Road & Glass — Issue 00: Why This Exists

I didn't grow up with a passport.

There were no summers in Europe, no family road trips to somewhere unfamiliar, no meals eaten in a language we didn't speak. I grew up in Texas, which is its own kind of world — and a good one — but the world beyond it might as well have been a postcard. Something other people did.

I don't say that as a complaint. It's just the truth.

But somewhere along the way, I made a decision. A quiet one, the kind you don't announce so much as just start doing. I decided my kids would know what it felt like to sit in a plaza in a city they couldn't have found on a map two weeks before. To eat something they couldn't pronounce and like it. To stand in front of a cathedral or a mountain or a vineyard terraced into a hillside and feel genuinely small — the good kind of small, where the world gets bigger instead of you getting lesser.

That decision, made somewhere between raising a family in San Antonio and figuring out what kind of life I wanted us to have, is the reason Road & Glass exists.

We've taken 29 trips now. Western Europe, Central Europe, Canada, Costa Rica, Asia, the American West. London, Lisbon, Barcelona, Florence, Vienna, Prague. We've watched dawn break over the Amalfi Coast and chased the last light at Moraine Lake. We've eaten in Michelin-starred restaurants and stood in line at local markets where no one spoke English and that was the whole point.

And on almost every single one of those trips, there has been wine.

Not because I'm a sommelier or a collector or someone who can lecture you about tannin structure and terroir — though I'll get there eventually, glass in hand. But because wine, it turns out, is one of the most honest ways to understand a place. The Douro Valley in a single glass of Port. The character of Andalucía in a dry Sherry that tastes nothing like what you expected. The patience of the Wachau Valley in a Grüner Veltliner you'd never have ordered if someone hadn't handed it to you.

Wine is geography. It's art and history. It's an argument a piece of land has been having with the sun for centuries. I didn't know that before I started traveling. Now I can't unknow it.

And the camera. Always the camera.

I am not a professional photographer. I am someone who wakes up at 5am to get to Piazzale Michelangelo before the tour buses arrive, who scouts a shot at the Belvedere in Vienna and comes back twice when the light is different, who knows that Moraine Lake belongs to whoever gets to the rock pile before sunrise.

The camera is how I remember. It's also how I slow down. In a world where travel can become content before it's even become a memory, the act of looking — really looking, waiting, composing — forces you to be present in a place before you try to capture it.

That's the other meaning buried in the name of this newsletter. Glass: the wine glass, yes — but also the glass in the lens. Both travel with me everywhere.

Every two weeks, this newsletter goes out. Each issue is built around a destination — somewhere we've been, something we saw, someone who handed us a glass and changed how we thought about a region. It's organized around four things:

This isn't a luxury travel brand. It's not aspirational content designed to make you feel like you're missing out. It's a record of what happens when a kid who didn't have a passport decides to go see the world — and brings his family along.

I hope it's useful. I hope it makes you want to go somewhere.

More soon.

— Abe

San Antonio, Texas  ·  Road & Glass