POCKET SCIENCE: Why Pickleball Has Become One of Our Favorite R&D Labs
If you had asked me five years ago whether SCOTTeVEST made clothing for pickleball, I probably would have laughed.
Today, I’m not so sure.
Laura and I stumbled into pickleball like millions of other people. We thought we’d play occasionally for a little exercise. Instead, it has become one of our favorite things to do together. We’ve met incredible people, traveled to tournaments, and built friendships we never expected—all because of one little plastic ball.
This summer, SCOTTeVEST was proud to sponsor the Wood River Pickleball Alliance’s Play with the Pros weekend. Lee Sponseller and his team put together an incredible event, bringing some of the best senior professional players in the country to Sun Valley.
We spent hours taking clinics, playing alongside the pros, and learning from people who make the game look much easier than it actually is. Laura and I also had the pleasure of hosting many of the players and organizers at our home afterward, which made the weekend even more memorable.
One thing kept jumping out at me throughout the event.
Without thinking about it, I—and a surprising number of other players—kept showing up wearing SCOTTeVEST.
Not because we designed clothing specifically for pickleball.
Because the features that make great travel clothing happen to work remarkably well on the court.
Secure zippered pockets for your phone and keys. Lightweight stretch fabrics that move with you. Layers that work on cool mornings before the courts heat up. Clothing that lets you carry what you need without worrying about leaving your valuables sitting courtside.
It made me realize something.
For nearly twenty-five years, we’ve been designing clothing for active people who are constantly on the move. Whether you’re walking poodles, hiking, navigating airports, exploring a new city—or now spending three hours chasing a pickleball—we’ve been solving many of the same problems all along.
That’s one of the things I still enjoy most about running SCOTTeVEST. The best product ideas don’t usually come from conference rooms. They come from living life.
Every trip teaches us something.
Every hike teaches us something.
And lately, every pickleball match has taught us something too.
As America’s fastest-growing sport continues to evolve, don’t be surprised if SCOTTeVEST evolves right alongside it. After all, there’s no better research and development department than real life.
MY TRAVELS WITH STRANGE MEN - Episode Seven, Part 2: My Side Of The Story
Same trip. Same road. Same table. Different memories.
There is an old saying that there are three sides to every story: your side, my side and the truth. After rereading Andrew Wood’s account of our trip through Patagonia, I have concluded that there may actually be a fourth version: the one you remember several years later, after thousands of photographs have blurred together, the inconveniences have become funny, the landscapes have become almost mythical, and one painful moment has somehow taken up more room in your memory than two otherwise spectacular weeks.
Andrew and I traveled through Patagonia from March 8 through March 23, 2023, driving thousands of miles across Argentina and Chile, sharing hotel rooms, a rental car, hiking trails, meals, conversations, logistical decisions and enough competitive nonsense to fill a separate article. We saw the same glaciers, crossed the same borders, traveled the same dirt roads and stood together in some of the most spectacular places either of us had ever seen. Yet when I recently reread Andrew’s account, I was struck by how differently we remembered the trip.
Andrew remembered Patagonia: the hiking, the llamas—or guanacos, if we are being accurate—the endless roads, the food, the southernmost golf course in the world, and my alleged inability to navigate a region where, according to him, there was generally only one road.
I remembered Andrew and, more specifically, I kept returning to one particular restaurant.
That is not to say I had forgotten Patagonia. I remembered glaciers that seemed the size of cities, water in shades of blue I had never seen before, snowcapped mountains appearing around nearly every turn, and roads stretching so far into the distance that Idaho suddenly seemed crowded. I remembered crossing the Strait of Magellan with our rental car on a ferry, walking through an enchanted forest beside the Beagle Channel, wandering alone through an extraordinary cemetery and completing some of the greatest hikes of my life. I remembered arriving in Ushuaia, genuinely at the end of the world, after tracing an enormous path through the southernmost reaches of Argentina and Chile.
