I write about my 2012 Hyundai Elantra, driving Dan Bongino, visiting Oheka Castle on Long Island, and a car that has carried me for nearly 15 years. This story is on the longer side. Read it in spurts if you want. Come back to it whenever you are ready. You don’t have to read this in one sitting. It’s a good story; I promise.
A Hospice Conversation That Inspired This Story
Last year, I began volunteering with Hospice of Washington County as a companion volunteer. I spend one-on-one time with people who are in the final stages of their lives. I do this for a couple of reasons, but mostly because I don’t want anybody to die alone.
I don’t want to die alone. I think it’s my worst fear.
Sometimes when I’m visiting with someone enrolled in hospice, I’m a quiet presence. Other times, we talk about anything and everything. And the conversations I have with folks – they’re sacred. Those moments of reflection, thinking about life, facing mortality, and regret. Most of all, volunteering with hospice helps me cope with all the loss that has consumed my life over the last six years.
Last April, I visited a hospice enrollee at Doey’s House in Hagerstown, Maryland, where I was born and raised. The patient loved watching Fox News, so that’s what we watched. We shared many wonderful conversations about cars, road trips, places they visited, things they have done, and seen.
The patient asked if I had ever met anybody famous. I kid you not, while we were talking, Fox News mentioned Dan Bongino, who officially took office as the FBI’s Deputy Director on March 17, 2025.
I pointed at the television and said, “Well, I used to drive to Dan Bongino – and he was my friend.” The patient and I talked for a couple of hours that day.
Not too long after that conversation, maybe a few weeks later, the patient I visited at Doey’s House passed away peacefully, surrounded by family. I remember telling the patient that day, I had regrets about how things had left off with Dan.
Maybe this is me trying to fix it – I don’t know.
But the older I get (I turned 40 in November 2025), the more I understand that maybe Forrest Gump’s mama was right: “You’ve got to put the past behind you before you can move on.”
And I think that’s what my writing is all about.
The Hyundai Elantra My Grandmother Loved
268,444 miles – that’s the current odometer reading on the 2012 Hyundai Elantra that I bought on August 24, 2011.
Today is Wednesday, March 25, 2026.
I know the exact date I bought my Hyundai – August 24, 2011, the day after my late grandmother Maureen’s birthday. Our family celebrated my grandmother’s 79th birthday at Fireside in Hagerstown. After dinner, I took the family to Massey Hyundai, just across the street.
I test-drove a black 2012 Hyundai Elantra with my entire family. My grandmother sat in the back seat with my late grandfather, Dick Hann, and enjoyed the new car smell. It was the first new car I had ever bought – and even then, I probably couldn’t afford it.
My grandmother, Maureen, passed away on Wednesday, July 16, 2025. The day Maureen died – it was a warm summer night – I drove my Hyundai from Gaithersburg to Boonsboro to spend our last day together. After she passed, I sat inside my Hyundai for a while. I took the long way home that night. I miss her every day.
268K Miles of Conversations You Cannot Have at a Kitchen Table
I have owned my Hyundai Elantra for 14 years, 7 months, and 1 day.
It’s been to Arizona and back. New Mexico and back. It has been to New Hampshire and back seven or eight times (we met the presidential candidates).
That Hyundai – it’s been to Maine and back a handful of times. Kim and I have driven to Myrtle Beach and back for a 2018 vacation. And we drove from Maryland to Cleveland, Ohio, and back; my old pal Eugene Craig snatched an extra ticket from Rand Paul’s 2016 presidential campaign for the first Republican presidential debate of the cycle. That’s where Trump said the thing about Megyn Kelly.
My Hyundai has carried our son and daughter to school more times than I can count; some of the best conversations I have ever had with the kids happened inside that Hyundai. Cars, I believe, create a space where people can talk without having to look at each other – and sometimes that’s the only way the real stuff comes out.
Sometimes that’s how we men have to do it. My dad and I do that.
Dan Bongino’s Don Quixote Mission
I need to go back to 2011 to explain how this car ended up carrying the story I am about to tell you.
A really nice guy named Brian Murphy introduced me to Dan Bongino. He and Dan were friends.
Mr. Murphy is a Wharton graduate who founded Smith Island Baking Company and ran for governor in the 2010 Republican primary against former Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich.
Murphy lost.
But he was a connector, the kind of person who knew everybody and remembered everybody. Brian played an important role in Dan’s Maryland 2012 U.S. Senate campaign. Bongino took on Ben Cardin in the general election. Mr. Cardin prevailed.
I remember Dan describing his first run for public office – a U.S. Senate bid in Maryland, no less – as a Don Quixote mission.
Dan used that phrase more than once. I will never forget it; I knew the book but had not read it fully, and after hearing Bongino talk about it, I read the whole damn book.
