At the age of 17, Mike Brodie hopped his first train close to home in Pensacola, Florida, thinking he would visit a friend in Mobile, Alabama. Instead, the train took him in the opposite direction to Jacksonville, Florida. Days later he rode the same train home, arriving back where he started.

Nonetheless, it sparked something in him and he began to wander across America by any means that were free – walking, hitchhiking, and train hopping. Shortly after his travels began he found a camera stuffed behind a car seat and began to take pictures. Brodie spent years crisscrossing the U.S., documenting his experiences, now appreciated as one of the most impressive archives of personal travel photography.