But the fact remained that Andrew remembered Patagonia as one of the five greatest trips of his extremely well-traveled life, while I had allowed one difficult evening to become its emotional bookmark.
That difference in perspective may be the most interesting part of the story.
The Strangest Strange Man Yet
For anyone new to this series, a Strange Man Trip is more or less what it sounds like. I say yes to traveling with a man I barely know—or someone I know only within one narrow context—and then find out what happens when the normal scripts disappear. Shared rooms, long drives, unfamiliar surroundings, physical exhaustion, wrong turns, meals, decisions and too much uninterrupted time together reveal people quickly. They also reveal me quickly, which is often the more uncomfortable part.
If you're new to the series, catch up on all of my Strange Men stories here. For the detailed itinerary, route and day-by-day activities, read Andrew’s version of Patagonia here. Andrew’s account is the better travelogue. This is my version of what happened between the destinations.
The first trip, with Scott Eddy, happened almost by accident. The journeys that followed taught me that there was something unusually valuable about temporarily stepping outside my established life with Laura, the poodles, SCOTTeVEST and the routines I know so well. These trips were never really about assembling a collection of exotic destinations. They were about placing myself in situations where I did not know exactly what would happen, how the man beside me would react or how I would react to him.
Andrew Wood may have been the strangest Strange Man yet because I had truly never met him in person. He was a British author, golf and hospitality consultant, world traveler, SCOTTeVEST customer and affiliate, and online acquaintance who had read my book, Pocket Man, written about me and developed a relationship with me almost entirely through email and occasional video conversations. I knew he was intelligent, charismatic, opinionated, competitive and capable of writing an astonishing number of books. I did not know how he handled stress, whether he was flexible, whether he would irritate me, whether I would irritate him, or whether two outspoken men of approximately the same age could share rooms for more than two weeks without one of us disappearing into the Patagonian wilderness.
On January 31, 2023, Andrew sent me an email with the subject line “Adventure.” He knew I liked road trips and explained that he was organizing a self-driving journey through Patagonia. I had never been there. To be completely honest, I was not entirely certain where Patagonia was or why people spoke about it with such reverence. Within approximately forty-eight hours, however, the trip was booked.
Most people spend more time researching a dishwasher than we spent deciding to travel together through one of the most remote regions on Earth.
Looking back, it was either brave or stupid. The distinction would become clear only after we got home.
Almost Dead Before We Met
The trip nearly ended before Andrew and I had even shaken hands. Andrew was convinced that travelers could sometimes obtain better hotel rates by using a foreign-language version of Expedia. He may have been correct in theory. In practice, it resulted in hotel information printed in another language, a reservation apparently made for the wrong date, and a taxi driver who could not locate where I was supposed to be staying after I arrived in Buenos Aires exhausted and very late at night.
I was carrying significant cash for travel and wearing a new IWC watch I had purchased for the trip and was ridiculously excited about. After the driver circled for what felt like forever, I became frustrated and insisted that he let me out so I could find the hotel myself. I grabbed my bag, stepped onto the street and only then looked closely enough at my surroundings to understand that I had made a spectacularly poor decision.
The area was dark, the drug activity was obvious, and I was standing there advertising that I was an affluent tourist with luggage, valuables and absolutely no idea where I was.
The driver began yelling and holding up his phone: “Unsafe! Unsafe! Unsafe!”
I reluctantly climbed back into the cab, which may have prevented my first trip with Andrew from becoming a very short posthumous story. Eventually, we found the hotel, discovered the reservation problem and obtained what I believe was the last available room. I took an Ambien, went to sleep and prepared to meet the man whose brilliant travel hack had already nearly gotten me mugged.
The next morning, I finally met Andrew and liked him almost immediately. He was highly intelligent, funny, energetic, articulate and at least as outgoing as I was, which is not something either of us encounters often. He was also incapable of walking at a normal pace. We spent hours exploring Buenos Aires on foot, walking somewhere in the vicinity of fourteen miles while talking almost continuously about entrepreneurship, marriage, children, politics, success, disappointment and our relationships with our fathers.
