Between five months of almost nonstop travel, dozens (maybe a hundred?) of flights, and trying to keep up with everything else, I somehow managed to miss last week’s Wednesday post. Several of my friends have asked me what Baikonur was actually like after I teased the trip a couple of weeks ago, so this week we’ll fix both problems. It’s also been far too long since I’ve written a proper trip report.

So...let’s head to Kazakhstan. Or is it Russia?

Every trip to Baikonur these days starts with a bit of a compromise. While there is an airport in Baikonur itself, it’s primarily reserved for government and official traffic, so tourists fly into Kyzylorda instead and then spend about three hours crossing the Kazakh steppe by bus.

Somewhere along that drive a couple folks in the group received the news none of us wanted to hear. The Soyuz launch had been postponed indefinitely…meaning it was extremely likely the main event we’d just arrived to see wouldn’t be happening. At least while we were there to see it.

Of course everyone was disappointed; we’d traveled halfway around the world hoping to watch a rocket launch…but there wasn’t much point dwelling on it. After a few minutes the conversation naturally shifted to what else there was to see. Looking back, I think that’s one of the advantages of traveling with experienced travelers. Everyone understood that one canceled event didn’t suddenly erase everything else we’d come for. We were already there, and were going to make the most of it.

By the time we reached Baikonur, most of the people in the group were already looking forward instead of backward.

After a surprisingly good late lunch (more on the food later), we had a rather chaotic check-in to our hotel and went our own ways in smaller groups. I went for the mandatory daily run, and right outside our hotel was a local cultural festival. Not an international festival where performers had flown in from around the world, but local residents enthusiastically celebrating different cultures. Imagine Russians singing La Bamba, children running around in traditional costumes, families everywhere, and people happily inviting curious tourists into the festivities.

Nobody had planned for it.

Which, of course, made it one of my favorite memories of the trip.

The next morning was dedicated to the cosmodrome itself, and for a lifelong space geek, it absolutely delivered.

The highlight for me was finally standing beneath Energia-M. I’d seen photos for years, but nothing prepares you for the sheer scale of that rocket or the enormous assembly building surrounding it. It’s hard to describe what it’s like…because, it’s just a giant hunk of metal at the end of the day, and you don’t marvel at it so much as stare upward trying to comprehend just how massive everything is.

What I loved most, though, was how unpolished and raw the experience felt. This wasn’t a perfectly curated museum with dramatic lighting and interactive displays. At one point our guide literally had to call “the guy with the key” so we could get inside another building. Tourism here still feels wonderfully improvised, and somehow that made it even better.

It feels less like visiting an exhibit and more like being allowed into somewhere you’re normally not supposed to see…and that is totally my jam.

The same was true of the Buran shuttle.

Growing up during the last years of the Cold War, Buran was always this mysterious Soviet counterpart to NASA’s Space Shuttle. Seeing one in person was surreal enough. Seeing it sitting inside its original building, surrounded by aging infrastructure and decades of history, was something else entirely.

The tiles are weathered. Equipment still sits nearby. Nothing feels the least bit restored or sanitized. It honestly looks as though the engineers went home one Friday afternoon expecting to come back Monday, only for history to take a different turn. So long USSR, hello whatever comes next.

Places like that are incredibly rare.

Standing at Gagarin’s Start was another one of those moments where history suddenly becomes real life, and you “learn” more about history than any textbook could ever teach you.

This is where Yuri Gagarin launched on April 12, 1961, becoming the first human ever to leave Earth. It’s one thing to know that fact. It’s another to stand on the same concrete, look across the same endless Kazakh steppe, and realize this quiet place was once the center of the world’s attention.

There aren’t many places where you can honestly say, “Everything changed right here.”

This is one of them.

One surprise for me was how much I enjoyed Baikonur itself.

After the launch was canceled, a few people decided to cut their losses and leave one day early. I’m genuinely glad I didn’t. Believe me, I seriously considered it. More comfortable hotel back in Almaty, one less day on busses going from site to site. I’m glad I resisted the temptation. Spending another day exploring the city turned out to probably be one of my best decisions of the trip.

The museums were better than expected, the monuments genuinely interesting, and simply walking around gave me a much better sense of what it’s like to live in a city built almost entirely around one industry.

Then, there was the final evening. Hanging out with an incredible group of like-minded people, avgeeking with a couple of kindred spirits who were also in Baikonur with a different tour, and just all around amazing craic as the Irish would say.

Everywhere you turn, Baikonur reminds you why it exists.

There are monuments to Gagarin, rockets displayed in parks, murals celebrating Soviet space achievements, and apartment blocks built to house the people who made it all happen. It’s impossible to forget where you are…and that’s what made this trip so amazing. It wasn’t an event, or a must-see site, it was basically an all-consuming experience.

The museum inside the Palace of Culture deserves a special mention.

I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting much, but it ended up being full of fascinating Soviet-era artifacts, photographs, uniforms, and stories from the early days of the cosmodrome. Like so many things on this trip, it exceeded my expectations simply because I hadn’t expected much in the first place.

Then there was Rocket Park.

Because apparently one or two rockets around town just wasn’t enough.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of all was how wrong we’d been about the practical side of visiting.

Before arriving we’d been told the restaurants would be crowded, the food mediocre, and that buying the group’s meal package was pretty much essential. As it turned out, the canceled launch also quietly canceled the meal package. Instead, we ate wherever we wanted and discovered several genuinely good restaurants around town.

Even Hotel Tsentralnaya improved dramatically once I learned the secret every experienced traveler eventually learns: skip the grim hotel breakfast, walk two blocks, and find the excellent local coffee shop instead. Sure, it’s not free and if you’re on a really tight budget that matters, but it’s more real instead of a curated for visitors experience.

Funny how often travel rewards curiosity.

Looking back, I’m actually grateful I stayed the extra day.

Yes, I’d still love to see a Soyuz launch someday. But Baikonur turned out to be far more than a place where rockets leave Earth. It’s a fascinating city, a living museum of the Space Race, and one of the few places I’ve visited that still feels genuinely undiscovered by mainstream tourism.

If you’re a fellow aviation or space geek, I’d absolutely recommend it. Tourism here is still a little rough around the edges. You’ll need permits, patience, and a willingness to embrace a bit of bureaucracy. But you’ll also get something that’s becoming increasingly rare in travel: an experience that still feels authentic.

And for those of us who grew up at the tail end of the Space Race, that’s worth every mile of the journey.

I’ve tried each week to write about what’s on my mind after that week of travel, and it feels now like they’ve come together into something I want to write as a bit of a capstone piece this week.

In <a href=”https://substack.com/home/post/p-213839038”>Papua New Guinea: Why One Visit Wasn’t Enough</a>, I wrote about realizing that collecting passport stamps isn’t the same thing as truly knowing a place. A week later, <a href=”https://substack.com/home/post/p-214879516”>What Returning to Berlin Taught Me About Hidden Gems</a> explored how the best travel experiences often begin once you’ve stopped worrying about seeing everything you’re “supposed” to see.

Both essays were really about changing the way I think about travel.

My recent trip to Baikonur taught me something different.

This time, it wasn’t because I discovered something unexpected.

It was because the one thing I’d traveled halfway around the world to see never happened.

There were about twenty of us on the trip, and if you’d asked any one of us why we’d made the journey to this remote corner of Kazakhstan, I suspect the answer would have been identical. We’d come to watch a Soyuz rocket launch.

