About the Author

Nicholas Bieneck is a motelier, traveler, and lifelong wanderer who has spent the past two decades chasing stories instead of stability. He’s worked on the European backpacker trail, spent a decade behind the scenes at some of the biggest music festivals in the country, and once cooked biscuits and gravy on television.

He’s hosted thousands of guests at his roadside motel, traveled the country in a VW bus, and — as the photos prove — once smoked weed with Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson in Amsterdam.

The Bloom and the Wither is his first book, written as both a tribute to the chaos that shaped him and a reckoning with the cost of a life lived in motion.

He was most recently the innkeeper at Tuggle’s Gap Roadside Inn, on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Floyd, Virginia.