I’ve got a new Travel page that I soft launched with February’s ‘Current Things’ and formally launched earlier today with the blog post, ‘The Window’. I want to take a few seconds to talk logistics.

(y’all didn’t believe me when I said I was going to mostly blog about logistics)

Here’s a break down of the new Travel page:

At the top is my Flighty passport. The excellent–but very expensive– Flighty app has a feature that produces an image of all of the flights it’s tracked. This is a log of most (and maybe all!) of my flights since 2010. It makes me happy to look at this and remember the trips I’ve taken. It also reminds me that two places I’ve only visited once– Russia and China– are very big. I will update this image on a completely irregular basis.

The next section is the trips that I’ve got scheduled for this calendar year. Micro.blog does a good job of allowing me to easily create a category for every trip and then link to that category to show a running log of everything I’ve blogged about a specific trip. Sometimes I’ll write a lot about a trip. Sometimes I won’t. Have to keep y’all guessing.

The next section– Future Trips– is a rough sketch of my travel plans past this year. I probably won’t take some of these trips, but it’s fun to think about the places I want to go! I also find putting even a rough date to some of these trips helps me decide whether or not to move on to actually starting to plan them.

The final section– Past Trips– is a list of the trips I’ve taken organized by year. As a trip is completed, it’ll move from the current year section down to here.

A few other notes:

• As I mentioned above, I’ve also added a travel planning section to my Current Things page. This will be a list of the trips I’ve got planned for the current year.
• I plan to write travel-year-in-review-type posts. I’m going to do my best to do that for 2023 at some point, but I probably won’t go any further back than that.
• I also would like to blog more about travel in general (the industry, my philosophy, interesting links, etc.). I’ve started a Travel category to collect these thoughts in once place, but I want to do a bit more thinking about how I want to present these before I widely publicize it.

As I mentioned in the blog post, this is going to be more of a window rather than an all-encompassing travel log. I tried to do a lot of blogging while on my recent trip to Quebec Charlevoix, but found it difficult due to the nature of the trip (going 40 MPH down a hill is not conducive to writing) and due to some limitations of micro.blog (there’s a video upload limit that’s unclear to me–though I’m sure Manton would tell me if I asked!). There’s still a few processes that I need to hammer out around how to post photos/videos and what I find useful to capture during a trip as opposed to after. But real artists ship so I’ll figure some of these things out as I go.

Traveling scratches a lot of itches for me, but I think the biggest is answering the question, “What’s next?”.

I fight with this sometimes. I have a bad habit of sacrificing now for next. I like having things to look forward to, but I get consumed with it to the point that it feels like a trip is over when I finish planning it.

It also makes the actual trip feel like a checklist: a neat, chronologically-ordered inventory of the place I’m visiting. I either complete it by visiting all the sights I’m supposed to see or I don’t and I’m bummed because I missed something.

Most places aren’t Disney World: there’s not a finite set of attractions to ride. But sometimes it feels like it! It feels like you don’t see Paris if you don’t visit the Eiffel Tower, and the Louvre, and the Catacombs, and Moulin Rouge, and the Bastille, and and and and

I’m trying to embrace that there’s always going to be an ‘and’. Embrace that travel is more like a window: it’s a peak through to somewhere you don’t normally get to see. I’m trying to learn to enjoy what the window shows me rather than worrying about what’s outside of the frame.

Blogging is a lot like that too. I have such completist tendencies that sometimes I don’t bother if I can’t document everything. But I need to let that go. Blogging isn’t about giving readers a complete picture, it’s about offering them a window into somewhere they wouldn’t normally get to see.

So this travel blog is my attempt to offer a window. A restricted view into where, how, and why I like to go. Sometimes I’ll be philosophical about it. Sometimes I’m going to share some amazing pictures. Sometimes I’m going to recount a cool story. But most of the time I’ll probably just talk logistics.

That’s OK. It’s my window and I get to choose the frame.

There was an article making the rounds a few weeks ago about how Positano was “the most unpleasant place” the author (Rebecca Jennings) had ever been. If you haven’t read it, I’d really encourage you to do so. It’s short and the observations are astute, even if I don’t agree with all of them.

Something in this article hit me on an existential level and I’ve been trying to unpack it for the past several weeks.

I traveled extensively in my 20s and early 30s by gaming credit card points. Frankly, I had enough points to go anywhere and do anything. Time was my rate-limiting factor. It was exhilarating and exhausting.

Looking back, travel was a game to be won rather than anything meaningful. Destinations were chosen based on award availability and efficiency. Why visit three countries when logistically I could visit four? I told myself that I wanted to go everywhere and see everything, so letting award availability dictate my itinerary allowed me to have more points for more trips. Adding a day trip to a nearby country was one more I could check off on my list. More More More

This isn’t a mea culpa. I’m not sure I’d change any of it if I could. But as I’ve started to plan travel for a family rather than for a single guy, I’m realizing the missed opportunities. I’ve got pictures of myself in almost every place you’re “supposed” to go, but my memories are far fewer.

The positive spin is that it was all just a tasting menu— a way to try many places before coming back later for a bigger serving. But “I’ve visited 60 countries” sounds much more impressive than “I’ve visited 30 countries twice”.

Which brings me back to Jennings’ article. She ends with:

Everything about the way the industry works now — booking websites, credit cards, Chase points, Instagram — makes us believe that actually, we can afford to visit a place like Positano, and that it will look just as glorious as the photos taken from the most expensive resorts. Being adjacent to luxury, though, is not the same thing as experiencing it. In fact, it can make us feel bereft of something we never had in the first place, but somehow felt like we deserved.

Booking websites, credit cards, Chase points can allow you to afford to physically locate yourself in a place like Positano. Or Bhutan. Or the Maldives. But making these trips more than Instagram likes and desktop wallpapers requires more than a travel hack: it demands time, patience, and trial and error. Or a ton of money. Preferably all four.

We all want unique and special without the work it takes to make things different and notable. But the very definition of unique and special makes them uncommon. So if we’re going to attain the type of trip that Jennings—and frankly all of us— are looking for, it’s going to require a reframing of expectations, a changing of mindset. Less pilgrimage and more meandering. There should always be room to visit the Eiffel Towers and Big Bens of the world, but spare some time to find your own memories, as well.