, from the Dolomites to the Adriatic, and now I was standing above the Black Sea in Bulgaria with a golf bag. The whole thing was becoming increasingly ridiculous, and I loved it.
One evening toward the end of my time there, I sat down for dinner as the sun was setting over the Black Sea. I remember sitting there by myself, eating a loaf of fresh bread and watching the light disappear over the water. There wasn't anything particularly remarkable happening. I wasn't rushing to another golf course or trying to figure out where I was sleeping that night. For once, I was just sitting still, and I remember thinking, Surely this is the entire point.
It wasn't about the score I had shot, how many golf courses I could play, how many countries I could get to, or whether anybody was following along. It was just being somewhere I never expected to be, eating fresh bread, watching the sun go down over the Black Sea and having absolutely nowhere else I needed to be.
By the end of my time in Bulgaria, Feel Golf finally crossed 100 followers. It was an insignificant number by almost any measure, but at the time it felt like something. I had started the page with 44 followers and had been posting this strange trip as I went, without any real plan for what the page was supposed to become. Somewhere along the Black Sea, that number rolled over to 100. I had no idea where any of it was going, neither the page nor the trip, but I was beginning to think that maybe knowing where it was going wasn't the point at all.
The next morning, I woke up, packed my golf clubs and headed for the airport in Varna. I boarded a little prop plane and left Bulgaria behind, laid over in Serbia, and eventually made my way to Slovenia. By this point, moving around Europe with a set of golf clubs had started to feel strangely normal. Trains, cabs, an RV, boats, rental cars and little airplanes. Whatever got me to the next place.
This wasn't my first time in Slovenia. The first time I ended up there was almost entirely by accident. In 2022, on my first real trip through Europe, we flew into Munich for Oktoberfest. Within about six hours of arriving, I got excited and decided that doing parkour was apparently a good idea. I sprained my ankle, and suddenly the trip we had planned didn't make much sense anymore. We had intended to travel counterclockwise from Munich through Switzerland, but with me hobbling around on crutches, we changed course. The thinking was that if we headed east first, I would have more time to recover and hopefully be closer to full health by the end of the trip.
That change of plans was how we accidentally found ourselves in Slovenia. It hadn't really been part of the itinerary, and I didn't know much about it before we arrived. Then Ljubljana completely blew my mind. It was a beautiful capital city, the food was incredible, and the entire country had this quality that made me wonder why more people weren't talking about it. I left telling anyone who would listen, Slovenia is the spot. For the next three years, I kept saying it.
So when this trip started taking shape and I realized I could make my way back there, I knew I wanted to go. There was something fitting about returning to a country I had originally discovered because the plan had fallen apart. In a way, that was exactly how I was traveling again. I wasn't trying to force the trip into some predetermined itinerary. I was letting one decision lead to another and trusting that sometimes the places you never planned on finding are the ones that stay with you the longest.
The circumstances of my return were pretty funny too. The first time I arrived in Slovenia, I was on crutches because I'd hurt myself doing parkour at Oktoberfest. Three years later, I was coming back alone with a set of golf clubs after flying out of Bulgaria on a prop plane. At least this time I could walk. And this time I knew exactly one place I wanted to see: Royal Bled.
Somewhere on my way to Slovenia, I received an email from the club letting me know that they were about to begin course maintenance. I had originally booked a two day package, but there was no way I was coming all the way back to Slovenia and missing Royal Bled. I moved my flight up by a day just to make sure I could get there before they started punching and sanding the greens.
I arrived at Royal Bled and almost immediately realized this was going to be different from anywhere else I had stayed on the trip. When I walked into the clubhouse, they had a locker waiting for me with my name on it. It was mine for the duration of my stay. I checked in, got settled and went straight out to play.
There was almost nobody on the golf course. The conditions were perfect. Everything was striped and manicured, and for most of the round it felt like I had the place to myself. The layout was incredible, but what made it even harder to believe was the setting around it. Bled itself looks like something out of a fairy tale. There is an ancient church sitting on an island in the middle of the lake, a castle built into the cliffs above it, and from the first tee at Royal Bled you can see the castle in the distance. It was one of those places where I almost had to remind myself that I was actually there.
When I finished the round, I went back inside, and somewhere in the conversation at the front desk they told me they were going to upgrade my stay. At that point, I had already made up my mind. I didn't care if they punched every green on the property the next morning. I loved Bled so much that I wasn't leaving.
What had started as a shorter visit turned into three days of unlimited golf. I stayed in a room at the clubhouse, with breakfast every morning, full use of the practice facilities and an e bike I could take into town and around the lake. One evening I had a five course chef's tasting menu. On paper, it was an incredible golf package, but what I remember most wasn't any of that. It was how personal the entire experience felt.
Every night when I came back to my room, there was a handwritten note waiting for me with the course conditions for the following day. It was such a small thing, but it told you everything about the place. I had arrived expecting maintenance to begin almost immediately. I woke up the next morning, went downstairs and the course was still untouched. No maintenance. I played again. The following morning, the same thing happened. Still no maintenance. I played again. By the time I was leaving on my fourth day, they were finally beginning the work.
