Connection on Moments in the Miles

More Good. (Meet Mary.)

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One of the quiet gifts of a life spent moving is the people you meet along the way. Not the ones you plan for, but the ones who just appear: at a dinner table, on a dock, in a conversation that starts about nothing and ends somewhere you didn’t expect.

Mary is one of those people for us.

Karlee met her on St. John, years before there was any talk of a van or a road trip. They spent time sailing the Caribbean together, both of them unsure what came next, both completely certain they were exactly where they were supposed to be in that moment. Later, when Mary’s road trip brought her through Denver, Karlee introduced her to Jesse. Once you know what Mary has been out there doing, it’s hard not to feel like the world could use a few more of her.

43,000 miles in her mother’s old Subaru

From 2016 to 2019, Mary Latham drove 43,000 miles across America. All 50 states. 154 homes. Thousands of conversations with strangers.

She wasn’t chasing adventure for its own sake. She was looking for something specific: stories of human kindness, acts of good that don’t make the news, the everyday moments where people choose each other.

The project was inspired by her mother’s words, that there will always be more good out there if you look for it. Mary took that literally. She loaded up the car and went looking.

What she found, across red states and blue states, in small towns and big cities, in the homes of people who didn’t agree on much of anything, was the same thing over and over: goodness, showing up in the most ordinary places, in the gaps between the headlines.

A road trip that became something much bigger

More Good Today started as a road trip and became a philosophy, a nonprofit, and a book in progress.

Mary has been featured on the Today Show, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the Kelly Clarkson Show, and Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper, not because she was chasing attention, but because what she’s doing cuts through something. In a moment when it’s easy to believe the world is only getting worse, she went out and proved otherwise. With a Subaru and a voice recorder and an open door.

The stories she collected are being compiled into a book she plans to donate to hospital waiting rooms, the places where people sit and need something to hold onto. That detail says everything you need to know about how Mary thinks.

What travel has a way of doing

After years on the road, we’ve noticed the places are only half of it. You meet people who reframe things, who remind you what’s possible, who are out there doing something so specific and so true to who they are that it makes you want to go be more specific and more true yourself.

More good, worn literally.

Mary is that kind of person. Her work is a living reminder that goodness is not a passive thing. It has to be sought out, documented, and shared, and the stories worth telling are often the ones nobody thought to look for.

Whether you’re traveling full-time, taking a long trip, or just trying to move through your regular life with more intention, More Good Today is worth paying attention to. Not because it will make you feel better in a soft, surface-level way, but because it will make you look differently at the people around you, at the ordinary moments, at what’s already there.

Go find more good

Mary hasn’t stopped moving. She’s in Paris at the moment, still collecting stories, still available for speaking engagements. Follow along and let her keep showing you how much beauty is sitting in ordinary people.

Her message matters more now than it did when she started. Looking for the good, and letting yourself feel connected to it, does more than it sounds like it does. It feeds you. It keeps you going. I look up to Mary, and I’m proud to call her my friend. — Karlee

The River That Gave and Took

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There are moments from our eight months in Asia that still sit in my chest.

The two-day slow boat from Chiang Khong into Laos is one of them.

At the time, it felt like adventure, like romance, like the slow travel story you dream about when you first start talking about leaving everything behind.

But travel has a way of revealing what you didn’t know you were taking for granted. Sometimes it does it gently. And sometimes it does it all in a single day.

The boat

You get three choices for how you go up the river. Two of them are the nicer versions: proper tables and benches, colorful tablecloths, pillows, everything arranged for comfort and the perfect Instagram shot. We took the third one, the boat the locals use.

It was old and rickety. Car bench seats lined the interior, worn and loosely placed, not meant for comfort. The engine roared so loudly you couldn’t hold a steady conversation. A squat toilet sat in the back, a humbling reminder that this wasn’t a curated experience. At one end there was a small snack bar selling bowls of noodles and drinks.

Locals and tourists sat shoulder to shoulder as we drifted down the river. Jungle banks slid past. Small wooden homes perched on stilts. Life unfolding at its own pace.

There are only a few villages along that stretch of river, and they are remote in a way that’s hard to hold in your head. The captains stop at them. The kids come down to meet the boat to sell bracelets, or sometimes you just hand over your snacks or some cash.