For many people, it had been on the bucket list for years. Baikonur is where the Space Age truly began. Sputnik launched from here. Yuri Gagarin launched from here. Even today, standing on the Kazakh steppe watching a Soyuz climb into the sky feels like one of the most iconic experiences in space travel.

Then, a couple of days before launch, literally less than an hour after we’d landed in Kyzylorda (the nearest airport to Baikonur) the news arrived.

It had been postponed. Not by a few hours or by a day…by an “undetermined amount of time.” If you know the type of nonstop travelers I do, these are not people who generally build a spare week into their schedules to wait around.

Naturally, everyone was disappointed. How could you not be? We’d all built this trip around one moment.

What surprised me wasn’t the cancellation itself. It was what happened next. Or perhaps more accurately...

...what didn’t happen.

I don’t remember hearing a single complaint. No whining. Maybe a few lighthearted jokes at most.

Nobody spent the evening grumbling about wasted time. Nobody declared the trip ruined. After a few moments of obvious disappointment, the conversation simply shifted to what we were going to do instead.

Looking back, I don’t think that reaction was accidental.

It came from experience.

The longer I’ve been travelling, the more I’ve realized that every trip is incomplete.

There will always be another neighborhood to wander, another restaurant someone insists you should have tried, another museum that closed on Mondays, another sunset hidden behind clouds.

Travel has never been about seeing everything…it’s about making the most of whatever happens while you’re there.

Why should a canceled rocket launch be any different?

Yes, we’d lost the main character, but the other nine or ten reasons we’d come to Baikonur were still sitting exactly where we’d left them.

So we carried on. A few people cut their trip short by a day to move on to other things, but there were exactly zero complaints.

We stood beneath the enormous Energia rocket. We explored launch facilities that changed human history. We wandered through abandoned Buran space shuttles that looked less like museum exhibits and more like someone had simply finished work one Friday afternoon and forgotten to return. The trip we’d imagined had changed, but it hadn’t become any less interesting.

As we pondered what we’d do instead during the remaining two hours of the bus ride, we soon arrived in Baikonur and went straight to lunch. Then came something none of us could possibly have planned.

We headed to our hotel to check in and found the square outside filled with music, dancing, families, children, and people dressed in traditional clothing. An unexpected local cultural “festival of nations” was underway.

Within minutes our group had scattered into the crowd, chatting with locals, taking photos, and smiling our way through conversations despite the language barrier.

Nobody had traveled to Baikonur expecting that experience.

Which, of course, is exactly why it became one of my favorite memories of the trip. Some of the best travel moments aren’t hidden because they’re secret. They’re hidden because they couldn’t possibly have been planned.

The whole experience also reminded me how much the people you travel with matter.

I’ve been fortunate over the years to travel with everyone from first-time out-of-the-country folks to people who’ve visited every country on Earth twice. One thing I’ve noticed is that attitudes spread remarkably quickly.

Negativity does., but optimism does too.

Had twenty people spent the next three days complaining about the canceled launch, I suspect that’s what I’d remember most about Baikonur.

Instead, I spent my time in Baikonur surrounded by experienced travelers who simply accepted reality and immediately became curious about everything that was still left to see. I admit I was frustrated myself, and debated leaving a day early. I stayed because the people around me were fun to explore with.

That mindset changed the trip far more than the cancellation ever could.

A few weeks ago, in <a href=”https://substack.com/home/post/p-212644547”>Travel Has a Way of Proving You Wrong</a>, I wrote that many of the strongest opinions we carry into travel eventually run into exceptions.

Perhaps itineraries deserve the same treatment.

We often convince ourselves that one moment will define an entire trip. The launch. The safari. The northern lights. The perfect weather.

Sometimes those things happen. Sometimes they don’t.

What I’ve gradually come to appreciate is that successful trips aren’t defined by whether everything goes according to plan. They’re defined by how quickly we’re willing to let go of the trip we imagined and embrace the one we’re actually having.

Looking back now, I won’t think of Baikonur as the trip where the rocket launch was canceled.

I’ll remember it as the trip where I stood beneath Soviet rockets, explored forgotten space shuttles, stumbled into an unexpected cultural festival, and spent a week with nineteen people who quietly reminded me what experienced travelers do best.

They accept reality.

Then they get on with enjoying the adventure.

Every city supposedly has them. Every guidebook ever written promises them. Every YouTube thumbnail claims you’ve been “doing Paris wrong” and reveals the one neighborhood locals don’t want tourists to discover.

The more I travel, the less I even skim those articles. Not because hidden gems don’t exist, but because I don’t think the ones they include are actually hidden or “gems” at all.

Hidden gems? They exist, but not in the way we’re led to believe. So what are they? I think they’re earned.

When I first started traveling, I wanted to see everything I was “supposed” to see. If I flew all the way to Paris, of course I was going to the Eiffel Tower. Rome meant the Colosseum. Sydney meant the Opera House. Berlin meant Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, Museum Island and Checkpoint Charlie. Those places are famous for a reason, and I’d still recommend every single one of them to someone visiting that place for the first time.

But something funny happens when you return.

The checklist disappears.

You stop worrying about whether you’ve “covered” a city correctly and start following whatever genuinely interests you about a place, even if it sounds completely ridiculous to everyone else.

Which is exactly how I found myself spending two days in Berlin recently riding suburban trams, tiny ferries and obscure S-Bahn branches instead of standing in another museum queue.

One of my first stops was a tiny medieval church tucked away in Hellersdorf. It isn’t on the postcard racks, the sightseeing buses don’t stop nearby, and I’m pretty sure it never appears on anyone’s list of Berlin’s “must-see” attractions.

Objectively, it’s a small stone church.

Subjectively, it was exactly the kind of place I wanted to see that day.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped measuring cities by how many famous landmarks I could check off and started appreciating the quieter places that tell their stories just as well. See, I think that’s the funny thing about hidden gems. They’re often hiding in plain sight. I think you only start noticing them once you’re no longer looking for the obvious.

Then…there was Tram 68. On paper, it’s just another public transport line. In reality, it’s one of the most unique and beautiful tram rides I’ve ever taken.

The line has existed in one form or another for more than a century. After leaving the suburbs of Berlin, it slips into the forest, carving its way alongside lakes and through stretches of woodland that make it almost impossible to believe you’re still inside Germany’s largest city.

Ten years ago I probably would have looked at that route map and wondered why anyone would spend nearly an hour riding a tram. Now I was deliberately timing connections so I could ride the entire line from end to end.

Travel changes you in funny ways.

At the end of the tram line, I boarded Berlin’s tiny F21 ferry. Calling it a ferry almost feels generous. I’d imagined something substantial much like the harbour ferries in Sydney. Instead, a little boat appeared that looked more like it belonged to a local yacht club than a major European capital’s public transport system.

I climbed aboard, the entire boat just for me and the guy driving it, crossed the water in just around eight minutes, and suddenly found myself somewhere that felt worlds away from the crowds around the Brandenburg Gate.

It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t efficient. It never made a postcard.

It was absolutely wonderful.

Of course, hidden gems rarely come without a little effort. According to ChatGPT the walk from Krampenburg to Müggelheim to catch a bus and continue on with my journey looked perfectly reasonable.

ChatGPT lied. It got very defensive when I called it out on it.

