FAQ

Why do I travel?

This is the perpetual question. When my spouse asks me why I want to visit a certain place I’ve been talking about for a few days, I can easily list off a food universally-recognized reasons: the scenery, the history, the food, etc. This is dodging the ultimate question, which is essentially why do I want to leave home to have a certain experience. In short, I could spend days explaining why I love to travel but I cannot tell you why I must travel. For some reason little parts of my soul start to evaporate through my skin when I am sedentary for too long or when my personal situation keeps me in one place for a while. My wanderlust is so powerful that I will catch myself thinking that maybe I should quit my job or leave my family for a while in order to go somewhere, a thought which requires faith that I can find a new job and my family patiently awaiting me upon my return. So why do I travel? I travel because something inside me compels me to. I travel because I must.

Why do you want to write about travel?

Everyone living their lives to the fullest has something that is more powerful than any other desire or experience. For me this is traveling. It’s about moving through the world more or less unnoticed to see how it operates following a different historical and cultural experience. It’s about being in a place where only I know myself and get to know myself as I get to know others’ lives. When I have an experience like that I only want to create something from it. So I try to write about it.

Who are your travel icons?

Aside from wishing to live my 20s over three times so emulate the irreverent way in which backpackers everywhere manage to spend their youths, I’ve come to respect certain semi-famous travelers to no end. On television I am torn between the charming Samantha Brown, whom nobody the world over has managed to meet and not fall in love with, and Anthony Bourdain, a badass travel chef who arrives in a place and gets to the heart of it almost effortlessly. From guidebooks I find Rick Steves to be the most like myself with his adorable and nerdy Type A travel personality and I have recently come to love the Dutch journalist Geert Maak who has managed to deliver the history and complexity of European life to me in paperback. Outside of traditional travel writers, I have a special place in my heart of Rachel Maddow and her seemingly unending knowledge of world issues. She also has the ability to move through the world with a self-assuredness that is downright dreamy. In a perfect world I would put all of these people into a proverbial blender, make a power shake, and have it for breakfast each morning to hopefully one day become the ultimate traveler. 

Do you really want to go everywhere? What is the ultimate goal here?

I don’t necessarily want to go everywhere, but I do want to visit a lot of places. I choose my next destination based on a number of factors, typically involving a careful balance of a “gut reaction” to an idea and my financial abilities at a given time. My favorite way to see a place is as a series of related places linked together like “treks.” I almost never travel to just one destination in a given trip, because that’s a vacation and not an experience. Certainly I will end my life not having been everywhere, but that’s not the point. The point is to see and do everything that speaks to me at a time in my life and to come away from it a little bit different.