That first stop was a lot of things for me at once. I was sad and happy at the same time and I wanted to be near them. You can tell they don’t have much. They also have some of the biggest smiles I have ever seen. I got off the boat and played on the beach with them, handed out high fives, and got back on.

The first day was calm.

By late afternoon, we pulled into Pakbeng. The dock exploded into noise the moment we arrived. Drivers shouting hotel names. Backpacks tossed into truck beds. Strangers ushered into random vehicles and driven up dusty hills toward wherever they were staying.

The Mekong at dusk, northern Laos.

That’s how we met Vieng.

The invitation

Vieng ran our small riverside hotel. He had just opened a bar down the road, simple and homey, overlooking the water.

We ate good food. Drank beer. Played pool. Talked easily; his English was great, warm and direct in a way that made conversation feel effortless.

By the end of the night, he offered something unexpected: he would help us reschedule our boat, extend our stay, and take us to his home village the next day, an hour away. He wanted us to see where he grew up.

We said yes.

The next morning, we drank coffee on the patio and watched our original boat load up and disappear down the river without us. We were staying.

The morning we let the boat leave without us.

His village

The drive wound through dirt roads and small rural communities, and Vieng talked the whole way. He named each village as we passed it. He told us about growing up out here: there was no school in his town, so he went two towns over. The kids walked there, stayed the week, walked home, and did it again. He had one set of clothes to wear for that week.

He said all of it plainly, as just how things were.

When we arrived, you could see how proud he was. People had put on their good clothes. Children paused to stare, smiling wide.

He introduced us to his mother. His family. Showed us the newly built school.

Before we’d even settled in, we handed out the candy we’d brought. Vieng had suggested it. The kids went absolutely wild. That kind of excitement doesn’t need translation.

We watched children fish, bathe, and play in the river like it was the center of the world, because it was.

His mother made lunch for the four of us: Vieng, the driver, Jesse, and me. It was one of the most authentic meals of our entire trip. Simple, careful, made with intention.

Lunch in Vieng's village. Simple, careful, made with intention.

After lunch, the townspeople began to gather. Vieng’s family brought out the rice wine. Then more people. Then more rice wine. We sat together for hours, laughing, drinking, listening, the conversation a loose mix of Vieng translating and the universal language of people who are glad to be together.

It was exactly what we had imagined a year earlier, back when we were still hesitating to book this trip at all.

This was what we had hoped travel could be.

The shift

As we were preparing to leave, Vieng approached us quietly. We were going to take his sister-in-law and her baby to the doctor. The baby was sick.

I didn’t understand how serious it was until we were in the truck.

Jesse and I sat in the back seat. The mother sat between us. The baby’s eyes rolled back. His breathing was strained. Sweat ran down his mother’s face.

We were driving fast, and the dirt road still felt longer on the way down.

We pulled into the “doctor’s office.” No one was there. We were sent to the “hospital.” We rushed inside.

There was no doctor waiting. No machines. No urgency the way we understand it.

We left that room. We sat on the concrete steps outside. Three little boys stood on their toes, trying to see through the window. And all you could hear were a mother’s screams.

Full circle

Earlier that day, sitting in the village, Jesse and Vieng had been talking about how beautiful this life was. No traffic. No calendar. Nobody running anywhere. Jesse said the thing out loud that everyone thinks in a place like that: how nice it would be to live somewhere this quiet, away from the rat race.

Vieng let it sit for a second. Then he looked at him and said quietly, “Yes… but people get sick and die.”

He said it there, in his own village, in the middle of the best afternoon we’d had in months. It hit hard enough that neither of us had an answer for it.

He told us he says a version of it to his own people, too. That there is a world out there running on different rules than theirs, and the kids should at least know it exists so they can choose. He wasn’t apologizing for where he came from. He was refusing to let it be the only thing anyone there could picture.

At the time it sounded philosophical. By evening it was a fact.

The baby didn’t make it.

The river, at the end of that day.

What travel really gave us

We think about that baby more than we have ever told anyone.

A fever, a dirt road, and a room with nothing in it. At home he would have been seen within the hour and been fine by the weekend. That is the whole difference. Not effort, not love, not anything his mother did or failed to do. Just where he happened to be born.