What I expected to be a pleasant stroll of 10-15 minutes turned into several kilometers through quiet woodland. Somewhere along the way I became extremely grateful for a bench that appeared at exactly the right moment. Eventually, nearly an hour later, I emerged into town, caught a bus, realized I’d accidentally wandered into Berlin’s Zone C transit area because ChatGPT screwed up again, bought another ticket, got caught in a rain shower on the way back, and somehow enjoyed every minute of it.

None of those little inconveniences made the day worse.

They made it memorable.

The stories we tell years later rarely begin with, “Everything went exactly according to plan and OMG it was amazing.” They usually begin with something closer to “you’ll never believe what happened on this trip!”

As I sat beside the lake before heading back into the city, it struck me that maybe hidden gems aren’t places at all.

Maybe they’re a stage of travel.

Nobody should skip the Brandenburg Gate because some writer online insists the “real Berlin” is somewhere else. That’s poppycock. Famous places become famous because, more often than not, they’re worth seeing.

But after you’ve visited them...After you’ve taken the photos...After you’ve checked the boxes...Something shifts.

You stop asking, What am I supposed to see?

You start asking, What am I curious about?

That question leads to very different days.

I’ve now been to Berlin dozens of times, and if someone asked me which trip I’ve enjoyed most, It’s no longer as easy as it once was to say “the first one.”

It might be this one.

Not because I discovered Berlin’s best-kept secrets.

The little church had been standing there for centuries before I arrived. Tram 68 has been running through the forest for generations. The tiny ferry has been crossing that stretch of water every day whether tourists notice it or not.

Those places weren’t waiting for me.

They were simply waiting until I became the kind of traveler who finally noticed them.

There were no countries left to tick off, no lists to chase (very intentionally on my part), and no pressure to squeeze one more passport stamp into an itinerary. I simply went wherever sounded interesting. Some trips were built around a great airfare, others around seeing friends, a place like Greenland because it’s incredible, or simply curiosity.

It reminded me of the advice I got before my first Ironman triathlon. People warned me that after spending years working toward one enormous goal, actually achieving it could leave a surprising hole in your life. The thing that had defined so much of it was suddenly over, and you were left staring at a simple question:

What next?

Ah yes...the curse of the Type A personality. Eventually, though, another realization crept in: visiting every country didn’t necessarily mean I’d experienced every country.

Some places I’d spent weeks exploring. Others, if I was honest, amounted to little more than an airport, a hotel, and a passport stamp. They all counted equally on the map, but they certainly didn’t feel equal in my memory.

Papua New Guinea was probably one of the best examples.

My first trip to Papua New Guinea back in 2014 lasted exactly one night.

Unfortunately, I had unknowingly arrived the day after a contentious national election. Port Moresby was effectively locked down, security was everywhere, and most of what I’d planned to see simply wasn’t possible. I flew back to Australia having technically visited the country, but feeling like I’d barely seen any of it.

This time, I decided to do things differently.

The Mount Hagen Festival was the reason for returning, and it deserves a story of its own. Around that, though, I built an itinerary that would let me spend nine nights in the country: one night in Port Moresby at the beginning and end, four unforgettable nights in Mount Hagen, and then three nights exploring places I’d never seen before: Lae, Rabaul, and Buka in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville.

Almost immediately, Papua New Guinea reminded me why so many people consider it such a fascinating place to travel.

People had warned me endlessly about the domestic flights. “Expect delays.” “Expect cancellations.” “Don’t make tight connections.”

For a while, everything looked surprisingly smooth. Flights shifted by ten or fifteen minutes here and there, but nothing dramatic. Then came my departure from Lae.

The flight was moved from 11:30 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., which meant leaving my hotel before dawn because it sat nearly an hour from the airport. I dragged myself out of bed, arrived at the terminal...and discovered the flight had been “retimed” again.

To 12:30 p.m.

Thanks, PNG Air. I didn’t really want to sleep or enjoy a leisurely morning anyways.

In fairness, that ended up being the biggest disruption of the trip and it really didn’t ruin anything in a major way. Every other flight operated reasonably close to schedule, proving that sometimes the horror stories are just that…stories.

Safety was another topic everyone seemed eager to share their views on before I left.

There’s no denying Papua New Guinea has serious security challenges, and pretending otherwise wouldn’t be honest. During my visit there was even a bit of a riot outside Mount Hagen after the festival ended, fueled by a familiar combination of young men and alcohol. My airport transfer in Lae came in a bus belonging to a company called Guard Dog Security, complete with wire mesh covering every window. It felt more like a prison transport than an airport transfer.

On paper, none of that sounds especially reassuring.

And yet, throughout the entire trip, I never once felt genuinely unsafe.

That’s not because the risks aren’t real. It’s because travel is almost always more nuanced than its reputation. By taking sensible precautions, listening to local advice, and respecting the places I was visiting, my experience turned out to be very different from the one many people had warned me about.

The biggest surprise, however, wasn’t the flights or the security.

It was the culture.

Papua New Guinea is often described as probably the most culturally diverse country on Earth, with more than 800 languages still spoken today. Statistics like that are impressive, but they don’t really capture what it feels like to be there. In many parts of the world, traditional culture survives mostly as a performance for visitors (Hawiian Luau anyone?) or as something preserved in museums. In Papua New Guinea, it still feels alive. Tribal identity remains important, customs continue to shape daily life, and even away from the festival you sense that these traditions aren’t just being recreated for tourists, they’re simply part of who people are.

That feeling stayed with me long after the festival and the “performance” ended.

I was also surprised by how much the country challenged my expectations in many smaller ways.

Port Moresby has changed dramatically since my first visit. There are several international-standard hotels in the city now, and it feels far more developed than I’d remembered. Lae surprised me even more. I checked into the Lae International Hotel expecting something functional and instead found a property that would comfortably hold its own in most cities in the world.

Rabaul and Bougainville were certainly more basic, but they had exactly what I needed: clean rooms, welcoming staff, and a genuine sense of hospitality.

Rabaul, in particular, has an extraordinary story. In 1994, twin volcanic eruptions buried much of the town beneath ash, destroying countless buildings and forcing residents to rebuild elsewhere. (You can still see piles of ash alongside the road to the day.) My hotel was one of the few major structures that survived. Sitting there with the volcano rising in the distance, it was impossible not to appreciate how resilient the people of Rabaul have been.

Bougainville may have been the biggest surprise of all.

Most people know very little about it, despite the fact that it may well become the world’s newest independent country in the coming years. What I found was a place of incredible natural beauty, super friendly and curious people, and an atmosphere that felt completely different from anywhere else I’d visited in Papua New Guinea.

Like so much of this trip, it left me wanting more (maybe after a short break somewhere more…”comfortable”) rather than feeling finished.

That may be the biggest lesson Papua New Guinea taught me.

Some destinations can be experienced surprisingly well in a day or two. Liechtenstein and San Marino…I’m looking at you…. They’re wonderful places, but you can leave after a relatively brief visit feeling you’ve gained a pretty good sense of them.

Papua New Guinea isn’t one of those places.

Nine nights felt substantial while I was planning the trip. By the time I boarded my flight home, it felt like I’d barely scratched the surface.

When I finished visiting every country, I assumed the next chapter of my travels would simply involve seeing new things. Instead, I’ve found myself doing something I never expected: returning and considering if I should do all 193/196 for a second time.

Not because I missed checking boxes, but because I’ve come to appreciate that almost all countries deserve far more than a single visit. A passport stamp can tell you where you’ve been, but it says very little about what you’ve actually experienced there.

My first trip to Papua New Guinea allowed me to say I’d visited.