I sometimes joke that these Strange Man trips are a form of therapy. The men are not licensed and, unfortunately for them, are not paid by the hour. Andrew had his own complicated family history, and our willingness to discuss subjects most men carefully avoid allowed us to move almost immediately past the usual introductory conversations. Somewhere during that first day, we stopped talking about what we did and began talking about who we were.
We also discovered that we shared a similar instinct for turning ordinary social encounters into a performance. Whenever someone asked Andrew how he was doing, he would smile and answer, in his British accent, “Legendary.” Whenever someone asked me, I would answer, “Fucking unbelievable.” Neither of us explicitly acknowledged how absurdly similar those responses were. We simply played off one another, two gregarious men independently committed to making even meaningless small talk more entertaining.
By the end of our first day together, I believed we were going to have a remarkable trip. Despite everything that followed, I was right.
Two Men, One Rental Car and Very Different Operating Systems
We flew south, picked up a Toyota Corolla Cross and began our journey into Patagonia. Check out the visual itinerary below. Andrew did most of the driving, partly because he enjoyed it and partly because the car itself held little fascination for me. I love driving Ferraris, BMWs and Alfa Romeos. The Toyota was merely transportation, although by the time we reached Tierra del Fuego it was so thoroughly coated in Patagonian dirt that it appeared to have become part of the landscape.
Our differences as travelers became apparent almost immediately. I prefer information. Andrew prefers faith. I downloaded Google Maps and Apple Maps, gathered paper maps, asked hotel employees for directions, sought restaurant recommendations and wanted to know where we were going before we began going there. Andrew pointed out that there was often only one road and therefore no meaningful opportunity to become lost. I considered that an excellent reason to possess an accurate map of the one road. He considered it further evidence of my neurosis.
The same difference applied to food. Andrew was willing to wander into any restaurant that appeared promising and let fate determine whether the next ninety minutes of his life would be pleasant. I preferred to spend several minutes reading reviews before committing to a meal. His method occasionally produced wonderful surprises. My method produced more consistent results. I learned many things from Andrew on the trip, but trusting random restaurants was not one of them.
Despite these differences, or perhaps because of them, we traveled remarkably well together. Both of us needed to move. Both of us were curious. Both of us enjoyed meeting strangers, asking questions and turning unexpected encounters into stories. We talked constantly during the long drives about business, marketing, cars, watches, technology, marriage, family, Israel, Ukraine, politics, aging and our fathers. Andrew prevented me from filling every empty hour with political podcasts, which was probably healthy. We listened instead to history, including a memorable program about Aaron Burr, and allowed the road to create the kinds of conversations that rarely happen during scheduled calls or dinner-party settings.
One afternoon, while discussing patience, Andrew asked, “Why is patience a virtue? Why can’t hurry the fuck up be a virtue?”
I agreed completely. That one sentence may explain why two men who could each exhaust most normal people found one another so entertaining.
Every night before bed, Andrew also introduced me to one or two short pieces of British comedy. It became a small ritual—something unimportant on its face that I nevertheless came to look forward to. Friendships often develop less through grand declarations than through small repetitions no one intended to become meaningful.
We were also competitive in the most ridiculous ways. Andrew had owned cars he considered better than mine. My watch was more expensive; his was supposedly rarer. He was the golf expert. I was the skier. He moved faster on flat terrain, while years in Sun Valley gave me the advantage when the trail turned steep. None of these comparisons mattered in the slightest, which naturally meant we discussed them constantly.
Business had not followed me to Patagonia in any formal sense, but SCOTTeVEST somehow did. We unexpectedly encountered not one but two customers wearing our products—one on March 13 and another while I was wandering through Punta Arenas five days later.
Finding customers at the far end of South America was surreal, spontaneous and considerably more persuasive than any commercial we could have staged.
The hiking was extraordinary. We completed the Laguna Torre hike together, with Andrew routinely moving several hundred yards ahead of me on the flatter sections. On the hike to Laguna de los Tres, however, the elevation eventually changed the equation. Andrew turned back before the final ascent, while I continued to the viewpoint, earning bragging rights I used frequently and without restraint.
