Our Story — Abigail & William
About us

The longer version.

If you've spent any time in our live streams, you already know the shape of us. This is the rest of it — where we come from, and how the two of us ended up here.

Abigail — portrait 4 : 5 · 880 × 1100 · paste image URL
Abigail

Abigail

Artist · Maker · Gymnast at heart

I grew up in the country in southeast Georgia, on and around a hay farm — cows, open fields, the kind of place where you learn to make your own afternoons. I started gymnastics when I was two and basically lived in the gym until I was thirteen. People assume cheer was the big thing for me, but gymnastics was the real love. It taught me how to commit to something all the way down, which is more or less how I've done everything since.

I studied business at West Georgia, spent four years in Phi Mu, and sold jewelry on Instagram and TikTok. That became DripTeasin — jewelry, clothing, and now my paintings — and a TikTok following that climbed to over 400,000 when TikTok was just coming on the scene. There was never a plan. I just showed up as myself, and it turned out people liked that.

These days I paint and make jewelry wherever we happen to be parked — a campsite, the passenger seat, somebody's kitchen table. I still can't fully explain why so many of you turn up for us, day after day. But you do, and somewhere along the way you became the best part of our long, strange trip.

William — portrait 4 : 5 · 880 × 1100 · paste image URL
William

William

Guitarist · Traveler · Thinker

I'm from the same stretch of rural southeast Georgia as Abigail, though we managed not to meet until we were grown. I came up in and around the locomotive world — my dad started out as a diesel mechanic and ended up managing a freight locomotive remanufacturing and leasing operation, and I was along for most of it, putting race-car engines together with him by the time I was eight and traveling to inspect old freight locomotives across the country. My grandfather farmed tobacco, flatpicked, and yodeled. So the mechanical and the musical were both integral in my development and lineage.

When I graduated high school, I joined CSX and worked in the shop as a locomotive electrician for nearly a decade. I stepped out for a few years to study the sciences at UGA — I get curious and I follow it — then went back to the railroad on my own terms. The work mostly came to me rather than the other way around, and I kept it light on purpose: enough to keep us moving, never so much that it crowded out my curiosity and instinctual drive for broad knowledge.

In my late twenties, I began to develop an affinity for guitar and live music. For the past decade or so, guitar has become my way of synthesizing fragments of life experience and knowledge I've accumulated, non-verbally. Somewhere in the lineage of Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and bluegrass flatpicking — the loose kind of playing that only really works when everyone's actually listening to each other. It's a beautiful modality of how a life could be lived and experienced improvisationally and creatively. A perspetive of life as an improvised and reciprocal conversation more than a performance. My interests follow wherever path it wants: philosophy, history, culture, a long list of things that don't connect until, eventually, they do.

I've never been in much of a hurry. I figure the good part is still coming.

How it started
The two of us — together 3 : 2 · 1600 × 1067 · paste image URL

Two people from the same corner of Georgia — who had to drive to Alabama to finally meet.

It was the end of 2020. William was in Tuscaloosa for a couple of weeks installing a new locomotive control system in a GP35, and our first date was nothing out of a movie: Barnes & Noble, a slow lap through the aisles, and coffee. Then a date at the bowling alley. It suited us both exactly.

We started traveling together in 2021 and never quite stopped. None of the rest of it was designed — the live streams, the community, the people who turn up most days like neighbors. It grew out of two people deciding to build a life out in the open, and finding that a lot of folks wanted to pull up a chair and watch it happen.

We don't know exactly where it's headed. That's mostly the point.