My second trip finally let me begin to understand why I’ll almost certainly be back for a third.

One of the things I’ve loved most about the last couple of years of more-or-less nonstop travel is that every destination seems to come with its own unwritten rulebook if you were to listen to other travelers.

See the famous landmark. Eat where the locals eat. Skip the tourist traps. Never order food that has a picture on the menu. Don’t waste time at chain restaurants. Travel independently whenever you can.

Spend enough time around seasoned travelers and you’ll collect dozens of these little rules. Many are genuinely helpful, or at a bare minimum come from a place of good intentions. Others become articles of faith, repeated so often that we stop questioning whether they’re always true.

After thirty+ years of traveling, I’ve started to notice something interesting: the world seems to have an endless talent for finding the exception to the rule.

I’m winding down this Australian and Papua New Guinea trip exactly where millions of visitors do: standing in front of the Sydney Opera House. It’s iconic for a reason, and I’d tell anyone visiting Sydney that it’s absolutely worth seeing. But by the end of the week, the experience that stayed with me most wasn’t one of Australia’s most famous attractions.

It was a zoo I’d never even heard of until 24 hours before going there.

I wasn’t even in Dubbo because of the zoo.

True to form, I’d flown there on a day trip to tick off another NomadMania region. A friend insisted that if I was making the trip, I had to visit Taronga Western Plains Zoo. I thanked them politely, but privately I wasn’t convinced.

Like many travelers, I’d gradually developed a fairly simple opinion: zoos are best avoided because they pen up animals in artificial habitats where they’re not always treated the best.

I’d seen enough depressing collections of animals over the years to wonder whether they belonged in the past. Keeping wild animals in captivity for our entertainment never sat particularly well with me, so I’d quietly and unintentionally adopted another travel rule:

All zoos are bad.

Still, I gave the zoo a go, and within about fifteen minutes of walking through the entrance, I realized the rule wasn’t going to survive the day.

The animals weren’t pacing small concrete enclosures. Many lived in enormous open habitats designed for breeding, research and conservation rather than spectacle. The zoo itself covers hundreds of hectares, and instead of shuffling past cages you spend your day walking, cycling or driving through a five-kilometre (if you ONLY stick to the path and don’t wander taking endless pics) circuit that feels far closer to a wildlife reserve than the zoos I remembered growing up. Taronga Western Plains Zoo was created specifically to provide more natural space for large animals and endangered-species breeding, reflecting a broader shift from exhibition toward conservation.

That doesn’t mean I had changed my mind about every zoo…but I had changed my mind about this one.

As I walked, it struck me that this wasn’t really a lesson about zoos at all. It was another reminder that almost every “rule” I’ve accumulated through travel eventually runs into an exception.

Independent travel is usually my favorite...until I find myself somewhere like Abiye, where joining a group isn’t settling…it’s the only practical way to experience the place.

Street food has given me some of the best meals of my life...and a few of the longest nights. Chain restaurants can feel unimaginative...until you’re curious to see how McDonald’s in Saudi Arabia or Starbucks in China reflects local culture rather than replacing it.

And yes, even zoos, it turns out, aren’t all the same.

The longer I travel, the less interested I become in universal rules and the more interested I become in individual experiences.

That’s also why I’ve become increasingly suspicious of the phrase “must-see.”

Of course there are places that deserve their reputation. Sydney Harbour is spectacular. The Eiffel Tower is iconic. Machu Picchu leaves people speechless for good reason.

But some of the most meaningful experiences I’ve had weren’t famous enough to make anyone’s bucket list.

They happened in a remote border town, on a tiny island, in the back seat of a taxi, or on a day trip to Dubbo that almost didn’t happen because I’d already convinced myself I knew what to expect.

Travel is wonderful because it introduces us to new places.

It’s even better when it introduces us to a new version of our own thinking.

I’ve come to believe that curiosity is one of the greatest gifts travel offers. Not just the curiosity about where to go next, although that’s certainly part of it. Curiosity about whether the opinions we’ve accumulated over the years still deserve to be held quite so tightly.

Sometimes they do.

Sometimes they don’t.

And every now and then, somewhere you never expected, perhaps even at a zoo in rural Australia, you discover that the world is a little more complicated, and a little more interesting, than the rules you’ve been carrying around in your head.

That’s a souvenir worth bringing home.

“You have to eat like a local when you go there.”

It sounds wonderfully adventurous. Skip the tourist restaurants. Find the tiny place with no English menu. Order whatever everyone else is having. If you really want to understand a country, the argument goes, start with its food.

There’s certainly some truth to that, but there’s also a dirty little secret that almost nobody talks about: after a few weeks traveling through remote parts of the world, sometimes you’re not searching for authenticity.

You’re just hoping to find something that won’t spend the next three days trying to kill you and make you regret your life choices.

Anyone who’s spent even a little time on the road knows exactly what I’m talking about. Somewhere between your second questionable street meat and your first frantic search for a pharmacy in a language you don’t speak, your definition of a “good restaurant” changes dramatically.

Suddenly, pizza starts looking like one of humanity’s greatest inventions.

The funny thing is that the more I’ve traveled, the more I’ve realized “local food” isn’t nearly as straightforward as self-proclaimed travel gurus make it seem.

Walk around almost any city in the world today and you’ll find pizza. And burgers. And sushi. And fried chicken.

…and if you’re really lucky (at least in my books) coffee shops with hipsters that wouldn’t look out of place back home.

One of the biggest surprises for me has been Africa. (Let’s be honest: one of the best parts about Africa in general is all the wonderful surprises.) Thanks in part to decades of Chinese investment, I’ve lost count of the number of surprisingly good Chinese restaurants I’ve found in places where I never expected them. Not because they’re catering to tourists...there usually aren’t any...but because that’s simply part of modern life there.

Authenticity isn’t frozen in time, and neither are the people who live there.

We sometimes forget that locals don’t wake up every morning asking themselves “hey, how am I going to eat more authentically today?”

They’re just...you know…people.

Sometimes they cook family recipes that have been passed down for generations, and sometimes they order pizza because it’s Friday night.

Sometimes they grab burgers after work, and sometimes they celebrate birthdays at the local Chinese restaurant.

Think about your own hometown and how often you eat the cuisine your region or country is famous for?

If someone visited Australia, would I insist they eat meat pies, barramundi, and kangaroo and wash it down with a flat white every day? Of course not.

I’d probably suggest Thai one night, Chinese the next, and tell them where to find the best little hole in the wall wine bar.

So why do we expect everyone else in the world to live inside the pages of a guidebook?

That realization has changed the way I think about food while traveling. I still love trying regional specialties whenever I can, but I’ve stopped treating every meal as some kind of authenticity exam that I either pass or fail.

Sometimes the most local thing you can do is simply eat what everyone else around you happens to be enjoying.

Recently I watched a friend use AI repeatedly on a trip to translate a menu. Then he asked it to recommend “something really local.” Then he asked which dish it thought he’d enjoy most. Objectively, it was brilliant.

AI knew his preferences. It understood the menu. It could probably recommend something he might never have picked on his own.

But I realized I wouldn’t want it to do that for me. Not because I think it’s wrong, but because, for me, it removes the best part:

I’ve ordered things I couldn’t identify. I’ve accidentally eaten dishes I still can’t name.

I’ve loved meals I never would have chosen based on my preferences.

I’ve also had more than a few spectacular failures, and those failures usually make the best stories.