When I eventually returned to the parking area, however, Andrew was nowhere to be found. He had been missing for several hours, I had no idea whether he would be waiting at the car, and I recorded my arrival in real time. The resulting video captures our dynamic better than any retrospective description could: concern, irritation, relief and comedy occupying essentially the same moment.
Fitz Roy illuminated in extraordinary early-morning pink light.
Patagonia kept supplying moments no itinerary could have promised. At dinner in Torres del Paine, a puma casually walked past the restaurant window, turning an already remarkable meal into something that felt faintly unreal.
Several days later, I completed the most meaningful hike of the journey alone: more than thirteen miles, approximately 3,000 feet of climbing and over eight hours to Mirador Base Las Torres. I listened to Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog as I climbed and found myself in a rare state of complete focus. There was no business to manage, no email to answer and no one nearby to impress. There was just the mountain, the audiobook, my own breathing and the decision to keep going.
I became low on water and periodically uncertain whether I was still proceeding in the right direction. The landscape was vast enough that several minutes of uncertainty could feel consequential. You began calculating daylight, distance, temperature and whether your confidence was based on evidence or merely optimism.
Those moments were not flaws in the experience. They were part of what made it real.
The Glaciers and the Restaurant
Several days into the trip, we took a boat through Los Glaciares National Park. The glaciers were almost impossible to comprehend. The water shifted between brilliant turquoise and a milky blue, and the walls of ice seemed less like scenery than living geography.
On the boat, we met two Israeli women and began talking. We had an enjoyable conversation and agreed to meet for dinner later. One of the great benefits of travel is learning how differently people from different countries understand the same history. We discussed one of Israel’s wars, which I had been taught growing up as a relatively straightforward victory. The women had learned a more complicated version, shaped by casualties and human consequences. I found the difference fascinating and pressed the discussion, perhaps more forcefully than necessary. Andrew apparently believed I was being somewhat rude. I believed we were having an interesting conversation. Both observations may have contained some truth.
At dinner in El Calafate, Andrew and I sat on one side of the table and the women sat across from us. By then, we had been hiking, driving, sharing rooms, eating together and talking almost continuously. From my perspective, the trip was going spectacularly well.
Andrew had been drinking that evening; I had not. From my completely sober perspective, he seemed affected by it. Andrew remembers that differently and says he was nowhere near drunk. I do not need to resolve his precise level of intoxication to explain what happened next.
At some point, I excused myself to use the restroom. I initially went downstairs, then discovered that the actual bathroom was only a few feet from our table. I passed behind the group without anyone noticing and went inside. Almost immediately, I heard Andrew begin talking about me.
He complained that I texted him too frequently, constantly tried to coordinate plans, asked where he was, told him where I would be, researched restaurants, overplanned and generally behaved like a pain in the ass. Some of it was true. I did text him often. When two people are sharing rooms, cars, reservations and schedules, I tend to communicate: “I’ll meet you in the lobby.” “Here is a restaurant.” “Where are you?” “I’m going downstairs.” I unquestionably communicated more than Andrew preferred.
The painful part was not discovering that I occasionally irritated him. I have lived with myself for more than sixty years. I am aware that I can be a lot. What hurt was hearing him transform those traits into entertainment for two people we barely knew, exaggerating them in a way that cast him as the relaxed adventurer burdened by his neurotic companion. It seemed less like an honest complaint than an attempt to become more interesting at my expense.
I stood inside the bathroom waiting for the conversation to move on. It did not. Several minutes passed—perhaps five, perhaps ten, although emotional time is notoriously unreliable—and he kept going. Eventually, I had no choice but to return to the table.
The conversation stopped immediately.
I asked what they had been discussing. One of the women, attempting humor in an impossibly awkward moment, said, “You.”
I told them I knew because I had heard every word from the bathroom.