Nobody at Royal Bled ever told me they changed their maintenance schedule because of me, and I've never asked. Maybe the timing simply changed. Maybe weather pushed things around. There could be a completely ordinary explanation. But I was the only international guest staying on the property at the time, and part of me has always wondered whether somebody quietly decided to give me those few days before they started. If they did, they never took credit for it, and maybe that's part of why the experience has stayed with me.
Royal Bled is one of the great golf courses in Europe. You arrive expecting the golf to be exceptional. What I didn't expect was the warmth. I didn't expect my name on a locker, handwritten notes in my room, an e bike waiting for me, long mornings practicing beneath the Julian Alps, or the feeling that, for a few days, somebody had thought carefully about every little detail of my experience. Even as I write this, Royal Bled remains the best golf experience I've ever had.
The clubhouse itself was filled with some of the most incredible golf memorabilia I had ever seen. There were pieces of golf history everywhere, the kind of things you could spend an afternoon looking through without ever making it to the first tee. But there was one thing in the dining room that stopped me. On the wall were pieces from the 2005 PGA Championship at Baltusrol.
That tournament was the first professional golf event my dad ever took me to when I was a kid. I can still remember walking around Baltusrol with him, watching the best players in the world from just a few feet away. Somewhere at home, I still have a hat from that week covered in signatures. It was one of my earliest memories of seeing professional golf up close, long before I could have imagined where the game would eventually take me.
Now, twenty years later, I was alone on the other side of the world, standing in the dining room of a clubhouse beneath the Julian Alps, looking at memorabilia from that exact tournament. I don't know how to explain what that felt like without giving it more meaning than it needs. There are moments when something from your past appears in a place where it has absolutely no reason to be, and for a second the distance between who you were and who you are seems to collapse. I was thinking about being a kid at Baltusrol with my dad, then about everything that had happened in my life between there and Slovenia, and somehow all of it seemed connected.
For a few minutes, I had this overwhelming feeling that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Not that everything in my life had happened for some predetermined reason, or that I suddenly understood all of it. It was more that every version of me seemed to exist in that room at once. The kid walking around Baltusrol with his dad. The person I had become in the years that followed. The guy who had decided only weeks earlier to start competing again. And now this version of me, thousands of miles from home with a set of golf clubs, staring at a piece of my childhood hanging on a wall in Slovenia.
For all the years when my life had seemed disconnected, in that moment it didn't. It felt like everything had somehow prepared me to be there.
There was one other detail about Slovenia that I couldn't ignore. The country's tourism slogan is "I feel Slovenia." I had started Feel Golf only weeks earlier. I don't want to assign some grand meaning to that coincidence. At the time, Feel Golf was barely a thing. I had started the page with 44 followers, crossed 100 somewhere along the Black Sea in Bulgaria, and was still mostly posting because I wanted somewhere to document this strange trip I had found myself on. I had no idea what the page was going to become. But of course I noticed the word feel.
Then one afternoon at Royal Bled, I think I understood it. I had just finished a round of golf and shot 72. I walked off what had become my favorite golf experience in the world, changed clothes, jumped on the e bike they had given me and rode down toward Lake Bled. Not long after finishing my round, I was standing at the edge of this impossibly clear alpine lake with people from all over the world scattered around me, swimming, sitting along the shore and taking in the mountains.
So I jumped in.
The water was crystal clear. Above it sat the castle, the church on the island and the mountains surrounding everything. A few hours earlier I had been walking fairways beneath the Julian Alps, and now I was swimming in Lake Bled with nowhere else I needed to be. That's feeling Slovenia.
Maybe that was the thing I had actually been looking for since I left home. Not another golf course to check off a list, and not some perfectly planned golf vacation. I was chasing the feeling of being completely alive somewhere. The feeling of finishing a round of golf, jumping on an e bike and riding straight into a lake. The feeling of eating a loaf of fresh bread while the sun disappeared over the Black Sea. The feeling of getting out of a cab in Rome and meeting someone who, without either of us knowing it, was going to become one of my closest friends. Golf was simply giving me a reason to find those moments.
The first time I came to Slovenia, I arrived on crutches after hurting myself doing parkour at Oktoberfest. Three years later, I came back with golf clubs and found myself swimming in Lake Bled after shooting 72 at Royal Bled. Somewhere in that lake, I think I understood what this trip was becoming. I knew I was going to be chasing that feeling for a long time.
Eventually, it was time to leave Slovenia. I returned to Italy and played Castello di Spessa, surrounded by vineyards near the Slovenian border. By then, the trip had settled into a rhythm. I would travel, play golf, eat, meet somebody and keep going. Somewhere along the way, loneliness had also stopped feeling entirely like loneliness. It had started becoming solitude.