Travel has always been a little messy, and for me that’s exactly the point.

Which brings me back to that original advice:

Yes...eat like a local.

But maybe we should spend less time trying to define what that actually means.

Sometimes it means the family recipe that’s been served for generations, sometimes it means the Chinese restaurant that’s become part of everyday life, sometimes it means pizza after work because nobody felt like cooking.

Food, like travel itself, refuses to fit into neat little categories.

And maybe that’s exactly why I love it so much.

Because whether it’s king crab in Murmansk, lemon chicken in Cabinda, pizza in Cameroon, or the world’s most famous hot dog in Reykjavík, the meal is rarely the thing I remember most.

It’s the conversation, the people around the table, the laughter after ordering something completely unexpected.

Years later, I can barely remember what half of these dishes tasted like, but I can easily remember exactly who I shared them with.

“You should write a book.”

It usually comes a few minutes after someone discovers I’ve visited every country in the world...or 196, if you’re using my admittedly obsessive way of counting. They assume that’s the obvious next step. Visit the world. Write the book. It almost feels like part of the contract.

The funny thing is, I never really wanted to.

It wasn’t because I don’t enjoy writing. Quite the opposite. I genuinely look forward to sitting down and trying to make sense of something I’ve experienced. The problem was that I never felt I had a book that needed to be written. There are already wonderful travel memoirs. There are guidebooks, coffee table books, books about visiting every country, books about finding yourself on the road. I wasn’t sure I had anything unique to add to the shelf.

Then, a few weeks ago, it hit me…I’d already named the book years earlier.

I just hadn’t realized it.

When I started traveling internationally, I thought the destinations were the story. I was fascinated by airports, passports, unfamiliar languages and countries I’d only ever seen in an atlas. Every border crossing felt like unlocking another piece of the world, and for a long time I measured my travels the same way most people do: by where I’d been.

Somewhere along the way, though, I realized I almost never tell people about the destinations.

I tell them about the taxi driver.

Or the border guard.

Or the woman who invited me into her home along with a dozen strangers to show me her doll collection from travelling around the world.

Or the tiny plane that landed on a dirt runway because there wasn’t another way to reach the village.

The countries simply became the settings. The stories were always about the people, the moments, and the unexpected turns that happened once I got there.

I think part of the reason it took me so long to see this is because of the people I’ve been lucky enough to spend my life and career around.

For twenty-five years I worked at the World Bank alongside people whose jobs routinely took them to places most travelers never visit. I started spending more and more time with people who thought nothing of spending a weekend in Central Asia or a vacation in West Africa. Visiting fifty countries wasn’t unusual in that crowd. Neither was one hundred…but even they often found my travels unusual and “exotic.”

When you surround yourself with people whose stories sound just as extraordinary as your own, it’s surprisingly easy to convince yourself that yours aren’t particularly special.

Then something funny happens.

You mention your trip to North Korea at a random dinner with the Director of one of DC’s “Alphabet agencies” and they drop their fork.

Or tell someone about hiring a boat to cross from Colombia into Peru.

Or explain why you voluntarily flew three different airplanes just to visit one tiny region that almost nobody has heard of.

Suddenly you’re reminded that what has become normal to you is anything but normal to most people.

That’s when I finally understood what people had been trying to tell me all along.

They weren’t asking for another book about visiting every country.

They were asking for the stories.

Not because everyone dreams of standing on the North Korean border or finding themselves on a beach in Kiribati, but because stories have a remarkable way of making distant places feel human. We remember stories far longer than statistics. We remember awkward moments, unexpected kindnesses, ridiculous travel mishaps and the people who quietly changed our perspective without ever realizing they’d done it.

Those are the memories that have stayed with me too. Years later, I rarely remember what a plane ticket cost or what “must see” thing I saw in a museum. I remember the taxi ride that became a philosophy lesson, the stranger who insisted I join his family for dinner, the airport that looked more like a garden shed than a terminal, and the border crossing that taught me patience better than any self-help book ever could.

That’s also why I think these essays have grown into something I never expected.

When I started writing 196 Stories, I assumed the audience would mostly be other travelers. People chasing new countries, obscure flights or impossible itineraries.

Instead, many of the messages I treasure most come from people who have never been to any of the places I’m writing about. They aren’t reading because they want to copy my itinerary.

They’re reading because the stories remind them of something they’ve felt in their own lives: curiosity, uncertainty, excitement, fear, wonder or the simple joy of trying something new. The destination almost becomes incidental.

And honestly, that’s incredibly freeing to me.

Because maybe the goal was never to convince someone to visit Kiribati or Abiye or North Korea.

Maybe it’s simply to convince someone to finally apply for a passport.

Or book the trip they’ve been putting off.

Or say yes to an opportunity that feels just a little outside their comfort zone.

Some people will discover they love traveling.

Others won’t.

Both are perfectly okay.

What matters is giving yourself the chance to find out.

So yes...maybe there will be a book someday soon. I certainly hope so. Not because I visited every country, but because every country gave me another story to share.

Looking back, I can’t believe it took me this long to realize it, because the answer had been staring me in the face from the very beginning.

It’s the name at the top of this page: 196 Stories.

Not a travel checklist. Not a guidebook.

Just a collection of stories from a very curious life that I hope encourages someone else to become a little more curious about their own.

Not just the places, but the details that probably shouldn’t matter after all these years. The Delta L-1011 from Cincinnati to London Gatwick. At the time, flying Delta across the Atlantic felt impossibly exotic. From London we connected onto British Airways for Leningrad (yes, it was still called Leningrad then) and somewhere during that journey I realized the world was so much bigger than I’d ever imagined.

Everything about that trip seemed extraordinary. The airports felt exotic. The food was unusual. Street signs were in different languages. Even simple errands like boarding a tram carried a sense of adventure because I had no idea how they were supposed to work. Finding money meant searching for a bank or exchange office to exchange travelers checks. Nobody had smartphones, translation apps, or GPS. Getting a little lost wasn’t poor planning; it was simply part of traveling…and a real risk…which for a first-time international traveler was slightly terrifying.

What I remember most isn’t any single landmark I saw. It’s the feeling that every hour held the possibility of something I’d never experienced before.

Today, almost all of those things have become second nature.

Landing in another country rarely raises my pulse. If I need cash, there’s usually an ATM a few steps away. If I can’t read a sign or a menu, my phone can translate it in seconds. Hotels, train schedules, restaurant recommendations, even obscure visa rules now live in my pocket. Increasingly, people are asking AI to build detailed itineraries before they’ve even booked their plane tickets.

Travel has never been easier. Wonder, however, still takes work.

It’s tempting to conclude that technology has somehow stolen the magic. Certainly, some of the uncertainty has disappeared. But the more I think about it, the less I believe technology is the real story…the bigger change has been me.

The first passport stamp is unforgettable because you’ve never had one before. The first overnight flight feels magical because you’ve never watched the sun rise over the Atlantic. The first country where nobody speaks your language leaves an impression that stays with you for decades.

Eventually, if you’re fortunate enough to keep traveling like I’ve been able to, those experiences stop being firsts. They don’t become less remarkable, they simply become familiar. Somewhere along the way, bucket-list moments quietly turn into Tuesdays.

That realization hit me recently while looking back through photos from my recent trip to South America. In the span of about twenty-four hours, I flew into Brazil, crossed by taxi into Colombia, hired a private boat into Peru, then wandered back into Brazil that evening for a caipirinha before flying onwards into Colombia the next morning.