A Server at the Texas Roadhouse Who Talked Too Much
Now here is the part of the story I have to be honest about.
In the summer of 2011, I was working as a restaurant server at the Texas Roadhouse in Westminster, Maryland. I think I even waited on State Senator Justin Ready’s family once.
I was in between careers. I did not know what I wanted to do. I felt like a failure. I really did. I was embarrassed because I had a college degree – and I wasn’t making good use of it.
I was a few years out of college, still trying to find something that fit. I wanted to work in politics. Or was it public policy? Or did I like the fun of political campaigns? That’s what excited me when I was still young and impressionable, thinking that politics could be the thing, it could be fun.
In July of 2011, I met Dan Bongino for the first time at a Starbucks in Severna Park on Ritchie Highway. He told me he was running for Maryland’s U.S. Senate seat against a very popular incumbent, and he knew it was a long shot – but Dan was going to do it anyway. I remember Dan had a “GrappleSock.com” email address in 2011.
I was all in.
I spent the summer of 2011 driving Dan Bongino around Maryland – first as a volunteer. I was his “body guy.” That’s an honest job description.
I think Dan felt bad about my job title. He once referred to me as his chargé d’affaires. It sounded cool. That name stuck with Dan. He used it in a way that elevated me and made me feel valuable. I mean that. He truly valued the volunteers who helped him. I drove him. I provided minimal thoughts on the campaign communication strategy. I pulled his press clippings; I liked that.
But mostly I drove Dan and was the “body guy.” And finally, by fall, he said, “All right, we have got to pay this kid.”
I was not the greatest driver – I will admit that. I probably talked too much. And Dan liked to focus his time while on the road. I used to drive members of Congress around, too, when I worked on The Hill. The funny thing is that I don’t really like driving other people. I like driving by myself. Always have.
But driving with Dan – the conversations we had made the miles disappear.
Dan talked about economics in a way that made me want to understand it. I really didn’t understand a lot about economics then. He earned his MBA from Penn State; he knows the material like a professor. It was Dan who recommended Henry Hazlitt’s book to me, Economics in One Lesson, and I have read it many times; it changed the way I think about things.
Dan and I got into these deep conversations about economic theory, about what makes systems work and why they break, and I learned more from those car rides than I did in most classrooms.
Breakfast at Hagerstown’s Bob Evans with the Cruelest Man I Ever Met
I’ll bounce around a bit and tell you a handful of stories I remember about working with Dan Bongino in 2011.
Dan made it a point to visit my hometown, Washington County. I remember emailing and texting him about where to go in Washington County, trying to help him build connections there.
And I remember one incident that I have never fully shaken.
(I was born and raised in Washington County. The Republicans back then really didn’t like me because they didn’t trust me; they thought I was still moderate back then – a RINO.)
In early November 2011, I drove Dan from his home in Anne Arundel County to Washington County for an 8:00 a.m. breakfast meeting with members of the Washington County Republican Central Committee at the Bob Evans on the Dual Highway in Hagerstown.
An older guy named Bob Sweeney was at that November breakfast.
(There isn’t a person on this earth today who doesn’t know that Bob Sweeney worked for IBM, because Bob told everybody he ever met.)
So, Dan and I sat down at a table near the front of the restaurant. Ol’ Bob starts in on me right away; he doesn’t even wait.
Sweeney looks at Bongino with those squinty little dead eyes of his and says in front of the group of Republicans gathered that Bongino needed to “get rid of me,” as in, fire me from his campaign.
The reason, according to Sweeney, is that Mark Boyer, a Hagerstown lawyer at the time, hated me. Mr. Boyer was a local Republican Party figure in Washington County who was appointed to the Washington County Circuit Court by former Governor Larry Hogan in October 2016.
They didn’t like me because I didn’t kiss the asses of the Washington County Republican Central Committee members. Yeah, they didn’t like me. Some of the same folks are still at it.
And I sat there at this Bob Evans table on a Wednesday morning in November, where this guy, Bob Sweeney, said out loud, to my face, that somebody hated me.
That had never happened to me before – somebody telling me that somebody else hates me. Bob Sweeney hated me. For the life of me, I don’t recall ever meeting Mark Boyer. And if I did something to make Judge Boyer feel that way, I am honestly and truly sorry. I mean that.
But hearing it said out loud – that somebody hates me – at a breakfast table in the Hagerstown Bob Evans, by a man who seemed to enjoy delivering the news. Well, that was a new experience for me. It was the first time I tangibly felt embarrassed – not as an abstraction but as something physical that sat in my chest and did not leave.
After we left that ridiculous Bob Evans breakfast meeting (I was driving), Dan looked at me with a halfway smile: “What the hell was that all about?”