We finished the meal, said goodbye to the women and began walking back to our hotel. I came in hot. For approximately fifteen minutes, I berated Andrew. I told him that I believed we had been having a wonderful time and that if he had a problem with me, he should tell me rather than performing his complaints for strangers. I did not give him much opportunity to respond. My feelings were genuinely hurt.
This was not merely an embarrassing dinner. We still had approximately ten days of travel remaining, much of it sharing rooms in remote areas, and I suddenly did not know whether the man beside me actually wanted to be there. I had always understood intellectually that a Strange Man Trip could go badly. This was the first time the risk stopped being theoretical.
I stayed away from our room for a while and called Laura, trying to make sense of what had happened. Laura was thousands of miles away, probably half asleep, and had limited patience for an international emotional emergency that might appear less significant in the morning. I also contacted one of the women through WhatsApp, who confirmed that the conversation had been uncomfortable and strange.
When I eventually returned to our shared room, Andrew was asleep. He woke when I entered. He was not dramatically apologetic, but he clearly understood that a line had been crossed. I told him, in substance, “Tomorrow morning, we are going to wake up and pretend this never happened. We are never going to discuss it again. But if I sense for a hot minute that you are uncomfortable traveling with me, I am not going to argue, negotiate or stage another confrontation. You will simply discover that I am gone.”
The rental car and most of the remaining reservations were in my name. I had a credit card. I could leave.
Andrew said, “Fair enough.”
The next morning, we woke up and continued the trip. We never mentioned the incident again.
Andrew and I still remember that evening differently. To him, it was a tense few hours I magnified; to me, it was the first real sign that a Strange Man Trip could go sideways.
The Trip That Almost Failed, But Didn't
The surprising truth is that I felt normal the next morning. I did not spend days punishing Andrew, watching him for signs of betrayal or repeatedly reopening the case. I do not hold grudges easily. I had said what I needed to say, he had accepted the boundary and I was ready to move forward. I probably reduced my texting somewhat, but neither of us fundamentally changed who we were.
Looking back, the incident taught me something important about the entire Strange Men experiment. Until then, the risk had largely been part of the entertainment. Of course two men might not get along. Of course one of us might become irritating. Of course a trip could fail. But now something had actually gone wrong, and dealing with it turned out to be simpler than fearing it. We had confronted the edge of the relationship, established where it was and made a mutual decision to continue.
Laura and I almost never fight, and I have sometimes wondered whether that makes our marriage both stronger and, in one narrow sense, weaker. A real disagreement forces people to locate the boundaries of a relationship. It reveals what matters, what can be forgiven and what cannot. Andrew and I found one of those boundaries in El Calafate. He learned that turning my irritating qualities into a public comedy routine would not work. I learned that being hurt did not require me to end the relationship.
The conflict did not deepen our friendship simply because conflict is inherently valuable. It is not. Conflict can destroy a relationship as easily as strengthen one. What mattered was that we dealt with it and then both honored the decision to move forward. One more day became two. Two became three. Before long, we were once again simply Scott and Andrew, driving through Patagonia, debating everything, meeting strangers, competing over nonsense and searching for the next great hike or meal.
Three days after the restaurant, I posted that Andrew and I were “getting along swimmingly.” That was not diplomacy, revisionist history or an attempt to conceal what had happened. It was genuinely how I felt by then.
The pain had been real. The recovery was also real.
By Ushuaia, we were again openly making fun of one another. I posted a video titled “The bitching never stops,” which is either the clearest evidence that the friendship had recovered or proof that neither of us should ever complain about being used as comic material.
The journey continued south through landscapes that somehow became even more spectacular. We crossed into Chile, hiked in Torres del Paine, drove long stretches of dirt road and eventually reached Punta Arenas. There, Andrew and I separated for part of the day, and I wandered into the Cementerio Municipal Sara Braun. I spent hours alone among beautiful landscaping, monuments and mausoleums, absorbing the visible layers of history. My family’s cemetery business was part of my past, but this experience was not really about that. It was about the unexpected pleasure of being alone in an unfamiliar place, following my curiosity without needing to coordinate with anyone.