Objectively, that’s a ridiculous sentence. Yet while I was living it, it felt completely normal to me. Not because those places had become ordinary, but because I'd slowly become accustomed to living experiences that once would have sounded impossible to me.

Maybe that’s why I’ve found myself gravitating toward strange little milk-run flights lately. Tiny airplanes hopping between airports that almost nobody has heard of. Remote regions that will never appear on a “Top 10 Places to Visit” list. Places I probably wouldn’t have considered twenty years ago because I was too busy chasing first the thrill of an international trip…then new countries…then every country.

I wondered whether I was simply moving the goalposts. Had I become so spoiled by travel that I needed increasingly obscure experiences just to feel excited again?

I’m not so sure.

The more I’ve reflected on it, the more I think what I’ve been chasing isn’t obscure aircraft or forgotten airports at all.

I’m chasing the ability to see the world the way I once did. Not because I knew less, but because everything was new.

That feeling I had stepping onto that L-1011 all those years ago. The sense that I didn’t know exactly what the day would bring. That almost every experience had the potential to surprise me.

Children don’t stand in front of a waterfall wondering whether it’s one of the ten best in the world. They don’t compare today’s sunset to the last fifty sunsets they’ve seen.

They simply look.

Somewhere along the way, many of us stop looking quite that way. Experience gives us perspective. The challenge is not letting it cost us our sense of wonder.

Sometimes that means choosing the tiny airport over the major hub. Sometimes it means wandering down the street that wasn't in the guidebook instead of following the crowds. Sometimes it simply means asking one more question instead of checking one more attraction off the list. None of those things are guaranteed to create a memorable story. But they all make it more likely that I'll actually notice the one that's unfolding around me.

The destination always changes…the feeling doesn’t have to.

I can’t recreate my first international trip. I can’t recreate the first flight that I remember. None of us can. Once you’ve seen the world (or even just a small part of it) you can’t unknow what you know. Experience changes us, and that’s a gift.

But perhaps experience also comes with a quiet responsibility to ourselves. To remember that the things we’ve become accustomed to are still extraordinary. To remember that what has become common through “our eyes” is still magical to someone experiencing it for the first time.

To occasionally put the phone away instead of searching for the perfect experience.

To notice the little things, because those are usually the stories we end up telling years later anyway.

Because the goal was never simply to collect countries…or flights…or passport stamps.

The goal was to become the kind of person who still notices them...who can still look at the world with just enough of a child's eyes to be surprised by it.

Not finding somewhere more exotic. Just remembering to look at the world with the same curiosity that made us fall in love with it in the first place.

It wasn’t some principled stand against tours. I simply liked having control over my own time. I could stay somewhere longer if I liked it, leave early if I didn’t, change my plans halfway through the day, or pursue some obscure regional border that no normal person would find remotely interesting.

For most of my journey to every country in the world, I think I took exactly one proper group trip: North Korea. And that was mostly because, well, there wasn’t exactly another option.

Over the past few years, though, I’ve found myself traveling with groups more often, particularly as the places I want to reach have become more remote and complicated. Along the way, I’ve realized I was thinking about “group travel” completely wrong.

There really is no single thing called group travel. There are just groups.

And the people in them can matter every bit as much as the destination.

One of my first lessons came in Greenland, where I signed up for what was technically a group excursion and discovered the “group” consisted of exactly two people.

By complete coincidence, the other traveler turned out to be one of the most traveled people in the world. We spent hours talking about obscure countries, remote regions and a community of extreme travelers that I had mostly watched from the sidelines. That encounter eventually helped convince me to become much more involved in that world myself.

Had there been forty people on the boat, we might never have spoken.

That’s the first thing I’ve learned: not all groups are remotely the same. A group can mean two strangers in Greenland or twenty people on a bus. And when you sign up, you usually have no idea who those people will be.

That’s probably the biggest gamble.

I’ve joined inexpensive trips where I barely connected with another person, and more expensive ones where a higher price definitely did not guarantee more compatible personalities. Age doesn’t guarantee compatibility. Nationality doesn’t. Income certainly doesn’t. Even being extremely well traveled doesn’t necessarily make someone pleasant to travel with.

Sometimes you click. Sometimes you don’t. The opposite is true when you already know the group.

Years ago, a friend convinced me to join an all-inclusive resort trip in the Dominican Republic, which may be one of the least “me” travel sentences I’ve ever written.

And I had an incredible time.

It wasn’t because I suddenly discovered a passion for wristbands and all-you-can-eat buffets. It was because I was with people I genuinely enjoyed, we met more great people, and the destination almost became secondary.

The right people can magnify even a trip you might never have chosen yourself.

Unfortunately, the reverse is also true.

Put ten strangers together somewhere remote and you’ve basically created a small social experiment. Different personalities, different expectations, different travel styles and very different ideas about what constitutes an emergency.

Usually it works out at least reasonably well.

Sometimes one personality dominates everything.

Maybe someone complains constantly. Maybe they’re loud as a foghorn. Maybe they have an opinion about absolutely everything and feel a civic responsibility to share it.

You have two choices: spend the trip focused on that person, or refuse to give them control of your experience.

That may be the most useful thing group travel has taught me, and it has very little to do with travel.

We give other people an astonishing amount of power over whether we enjoy our lives. One rude stranger ruins dinner. One annoying coworker ruins the day. One difficult person becomes the story we tell ourselves about an entire trip.

You can’t always control who ends up beside you. You can control how much of your experience you surrender to them.

Of course, surrendering some control is the basic bargain of group travel. You eat when the group eats. You leave when the group leaves. You can’t always linger because the light is perfect or skip something because you’ve discovered a café where you’d rather spend three hours.

For someone like me, those compromises matter. But so does what you get in return.

Groups can make difficult logistics possible and expensive journeys affordable. They can arrange permits, charter transportation and get you into places that would be extraordinarily difficult to reach independently.

Most importantly, they can introduce you to people you never would have met otherwise.

Some of my closest travel friendships today began on group trips. I’ve traveled again with people I met that way, learned about destinations I’d never considered and become part of communities I probably never would have found entirely on my own.

So I’ve stopped asking whether I like group travel. The better question is: what kind of group travel works for me?

Maybe it’s friends at an all-inclusive. Maybe it’s ten experienced travelers heading somewhere logistically absurd. Maybe it’s two strangers on a boat in Greenland.

And sometimes you’ll get unlucky. The chemistry won’t work. Someone will drive you absolutely insane. That’s the gamble.

I still prefer independent travel most of the time. Give me my own itinerary and the freedom to make questionable logistical decisions without putting them to a committee vote.

But some of my best travel experiences (and some of the friendships I value most) would never have happened if I’d insisted on doing everything alone.

Or at least to the place where my laundry machine lives.

That’s become my working definition these days. It’s where my own pillows are. My prescription refills. Many of my friends. Doctors who know my medical history. Clothes that haven’t been stuffed into a carry-on for two months. Home isn’t really a place anymore. It’s wherever my life pauses long enough to reset before the next trip.

But before I board that flight, I have one last decision to make, and I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about it.

One option gets me home earlier, costs a couple hundred dollars less, and has much more civilized flight times. It also gives me a day in Costa Rica, a country I’ve already visited extensively. The other option is objectively worse. More expensive. Worse connections. Less sleep.

The reward? One new Colombian region.

