Skip to main content

The 17-Hour Way to Florida: Why We Skipped the Flight and Drove the Blue Ridge Parkway


Yoon, Jongshin Special Episode 2 - Roadtrip from New York to Florida


Last week's video was a thank-you — to the Jongshin fans who found this channel and stayed. This week, the series quietly turns a corner. This one is ours.

Summer 2020. Yoon Jongshin left the Hudson Valley for Florida to shoot a summer music video, and — there's a Korean expression, 친구 따라 강남 간다, tagging along with a friend all the way to the fancy part of town — Jinguk and I packed the car and followed him down.

Here's the part that makes people tilt their heads. A flight from New York to Orlando is about three hours and a hundred-odd dollars. We spent seventeen hours driving instead. On purpose. The reason is a road: the Blue Ridge Parkway, 469 miles along the crest of the Appalachians, the kind of drive Europeans fly across an ocean to do just once. We love it enough that we've been making a travel book about it for ten years — and this trip was, at last, our chance to finish it, drawings and all.

What those weeks in Orlando and Alabama turned into — and what happened after we drove back home to New York — is in the video.

▶ Watch here: https://youtu.be/kSOjXyZzyT4

Fast, or the way you love? If you've ever taken the long road on purpose when the quick one was sitting right there, I'd like to hear about it. Drop it in the comments.

If you're new here, subscribe — there's more of this story still coming. And leave a comment; I read them.


Tags: Yoon Jongshin, Blue Ridge Parkway, Appalachian Trail, MigukTV, road trip, New York to Florida, Nomad Project, Korean musician America, Hudson Valley, cross-cultural

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What Is a "Bracket" Anyway? — A World Cup Guide for People Like My Husband

2026 FIFA World Cup — the stadium energy is real Last night, my husband Jinguk watched Korea get eliminated from the World Cup and said absolutely nothing for about twenty minutes. Then he looked at me and said: "What even is a bracket?" He'd been seeing it all over Twitter. Fox Sports, ESPN, every American sports account posting about "the bracket." He knew what 대진표 meant — the matchup chart, the tournament draw — but "bracket" threw him. This is the thing about living with a Korean man in New York for fifteen years. I am constantly in translation mode. Not just language — *context*. The word "bracket" has a whole American backstory he's never needed before, and suddenly it matters because this is the World Cup and it's happening twelve minutes from where we live. So I explained it to him. And now I'm going to explain it here. --- Where the Word "Bracket" Comes From A bracket is, originally, an L-shaped support. The kin...

Mbappé Scored Twice, Olise Set Up Everything, and I Cannot Stop Thinking He Looks Like My Nephew

MetLife Stadium, packed with blue, white, and red. I need to get something off my chest before we talk about the actual match: Kylian Mbappé looks exactly like my nephew Aaron. Exactly. Even Jinguk agrees. Google Mbappé and put them side by side and get back to me. My nephew Aaron Okay. Now the soccer. France 3, Sweden 0 — and Two Records Fell in the Process France dismantled Sweden 3-0 at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey to advance to the Round of 16. On paper that's a comfortable win. In practice, two individual performances made it worth staying up for. The crowd knew what they were watching. Mbappé scored twice — a brace , in soccer terms, meaning two goals by one player in a single match. That brings his career World Cup total to 18 goals, one behind Lionel Messi's all-time record of 19. He's also tied Messi's goal count for this specific tournament (6 apiece), which reignites the Golden Boot conversation — the award given to the tournament's top ...

Croatia Scored the Equalizer That Would've Saved Their World Cup — Then a Sensor Inside the Ball Took It Away

2026 FIFA World Cup — when millimeters decide everything.  (Photo: Unsplash) We were watching Portugal vs Croatia when it happened. Round of 32. Deep stoppage time — the 103rd minute, well past regulation. Portugal was up 2-1. Croatia needed one more goal to force extra time. Then Josko Gvardiol tapped one in at the back post. 2-2. The stadium in Toronto exploded. Croatian players sprinted toward the corner flag. Jinguk stood up from the couch. Then the referee jogged to the monitor. We sat back down. But this time it wasn't a camera measuring a shoulder — it was the ball itself. "Offside," the call came back. Goal disallowed. Not because a player's foot was a millimeter too far forward. Because the ball, somehow, remembered being touched. I had to ask Jinguk to explain that one from the beginning. What Offside Actually Is Here's the thing about offside: everyone who watches soccer knows it exists, but almost no one can explain it clearly on the ...