I think I needed to learn the difference. For a long time, I had filled the empty spaces in my life with people, work, noise, relationships and bad habits, anything that kept me from sitting still long enough to ask myself what I actually wanted. Europe gave me a lot of time to ask that question, sometimes while driving through the mountains, sometimes sitting alone at dinner, sometimes walking a golf course in a country where I didn't speak the language, and sometimes sitting in an airport waiting for another flight.
Eventually, somehow, I ended up flying into Rome for the third time in three weeks. By then, Rome no longer felt like the beginning of the trip. It felt almost like home base. I had left, crossed countries, flown east, driven west and somehow circled all the way back.
There was one more place I wanted to see. Antognolla sits in the Umbrian countryside, built into the hills around a castle whose history stretches back centuries. It was exactly the kind of place I had started seeking out on this trip, somewhere where golf felt inseparable from everything around it.
Before my round, I sat down for lunch and ended up next to two British guys named Alex and Ben, who were also getting ready to play. We started talking and immediately hit it off. They were really cool guys, and we ended up having one of those effortless conversations with complete strangers that had become such a familiar part of the trip. I had an incredible salmon dish with risotto, we smoked a couple of cigars, talked about golf and life, and eventually headed out to play.
There was no rush to any of it. I wasn't trying to squeeze another course into the trip or get somewhere else. I was just having an incredible day in Italy. I went out and played Antognolla, and when the round was over, I came back upstairs and sat down again. I ordered homemade tiramisu and a coffee and stayed there for a while.
That was it. Salmon and risotto before the round. Cigars and conversation with Alex and Ben. Golf through the Umbrian countryside. Homemade tiramisu and coffee afterward. There wasn't some huge event that made the day memorable. It was simply a really good day.
Three weeks earlier, a day like that would have felt extraordinary to me. By then, it had almost become the rhythm of my life. I would arrive somewhere alone, sit down next to people I'd never met, play golf, eat something incredible and move on. Golf had made the world feel strangely accessible. It gave me somewhere to go and, once I got there, a reason to belong.
Maybe that's why I remember that final coffee so clearly. The trip was almost over, and there wasn't some dramatic revelation waiting for me at the end of it. I was just sitting there after a round of golf in Umbria, finishing homemade tiramisu and realizing how natural this life had started to feel.
I didn't really want it to end.
By then, three weeks of constant movement had caught up with me, and the excitement of the trip had begun mixing with something else: reflection. I knew I was going home, and I also knew I was going home to a life that didn't feel exactly the same anymore.
Near the end of the trip, I called my dad. I don't remember every word of that conversation. What I remember is the feeling. I had gone to Europe thinking I needed an adventure, but somewhere along the way I realized what I actually needed was proof. I needed proof that there was still a version of my life that could surprise me, that I could walk away from the things that weren't working, that the world was much larger than the one I had built around myself, and that golf could be more than a game I used to play.
I told my dad some version of what I had begun realizing over those three weeks. I didn't want to go back to living the way I had been living. Something had changed. Maybe it wasn't dramatic from the outside. I hadn't climbed Everest or crossed an ocean in a sailboat. I had simply taken some golf clubs to Europe and refused to make much of a plan. But for me, it felt enormous because the person who had gotten on that first flight to Rome wasn't exactly the person coming home.
I had left looking for something to chase. Somewhere between Rome, the Dolomites, Venice, the Black Sea and Lake Bled, I found it.
I came home, went back to work for one day, and then I quit.
There wasn't some giant company waiting for me. Feel Golf still barely existed. There wasn't a production company, a film series, a catalog of products or thousands of people following along. There was just an idea beginning to take shape. Maybe golf could become the vehicle through which I experienced the world. Maybe the thing I had thought was simply a game could become a way of connecting with people. Maybe it could take me places. Maybe it already had.
That first trip didn't give me a business plan. It gave me direction. There is a tendency to look backward and make the beginning of something seem more intentional than it actually was. Once you know where a story goes, you start assigning meaning to every decision that led there. But that's not how this happened. I didn't fly to Rome because I knew what Feel Golf would become. I didn't play Marco Simone because I knew I was going to meet my future best friend and business partner. I didn't rent an RV because I thought one day I would own a van and travel around making films about golf.
I rented an RV because I needed a way to get into the Dolomites. Then I got inside it and realized I wanted a life that felt a little more like this.
I didn't know what any of it was yet. I just knew I needed to move, so I moved. I followed golf through Italy, into the mountains, across the water and over borders. I met Rob outside a clubhouse in Rome, Alex and Ben over lunch in Umbria, and countless people in between. I ate bread while the sun disappeared over the Black Sea, saw a piece of my childhood hanging on a wall in Slovenia, shot 72 beneath the Julian Alps and jumped into Lake Bled. Somewhere along the way, without really realizing it was happening, I began becoming the person I had been trying to find.
The page had started with 44 followers. The trip started with a plane ticket. Everything that came afterward started with the realization that maybe I didn't need to know exactly where I was going.
I just needed something worth chasing.
Then I came home and started chasing it.