The Story I Wasn’t Looking For…
I walked into Café des Chutes in Bend, Oregon and met a man while waiting in line to order my coffee. We ended up sitting down together and what came next changed the way I think about everything I'm building.
Peter Korn, who I met in line and Bill Herzberg are traveling out of Portland, with no real plan but to find cool places to ride. They're retired. They're unhurried. And they are two of the most quietly inspiring people I've met in a long time.
Bill was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at 17, though the symptoms started earlier. Over the years the disease has taken most of his ability to walk. He can manage a few steps, but not many. What he can do is ride his recumbent bike. That bike is his freedom. His way of staying in the world on his own terms.
A few years ago, Bill and Peter rode around Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam together. Not a trip to the local park. Southeast Asia. Mountains, heat, roads that test anyone and Bill was there for all of it.
The adventure didn't stop when his body changed. It adapted.
A Story from Vietnam
During that trip, Bill needed to use a restroom. A family let him into their home. And there, in that house, was a person confined to bed. Unable to get up. Unable to get out.
He looked at that person and understood something immediately, they probably had the strength to ride a bike, to get outside, to move through the world. What they didn't have was the equipment.
The gap between capability and access. Between the will to move and the means to do it. For millions of people in rural and underserved communities around the world, the right adaptive equipment doesn't exist, not because the need isn't there, but because no one has brought it to them.
What if older adaptive equipment, the kind sitting unused in garages and storage rooms across the country, could find its way to the people who need it most? What if the equipment that changed one person's life could change another's?
That idea is sitting with me now. Hard.
Two Lives Worth Knowing About
Bill isn't just a rider. He's a retired physician and a travel guidebook writer, contributor to Lonely Planet and Let's Go. He has spent his life helping other people find their way around the world, even as his own world was quietly narrowing physically. The irony of that isn't lost on either of us.
Peter is a retired journalist. He is also, simply, a good friend. The kind who doesn't disappear when things get harder. The kind who gets on a bike next to you and rides through Vietnam without making it a big deal. In a world that talks a lot about community and support, Peter is someone who actually shows up.
Their friendship is its own story. Two people who kept choosing adventure together, adapting the format but never the spirit.
What This Means for Project Día por Día
I started this project with a belief that human beings are most deeply connected not through their highlights — but through their hardships. That the moments we don't talk about are the ones where we actually find each other.
Yesterday proved that right before I've even left Bend.
I hadn't ridden a mile yet. I hadn't crossed a border or documented a single conversation on the road. And yet here was exactly the kind of story Project Día por Día exists to find and share sitting across from me over coffee, completely by accident.
Bill's story is not about what muscular dystrophy took from him. It's about what he refused to let it take. The adventures in Southeast Asia. The guidebooks. The recumbent bike rolling through the west right now with his friend beside him.
The adventure doesn't stop. You just need to adapt.
That might be the most important thing anyone has said to me since I started planning this journey. And I heard it not from a motivational speaker or a book, but from a man who has been living it quietly for decades, without making a fuss about it.
Project Día por Día is a storytelling initiative about human connection through hardship and resilience. Chapter One begins in June 2026 — 5,000 miles from Norway to Portugal. But as it turns out, the stories start before you even leave home.