During the same walk, I encountered a group of young Scouts wearing matching green-and-yellow neckerchiefs and singing in a park with an adult leader. I stopped and recorded them. It was a small, completely unplanned moment, but those are often the ones that remain. Travel is not merely a collection of famous sights. It is also the cemetery you did not know existed, young people singing in a park, a conversation with a stranger or the freedom to turn down a street simply because it looks interesting.
We later drove our rental car onto a ferry and crossed the Strait of Magellan. Andrew found it hilarious that I had never driven a car onto a ferry and declared that I needed to get out more. I found the experience genuinely moving. “The Strait of Magellan” had existed in my mind since school as a distant historical reference. Suddenly I was crossing it in a filthy Toyota with a British man I had first met less than two weeks earlier.
It was one of those moments when geography, history and personal experience suddenly collapse into one another.
By the time we reached Ushuaia, we had traveled through Argentina and Chile, crossed the Strait, driven through Tierra del Fuego and arrived at the Beagle Channel. We stayed at the Arakur, a spectacular hotel above the city with sweeping views and a hot tub overlooking the mountains and water. At home, I use my hot tub every day, sometimes more than once. After nearly two weeks without one, sitting in that water at the bottom of the world felt like returning briefly to civilization.
One of our final hikes followed the Coastal Trail beside the Beagle Channel through a forest so beautiful it seemed constructed for a movie. Andrew wrote that he half expected a Hobbit to emerge and offer him a cup of tea, and that description is exactly right. The trail moved between woods, ocean and snowcapped mountains. At moments, we wondered whether we were lost, another recurring theme of the trip, but we eventually found our way. We met a young Russian woman and walked with her for a time, discussing how the war in Ukraine was being presented and understood inside Russia. Once again, travel placed us inside a conversation we could never have planned.
On our final full day, Andrew went to play golf at what he described as the world’s southernmost course, while I hiked near the hotel and encountered a group of horses. Separating for several hours no longer felt like evidence that anything was wrong. It simply felt natural. We had learned that traveling together did not require doing absolutely everything together.
For our final dinner, I did what Andrew had spent the trip teasing me for doing: I researched the options. He was considering staying at the hotel, but I wanted to go into town. We found a restaurant with a beautiful view and had what may have been the best meal of the journey. We raised our glasses for a photograph and reflected on how extraordinary the entire trip had been.
The incident in El Calafate never came up. It did not need to. We had already answered the question by finishing the journey together.
In my Facebook post that evening, I thanked Andrew for including me on his bucket-list adventure and described it as an amazing ending to an incredible trip. I meant it. A few minutes later, I wrote that whoever became my next Strange Man would have a difficult time topping Andrew because “he was amazing.”
I left Patagonia believing I had made a friend for life and expecting that we would see one another again soon.
Reading Andrew's Version
We have not seen each other in person since Patagonia, although we have remained in contact, sometimes closely and sometimes less so. After the trip, Andrew sent me a draft of his account. Reading it hurt in a way that echoed the restaurant incident. Once again, I believed we had experienced something overwhelmingly positive together, and once again I found myself encountering a catalog of my irritating qualities: the planning, texting, restaurant research, maps, politics, overthinking and occasional overreaction.
Much of it was funny. Much of it was accurate. Taken together, however, it stung.
Andrew did not publish the piece at the time, and we moved forward. Years later, when I began assembling the Strange Men series, I revisited it. With some light editing for privacy, clarity and the protection of people who had not volunteered to become part of the story, we published his version largely as written.
This time, I read it differently.
I finally recognized something that had been difficult to see when the experience was fresh: Andrew’s criticisms existed inside affection, not instead of it. His account makes fun of me relentlessly, but it also describes our conversations, the beauty of the journey, the meals, the hiking, the competition and the friendship that developed between us. He concluded by calling Patagonia one of the five greatest trips of his life, which means something coming from a man who has traveled through seventy-five countries.