When you travel slowly, when you sit in someone’s home, meet their mother, share rice wine with their neighbors, ride in their truck, the world stops being abstract. It becomes faces, names, breath.

You start to realize how much you take for granted. Access, healthcare, certainty. Things you never had to question, and things a lot of the world lives without on an ordinary afternoon.

We spent that whole day wanting Vieng’s life. He spent that whole day trying to show his village there is more than it. Both of those are honest, and they happened at the same table.

It took us a long time to be able to hold it. For a while we couldn’t set the two halves of that day next to each other at all.

The grass looked greener from the truck. It usually does. You don’t find out what the other side actually costs until you are sitting in the back seat with someone who has been paying it their whole life.

That is what that day gave us. Less certainty about whose life is better than whose, and a great deal more compassion for the people living the one we had spent all afternoon romanticizing.

Vieng’s bar is The Hive, in Pakbeng, northern Laos. If the slow boat puts you there for a night, go find it. Stay an extra day if he offers.

What Travel Taught Us About Human Kindness

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Chiang Mai, day one

Our first hotel in Chiang Mai put us one block from everything, right in the middle of old town. The night market was right there. So was the 7-Eleven, its door chiming open and shut in a steady rhythm.

Don’t judge. If you’ve done your research, you know they’re the holy grail of corner stores in Asia.

We had come straight from Bangkok, and you could feel the energy change the second we got there. Chiang Mai is calmer. Motorbikes still moved past and the street still hummed, but at a volume you could hear yourself inside of.

What stopped us was ten feet from the 7-Eleven door: a small food cart with at least six locals sitting on tiny, colorful plastic stools. That’s always a good sign in a foreign country. If the locals eat there, you should too.

As we walked by and made eye contact with one of the men eating, he broke into a wide smile. He pointed to his bowl. Looked at us. Smiled from ear to ear.

“Good,” he said.

That was it. No pitch. No explanation. Just one word and a grin that said everything.

He stood up from his tiny stool, almost ceremoniously, offering us his place. So we sat down.

A bowl of soup

The couple running the cart greeted us like we weren’t strangers at all. No English. No shared vocabulary. Just warmth.

As they cooked, steam rose into the humid air, carrying the smell of fresh Thai chili peppers. It was sharp and bright, almost sweet at first. And then it hit. Our eyes started watering before we even took a bite.

We laughed through the tears.

The food came quickly, steaming and fragrant. At the end, they brought us extra soup. We tried to pay for it, and they gently waved us off. Not a promotion, not a strategy. Just generosity.

We returned to that food cart several times during our stay. Not just for the food. For the feeling.

The realization

That first day in Chiang Mai set the tone for everything after it. And it was only the beginning.

Throughout the next eight months traveling across Asia, we encountered countless acts of kindness, moments that reminded us, again and again, what humanity looks like at its best.

Some invitations don't need words.

Human kindness doesn’t require language, wealth, or a reason.

It exists in eye contact, in shared space, in steam rising from a pot on a noisy street.

You don’t remember a place for what it looked like. You remember who was there, how they made you feel, and how you made them feel.

Slow down enough to notice

Kindness hides in plain sight. If we had rushed past that cart chasing landmarks, we would have missed it entirely.

We started building “nothing hours” into our travels — time with no plan except to wander, sit, observe.

When you slow down, you notice more. The vendor who adds an extra scoop. The stranger who gives you directions without being asked. The smile that feels bigger than a transaction.

Speed just makes it easy to miss.

Give. Receive. Repeat.

Kindness flows both ways. Sometimes you receive the extra soup. Sometimes you’re the one offering help — carrying a bag, sharing directions, translating a map.

Sometimes you're the one stirring the pot.

Travel taught us that generosity is less about grand gestures than about participation. When you show up open, the world often mirrors it back.

The invitation

When we think about Chiang Mai now, the first thing we remember is how much easier it was to breathe there after Bangkok. Then the plastic stools, the steam rising into thick air, the way our eyes watered before we even took a bite, the couple waving away our money with soft smiles.

And when we think about those eight months across Asia, it’s not the landmarks that rise to the surface. It’s the people: the generosity, the unexpected warmth, the reminder that goodness exists everywhere.

That’s what stays.