I really didn’t know. I just figured Bob didn’t like me, and he wanted to tell Bongino.
To date, Bob Sweeney is one of the most unpleasant men I have ever encountered in life – and I don’t say that lightly. He was cruel in a way that felt intentional, and he made me feel less of a person. I have met a lot of people in politics and journalism, and very few of them made me feel the way Sweeney did at that table.
I haven’t seen Bob Sweeney in years; I hope Bob has found peace in his life. I know that I’m still searching for some version of it.
But here is the thing about Bongino in that particular moment at Bob Evans: he didn’t throw me under the bus. He seemed confused about Sweeney’s vitriol aimed at me. But he was kind and gracious about it all.
I know Dan kept that moment in the back of his mind, but he never questioned me about it or made me feel bad about it.
Expensive Whiskey in a Castle That Would End Up on HBO
Not long after the Bob Evans breakfast, in early November 2011, I drove Dan and his family to New York from Maryland for a fundraiser at Oheka Castle on Long Island.
If you’re unfamiliar with Oheka Castle, here it is: it is the second-largest private residence ever built in America, a 127-room French chateau on the highest point of Long Island. At the time, a developer named Gary Melius owned it, a man who had spent decades restoring it from total ruin into something extraordinary.
Our drive to New York took us through Bongino’s old stomping grounds.
Before the Secret Service, before the Senate race, before any of it, Dan Bongino was a New York City police officer. He started as a cadet with the NYPD in 1995. Dan didn’t need a GPS.
I believe a handful of Dan’s campaign team stayed at the castle that night.
A guy named Fred Propheter, a Frederick County Republican club guy with whom I didn’t agree on much of anything – well, ‘ol Fred can put ’em back; he drinks as they did in those old Westerns.
Fred and I drank ourselves stupid that night on expensive whiskey. We sat back and drank ourselves stupid.
And I remember standing in that main room, the grand ballroom, and meeting Dan Bongino’s parents and his brother Joe, who was also a Secret Service agent, earlier in the evening, at Dan’s fundraiser.
I remember Dan walking around the room and introducing me to the folks who came – probably 50-100 people, maybe? That was decent of Dan. It meant a lot to me.
Years later, I am watching the Taylor Swift video for “Blank Space,” and I recognize the outside and inside of Oheka Castle. I sat up and said out loud: I was there! I was right f*****g there! I was a 25-year-old kid. It was fun. It really was.
And then years later, I was watching arguably one of the most famous episodes of Succession.
“Boar on the Floor.” Wild. The best scene. How much is a gallon of milk? Anybody know? That’s the room Dan Bongino fundraised inside. The room is magnificent.
And then I found out Megyn Kelly – yes, that Megyn Kelly – got married at the castle on March 1, 2008.
Sometimes you don’t realize until much later that you were standing in a place that mattered.
A Birthday Drive to Ocean City in a Black Tahoe
On November 15, 2011, my birthday, I drove Dan Bongino’s black Tahoe from his house in Anne Arundel County to Ocean City (Maryland, of course) for a political dinner at the Carousel Hotel. If you have ever been to the Carousel, you know it. It is the one with the indoor ice-skating rink.
Dan’s black Tahoe made sense for a guy who spent years as a Secret Service agent. From everything I know, he was a pretty good agent.
I just remember that night. My birthday. Driving a former Secret Service agent’s black Tahoe to Ocean City for a political dinner. The whole drive out and back in one evening. And what I remember most is that when I was in the car with him, it was genuinely interesting.
If you’ve been around Bongino, he’s sometimes shy, but he’s hilarious in a way that New Yorkers say things that others cannot. Dan Bongino’s wit is just really funny. He’s sharp, you know? He knows how to tell a story. He could be gracious and endearing in a way that people who only know the public version of him might not believe.
I was there, though; I saw it.
Two Guys on a Bridge Laughing at a Man Who Would Become President
We left the Carousel Hotel around 8:30 that night to get Dan back to Anne Arundel County. The Ocean City event was the last thing on the agenda that night.
Within a few minutes, I was driving Mr. Bongino’s black Tahoe across the Assawoman Bay Bridge, heading west on Route 90 toward the mainland.
Somehow, the conversation turned to Donald Trump.
In November 2011, Trump was not a political figure. He had flirted with running for president earlier that year but dropped out in the spring. He was still the Apprentice host, a real estate celebrity.
Remember Trump’s feud with Rosie O’Donnell? It was December 2006. Among all of Trump’s public feuds, to me, this is the single funniest. It’s classic Trump.
I was telling Bongino about Trump’s Entertainment Tonight interview where Trump went on television and said, with absolute conviction, that Rosie O’Donnell is disgusting, both inside and out, take a look at her, she is a slob, she talks like a truck driver.