Here’s the ridiculous part: there isn’t even anything in that region that I’ve always dreamed of seeing. No attraction I’ve been saving for years. No hidden gem that everyone’s been telling me about It’s just...

...new.

Apparently that’s enough to send my brain into overdrive.

The funny thing is, I’ve already done Costa Rica properly.

My first trip lasted almost an entire week. I visited every province. I never left thinking, I wish I’d had more time. Honestly, it was one of those rare trips I feel like I wasn’t checking boxes at all…I really saw a lot. Going back wouldn’t be filling in unfinished business. It would simply be revisiting a country I genuinely enjoyed. (…and yes, I’m unofficially working on visiting every country a second time and this would be #108…so there’s that.)

So why is my brain still fixated on the region in Colombia? Because it’s new.

I mentioned this dilemma to a few friends I’ve traveled with before. They listened patiently and asked really good questions. But then one of them hit the nail on the head:

“If you fly through Costa Rica, would you have to come back a third time because you missed something? Do you have regions left to visit there?”

“No,” I answered. “I’ve already done all the regions.”

“So...what’s the problem?”

It was such an obvious question that it completely stopped me in my tracks. I wasn’t really deciding between two flights….

…I was trying to decide what counts.

Travelers have very strong opinions about what counts.

Spend one day somewhere and someone will tell you that’s not enough. Spend two weeks somewhere and someone else will insist you still “missed the real place.” Visit every region in a country and you’ll be accused of checking boxes. Skip a famous attraction because it doesn’t interest you and someone will wonder why you bothered going at all.

We’ve all heard these conversations. Some of us have probably participated in them.

The irony is that every traveler is constantly making compromises.

Some people have more money than time. Others have all the time in the world but need to stretch every dollar. Some travel for food. Others for wildlife. Some want to hike every mountain they can find. Others are perfectly happy sitting in cafés talking to locals.

None of those approaches is more “correct” than another. Yet travel has an odd habit of attracting people who are convinced they’ve discovered the One True Way.

The backpacker who insists hostels are the only authentic experience.

The luxury traveler who can’t imagine taking a bus.

The foodie who thinks you haven’t experienced a country unless you’ve eaten at that restaurant.

The anti-list traveler who spends an astonishing amount of energy criticizing people with lists. Honestly…it can be super exhausting.

Years ago I asked a good friend whether they ever felt the desire to travel more.

Their answer has stayed with me ever since. “Nah,” they said. “My life is good enough.”

I knew exactly what they meant, but I remember physically recoiling from those words. Not because I think everyone should travel like I do. Quite the opposite. Some people genuinely have no interest in seeing the world, and that’s perfectly fine.

What bothered me was the phrase itself.

Good enough.

It sounded like curiosity had quietly packed its bags and gone home. And yet here I am, asking myself whether a two-hour visit to a Colombian region would be...

...good enough.

Funny how perspective has a way of humbling us.

The truth is, none of us gets everything. Not in one city. Not in one country.

Not in one lifetime.

Every trip involves trade-offs. Every itinerary leaves something on the table. Every traveler decides what’s important to them, whether they realize they’re making that decision or not.

The only real question is whether you’re making your choices or someone else’s.

That’s why I think we’ve become far too comfortable telling other people how they should travel.

“You need at least a week.”

“You have to go in the dry season.”

“You can’t miss...”

“That’s not real travel.”

Maybe.

Or maybe those are simply your priorities.

One of the best things about getting older is becoming comfortable with the idea that my travel doesn’t need to impress anyone else. I don’t need strangers on the internet validating how long I stayed, how I got there, or whether I checked the “right” boxes.

What matters is whether, years from now, I’m happy with the choice I made.

That’s why I value friends who know how I travel. The ones who understand that I genuinely enjoy collecting regions. The ones who know I’m perfectly happy taking a three-hour bus ride to see something obscure if it scratches an itch that’s important to me. The ones who also know when I’ll enjoy slowing down and spending another day somewhere I’ve already been.

Good travel advice isn’t universal.

It’s personal.

So...

Will I visit that extra Colombian region?

As I write this, I honestly haven’t decided…but I need to do so tonight.

But I think I’ve finally figured out the right question.

Not...

“Does it count?”

Not...

“Will other travelers approve?”

Not even...

“Is it enough?”

Instead, I’m asking something much simpler: “What choice will make me happiest a year from now?”

Because that’s really all any of us are doing when we travel.

Making the best decisions we can with the time, money, curiosity, and priorities we have. The rest?

That’s just someone else’s definition of enough.

Given the choice, I’d rather wander a city by myself or in a very small group than follow someone holding a flag. I’d rather spend an afternoon talking to the owner of a neighborhood café than listen to a microphone describing the history of the building across the street. I like making my own mistakes. Taking the wrong street. Changing my plans because something or someone unexpected caught my attention.

Group tours have never been my favorite way to travel. That doesn’t mean they’re bad. Sometimes they’re the only realistic option. The Amazon is a good example.

Manaus isn’t somewhere you simply rent a bicycle and explore.

If you want to see pink river dolphins, visit an Indigenous community, go searching for caiman after dark, or spend time on the river, chances are you’re joining a tour. Unless you have unlimited time (or a budget for a private guide) you’ll probably find yourself climbing aboard the same boat as twenty or more strangers.

That’s exactly what I did…and, as usual, I came away with mixed feelings.

Language was part of it.

I’d spent the previous five weeks making a real effort to improve my Portuguese, and I really did make great progress. It helped. I could order meals, joke with waiters, ask questions, and have simple conversations. But a boat full of Brazilians chatting naturally with one another reminded me how much further I still have to go. I could follow pieces of conversations, but not really join them. That’s frustrating, especially because talking to people is one of my favorite parts of travel.

That’s on me. I could have tried harder. But honestly, for five weeks, I did the best I could. Brazil is great this way, btw, English is so uncommon that you’re forced to practice Portuguese, so it’s a great place to learn.

The bigger challenge for me, though, wasn’t the language. It was authenticity.

One stop brought us to an Indigenous community where we watched dances, demonstrations, music, and ceremonies before browsing a souvenir market. The people we met were welcoming, and there’s no question tourism provides income that matters. I don’t want to dismiss that.

But I also couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching people perform their culture for an audience of tourists. That’s uncomfortable for me. Not because I think culture should be hidden, but because I kept wondering where the line is between sharing traditions and staging them.

Then again, what’s the alternative?

Without tourism, I almost certainly wouldn’t have met anyone from an Amazonian Indigenous community at all. At least not in this kind of setting.

The same questions followed me onto the water.

Pink river dolphins appeared because fish were dangled just out of reach. Caiman had their mouths taped shut while visitors held them for photographs before they were released. Giant arapaima (the largest scaled freshwater fish in the world) gathered around platforms where tourists could feed them using bait tied to strings instead of hooks.

None of it struck me as overtly cruel. The fish still got the meal. The caiman were released. The dolphins seemed eager to return because they associated boats with food.

But none of it felt entirely wild, either.

That’s the uncomfortable middle ground travel often occupies. We all say we want authentic experiences.

What we usually mean is that we want authentic experiences that fit into one afternoon, cost less than a nice dinner, are easy to photograph, and don’t require weeks of building trust with local communities.

Real authenticity doesn’t work that way. It takes time. It takes language.

It takes relationships.

And sometimes, it takes money that most of us simply don’t have.

My favorite tour of the week, oddly enough, was also the smallest.