His article was not an indictment disguised as humor. It was, in many respects, a love letter disguised as a British roast.
That realization does not make every observation painless or every exaggeration accurate. It does remind me that I cannot control how another person experiences me. I may believe I am being organized while someone else experiences me as controlling. I may believe I am communicating responsibly while someone else experiences me as texting too much. I may believe I am pursuing a fascinating discussion while someone else thinks I am pushing too hard.
The answer is not to abandon who I am or accept every criticism as fact. The answer is to become curious enough to consider what may be true without allowing the delivery to erase the relationship surrounding it.
The Fourth Version
When I first began writing my side of Patagonia, I worried that the restaurant incident would become the whole story because it had occupied so much space in my memory.
Looking back through the photographs, videos and Facebook posts did not prove that I had remembered the pain incorrectly. It restored the pain to its proper proportion.
I did not post about the restaurant while it was happening. It was far too painful and private, and I had no interest in publicly humiliating Andrew while we were still sharing a room and continuing the trip. Its absence from Facebook says nothing about how deeply the evening affected me.
What the Facebook record does reveal is everything else I was feeling at the same time.
I called it the best trip ever. I wrote that it was a thousand times better than I had imagined. I said the journey exceeded my wildest expectations, that I had truly enjoyed Andrew’s company and that my next Strange Man would have difficulty topping him.
There were thousands of photographs of Andrew and me laughing, hiking, eating, driving, resting, meeting strangers, crossing borders and standing together in some of the most beautiful places on Earth.
Those statements and images were not retrospective diplomacy. They were what I believed while I was still there.
The restaurant mattered deeply, but it was never the entire journey.
Perhaps that is the largest lesson. A relationship is not necessarily the worst thing that happened inside it. A trip is not necessarily the moment that hurt the most. Memory sometimes gives pain more authority than joy because pain demands analysis, while joy simply happens.
Andrew remembered the trip in its totality. I had remembered the exception. Revisiting his article, my photographs and my own words from the road allowed me to hold both truths at once.
I also learned that risk is not a flaw in the Strange Man concept. It is the concept. Had I gone to Patagonia with an old friend whose habits, boundaries, moods and weaknesses I already understood, the journey might have been easier. It would also have revealed less.
The unknown creates the tension. The tension creates the honesty. And honesty, when both people are willing to tolerate it, can create a genuine friendship.
Patagonia was absolutely spectacular. The hiking was among the best I have ever experienced. The food was far better than I expected. The driving route was ambitious, beautiful and occasionally ridiculous. Andrew was a capable driver, a formidable walker, an engaging conversationalist, a competitive pain in the ass and an excellent travel companion.
We were more alike than either of us probably wanted to admit: two highly verbal men with strong opinions, a need for constant movement, a tendency to make strangers part of our performance, and stock answers designed to transform ordinary conversations.
Andrew was legendary. I was fucking unbelievable. Together, for more than two weeks, we were both.
Home
Getting home required nearly two full days of travel through Buenos Aires, Panama City, Denver and finally Sun Valley. I made one connection with approximately two minutes to spare and spent the entire journey looking forward to seeing Laura and the poodles.
When I finally arrived, the poodles provided exactly the welcoming party I expected. They did not care about the glaciers, the Strait of Magellan, the hiking statistics, the restaurant incident, the dirty Toyota or whether Andrew believed I texted too much.
They cared that I was home.
That is the other recurring feature of these Strange Man trips. I leave home hoping to discover something about another person and inevitably discover something about myself. Then I return to Laura and the poodles with another story, hopefully a little more self-aware and even more conscious of how fortunate I am to have a home I genuinely miss while exploring the world.
I traveled to Patagonia with a man I had never met in person. I returned with thousands of photographs, one of the greatest adventures of my life, a friendship that had survived its first meaningful test, and a better understanding of how criticism, forgiveness, memory and affection can coexist. The trip almost failed for several tense hours in El Calafate, but it did not—and that is precisely why it belongs in the Strange Men series.