Here’s the Trump line that made Bongino and me laugh the hardest: “I like to see bad people fail. Rosie failed. I’m happy about it.”
I am literally laughing out loud as I type this.
Trump hit a media home run. He dominated one television show after another, never letting up. I considered it the most hysterical on-camera performance by a public figure I had ever witnessed.
It wasn’t political. It wasn’t strategic. It was just Trump going on an entertainment show and telling America that if he were running The View, he would have fired her.
In fairness to Trump, Rosie started it. She mocked Trump on TV for giving Miss USA Tara Conner “a second chance.” And we all know what happens when somebody mocks Donald Trump. He ends up as the president of the United States.
Bongino asked me how to find the video and watched it in the Tahoe. I have never seen Dan Bongino laugh that hard. Genuinely laugh. Not a polite laugh. Not a camera laugh. A real, from-the-gut laugh, because we both thought the way Trump presented himself in that moment was absolutely hysterical.
Neither of us knew that the man on the screen would become the president of the United States, and neither of us knew that the man behind the wheel would later become the Deputy Director of the FBI under Mr. Trump.
Dan Bongino and I were just two guys crossing a bridge on the Eastern Shore on a Tuesday night in mid-November ’11, laughing out loud at Trump being Trump.
It’s a good memory. I’m smiling as I’m writing this.
The Version of Dan Bongino Most People Never Got to See
I know people change. And I know public life does things to people in the spotlight.
I think that the Dan Bongino most people know today isn’t the Dan Bongino I knew in a Starbucks in Severna Park in July 2011. I am not here to get into politics; I’m disinterested in what Dan has become or what anyone thinks about him. That is not what this article is about.
What this is about is that I got to know a version of Dan Bongino before he became famous. And I liked that version of Dan. That version was kind to me.
Dan frequently talked about his wife, Paula, and his children in a soft, real way. If I remember correctly, Paula was pregnant when Dan ran for the U.S. Senate in 2012. When Dan talked about Paula, there was no performance; that’s a real marriage. He loves her – truly. I saw it every day.
Dan always called Paula, or Paula always called him, before or after an event. It didn’t matter what we were doing or where we were driving. When Paula called, everything stopped. Dan Bongino adores his wife and two daughters. I think everything that Dan does is for his wife and kids.
In 2012, Dan Bongino stood on the side of a busy Montgomery County intersection with my wife, Kim, our daughter Paige, who was five at the time, and our son, Josh, who was nine, and held signs for Mitt Romney (and Dan Bongino). Dan made sure Kim and the kids were safe. He was kind to our kids. That’s the Dan Bongino I knew.
When you get somebody in a car long enough, you learn who they really are. The version I saw was direct, straightforward, but also compassionate. That was the version of Dan Bongino, who was my friend.
Dan and I don’t speak anymore and haven’t for several years. We had a falling out at one point. We had some disagreements. I don’t need to get into all that.
And I never got the chance to tell Dan something I think matters: Thank you.
I don’t know, I wish I could pick up the phone today and say, “Look, I am sorry for what happened. Sometimes friends part ways – and that’s okay.
But it still doesn’t feel good. I have no idea if Dan and I will ever reconnect again. But I wanted to tell the story that Dan Bongino was once my friend.
A Western Maryland boy with a public school education, and I used to drive the former Deputy Director of the FBI.
That’s life. That’s what all the people say. I think Dan and I have far more in common than he’d like to admit: Each time we find ourselves flat on our faces, we pick ourselves up and get back in the race.
That’s life.
The Hyundai Seats, No CarPlay, and No Plans to Retire
My Hyundai seats are cloth.
The paint has stories it could tell, but will not. There is no CarPlay. There’s no touchscreen. The brakes are newer.
One week later, on Friday, March 20, on my way to my Hagerstown office, the starter died. Because of course it did.
I have the worst luck with cars and Fridays recently.
My Elantra quit on me in a Target parking lot in Frederick. I stood there looking at my car the way you look at a friend who just said something you didn’t expect. Vinny’s Towing and Recovery in Frederick sent the kindest tow-truck driver, a guy named Lane, who loaded the Elantra onto a flatbed and took it to Dynamic Automotive in Urbana. I picked up my Hyundai yesterday, Tuesday, March 24.
New starter. It runs. My little Hyundai runs again. It’s back. I can’t get rid of it. I have thought about it. I can’t do it.
I’ll tell you when it hits 300,000. There’ll be plenty more stories to tell, I’m sure.
Ryan Miner is a writer, journalist, and founder of Sentinel Silver, a dignity-centered technology service for older adults. He lives in Maryland with his wife, Kimberly. His 2012 Hyundai Elantra has 268,444 miles.