The next time you travel, look for it. Look for where the locals gather. Sit down, even if you don’t fully understand the menu. Let yourself be invited in.

You don’t need perfect language or perfect timing. Just openness.

Kindness is rarely loud, but it’s everywhere. Travel just teaches you how to notice it.

Human Connection Across Cultures

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s easy to think travel is about geography. New landscapes, new languages, new food.

But over time, the places blur. What stays are the people.

What St. John taught Karlee first

Karlee learned this slowly, over five seasons on a small island in the Caribbean.

Island life compresses distance in a way that’s hard to explain until you’ve lived it. You see the same faces enough times that strangers become familiar. Community isn’t something you seek out there; it becomes part of your daily rhythm whether you choose it or not.

There’s a quality to the connection that forms in small places. It’s less curated than what you find in cities. People don’t have the same ability to self-sort into comfortable bubbles. You end up alongside people you wouldn’t have sought out, and you’re often better for it.

Those seasons left a mark. Not just in the friendships, but in the understanding that the texture of daily life in a place, the rhythms, the relationships, the unspoken rules, is always more interesting than any landmark.

Eight years of American road

Van life across forty-eight states is its own education in human variety.

The America you see from a highway is different from the one you encounter when you slow down: when you stay somewhere long enough to become a regular at the diner, when your van breaks down in a small town and three strangers stop to help before you’ve finished assessing the situation yourself.

We’ve been waved into driveways, fed by people who didn’t know our names, directed toward roads that weren’t on any map by people who wanted to make sure we didn’t miss something. Those moments don’t show up in travel guides. They’re the ones that actually shape you.

What the American road taught us, more than anything, is that generosity isn’t a function of wealth or geography. It exists on a dusty BLM pull-off in rural Nevada and on a quiet side street in a small Appalachian town with equal frequency. You just have to be moving slowly enough to receive it.

The birthday in Nusa Lembongan

On a small island off the coast of Bali, we spent a few days staying next to a local dive shop. Over those days, casual conversations formed, the kind that start with smiles and questions and curiosity on both sides.

One evening, they invited us over. We assumed it would be brief.

Instead, we walked into a birthday celebration. It was Pan’s birthday. Chairs were pulled up without hesitation. There was a whole table of food set out: fish they had caught that day, rice, homemade soup. Someone patiently showed us how to fold a leaf into a bowl, laughing gently as we attempted it.

We sat around that table for hours. We told stories, we laughed a lot, and we drank a lot of Bintang and the local homemade wine. We lost track of time completely.

Pan's birthday, Nusa Lembongan.

We didn’t share a long history or a fluent language. But warmth doesn’t require fluency.

There was no performance, no curated experience, no transaction. Just a group of friends widening their circle for the night.

What changes when you sit at someone else’s table

It’s harder to reduce a country to headlines when you’ve celebrated someone’s birthday in their backyard. Harder to generalize when you’ve shared fresh fish prepared by hands that work long days at a dive shop.

Travel doesn’t automatically make someone open-minded. But proximity can.

Sit long enough at someone else’s table and you start to notice things. Parents worry about their children everywhere. Friends tease each other the same way everywhere. People work hard, celebrate hard, and care deeply everywhere.

Different customs, same humanity.

Comparing photos after dinner.

There’s also humility in being the outsider. You mispronounce names, misunderstand jokes, navigate small awkwardness. And that discomfort can be instructive. It softens certainty and reminds you that your way is not the default.

We left Lembongan with an open invitation to come back and dive with the guys. Karlee is still in touch with them. Whenever we make it back, we already know where we’re going first.

The world is not divided into ‘us’ and ’them.’ It’s divided into people who have met and people who haven’t yet.

What this taught us, practically

Slow down enough to notice daily life; the ordinary reveals more than the extraordinary
Stay long enough to have real conversations, not just exchanges
Choose local spaces over curated ones whenever you can
Learn a few words, even imperfectly; the attempt matters more than the accuracy
Remember that you are a guest, and behave accordingly
You can practice this in your own city; distance makes it easier to see, but it isn’t required

Some of the most meaningful moments in travel are not landmarks.

They’re tables, stools pulled up beside strangers, invitations that could easily not have been extended.

The miles matter. But the people in them matter more.