It was just me and one other traveler. A Colombian undergrad going to University in France but studying in China, on a night caiman excursion. Ironically, the tour itself wasn’t very good. But having only one other person meant we actually talked. We exchanged travel stories. Compared notes. Laughed at how different our experiences had been.

Sometimes the people make the tour. Sometimes the itinerary barely matters.

Did these tours make me fall in love with Manaus? Honestly...not really.

But am I glad I went?

Absolutely.

Because travel isn’t about waiting for perfect circumstances that may never come. If your options are the ideal experience or no experience at all, then yes, wait for the ideal. Most of the time, though, that’s not the choice. Most of the time the choice is between something imperfect...and nothing.

I’ll choose something almost every time.

As long as people are treated with dignity, animals aren’t harmed, and I’m willing to leave with more questions than answers, I think that’s a trade-off worth making. Now, make no mistake, I don’t want to come across as one of those holier-than-thou backpackers who preaches about their respect for indiginous people, is often a vegan for animal rights reasons, and pretends to have the ethical secret of the universe. Nope, plenty to learn here.

Travel isn’t always about certainty. Sometimes it’s about becoming just a little less certain than you were before.

…but no, not like “normal” people love planning trips. Not just booking flights and hotels, but really planning them. Comparing airlines and potential routes. Reading about neighborhoods. Deciding whether three nights is enough or if I should make it four. My spreadsheets often have spreadsheets. I genuinely enjoy the process, and after traveling to every country in the world, I’d like to think I’ve gotten reasonably good at it.

And to be fair, planning matters. You should probably know how you’re getting there. Having somewhere to stay that first night is usually a wise move. A little research can keep you from missing something you’ve always dreamed of seeing. Logistics reduce stress, and less stress usually means a better trip.

But here’s the thing…once you’ve landed, made it through immigration, dropped your bags at the hotel, and stepped outside for that first moment of exploration, most of that planning is over. The flights have been flown. The hotel has been chosen. The itinerary has done its job.

That’s when the trip actually begins.

From that moment on, your experience is shaped less by the decisions you made months ago and more by variables you never could have controlled in the first place.

The weather. Your mood. The people you meet. The waiter who insists they no longer have that dish you’d heard so much about. The musician playing in the square you hadn’t intended to walk through and asking for change. The museum that’s unexpectedly closed. The conversation that starts because someone overhears you trying to order in their language and offers help. The wrong turn that ends up being exactly the right one.

Those variables are impossible to plan for.

They’re also the reason I travel.

I was reminded of this on my run this morning.

It was raining, so the sidewalks were full of umbrellas. What surprised me wasn’t the weather (it’s winter in Brazil after all) but how many people seemed completely disconnected from where they were. Heads down. Eyes fixed on their phones. Umbrellas tilted so low they couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. Several times I had to dodge people who never once looked up. Had I been doing the same thing, we almost certainly would have collided.

As I was thinking about what I wanted to write today, it struck me that travel can be exactly like that.

We spend weeks planning a trip to somewhere extraordinary, then experience it while looking down at a screen. We worry about getting to the next attraction before we’ve really experienced the one we’re standing in. We obsess over checking things off a list while missing the life happening all around us.

Ferris Bueller understood this long before social media was ever a thing.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

It’s a great line because it isn’t really about life. It’s about paying attention and being present.

Some things are impossible to miss. A giant crab overlooking the beach in Aracaju. An enormous iguana in the middle of a park in Macapá. A caterpillar the size of a bus. A tree in Lençóis that seems to have decided growing sideways was a perfectly reasonable life choice.

Those things don’t require much effort to notice…however, the moments that matter most usually do.

They’re the old men arguing over a game of chess in the park outside a bakery. The woman who hears you struggling through a few words of Portuguese and gently teaches you a better way to say it. The tiny neighborhood bar you duck into because it started raining. The family celebrating a birthday at the next table who somehow ends up inviting you for one too many rounds of celebratory cachaca.

None of those experiences appear on anyone’s “Top 10 Things to Do.”

Yet years later, after most of the trip is a distant memory, they’re always the stories I remember best.

I sometimes wonder if we’ve convinced ourselves that a perfectly planned trip is automatically a better trip. Maybe this is why some people are so enthralled by AI: the more you can plan and schedule (their reasoning goes) the “better” your trip is ultimately going to be.

A well-planned trip gets you to the right place. It makes the logistics smoother. It gives you confidence that you won’t miss something that’s genuinely important to you.

But after a certain point, more planning doesn’t improve the experience. More presence almost always does.

Looking up instead of down. Leaving room in the schedule to wander. Sitting in a park for half an hour without feeling guilty that you’re “wasting” time. Talking to the person next to you instead of checking what strangers on the internet think you should do next.

Travel isn’t a project to complete.

It’s an experience to notice.

So yes, keep planning. Book the flights. Reserve the hotel. Read enough that you understand where you’re going and why it matters. Then, when you get there, let go a little. Leave room for the variables.

Because the flights only get you to the destination.

The real trip begins after you arrive.

If you enjoyed this story...

There’s a line from U2’s City of Blinding Lights that has stuck with me for years:

“The more you see, the less you know
The less you find out as you go
I knew much more then than I do now.”

When you first start traveling, it feels like you’ve unlocked something. That first country, that first stamp, that first moment where you realize the world is bigger than your day-to-day life. It’s easy, in those early trips, to think you’ve figured something out. Discovered the Meaning of Life. You’re the “expert” traveler in your group of friends. That you understand how the world works just a little bit better.

But then you keep going. And something changes.

The more places you see, the more people you meet, and the more perspectives you’re exposed to, the less certain everything becomes. Not in a negative way, but in a way that forces you to recognize just how much exists outside your own frame of reference.

The world does not get smaller with travel. It expands. Exponentially. And if you’re paying attention, so does your awareness of how little you actually know.

There’s another U2 line that fits just as well, from Beautiful Day:

“What you don’t have, you don’t need it now
What you don’t know, you can feel it somehow.”

Travel rarely gives you clean answers. More often, it leaves you with questions, impressions, and a sense that there’s far more going on than you can fully grasp in a single visit, or even a lifetime. This fits nicely with my recent discussion of lists and counting countries and places. What’s “enough” to “count” as a visit? After all, you’ll never see every square meter of a place. Every city. Every person. You won’t see it at every point in time as it changes.

And that’s where the value is. Not in “knowing” a place, but in realizing you don’t.

That said, I’ve also come to realize that not everyone travels this way.

There are plenty of people moving quickly from place to place, collecting destinations, collecting photos, collecting moments for the algorithm. They see a lot, but they don’t always process much. And that’s fine. Everyone has their own reasons for being out there. It’s just not what I’ve been thinking about lately.

But if you never stop to reflect, to think about what you’re seeing and how it’s changing you, then a lot of what travel has to offer just passes you by.

Places I recently visited in Brazil like Lençóis and Jericoacoara have been that reminder for me recently. Not just visually stunning, but the kind of places that force you to slow down, sit still, and actually think. I don’t “sit still” well, but this trip and these expeditions “forced” me to…and once I actually slowed down, there it was.

Thinking about where you’ve been. About what you’ve learned. And about how much you haven’t.

Because if there’s one thing travel has taught me over time, it’s this:

The goal isn’t to know everything. The goal is to understand that you never will, and to stay curious anyway.

The Bottom Line

Travel doesn’t make you an expert on the world. If anything, it does the opposite. It shows you how vast it is, how layered it is, and how much of it exists beyond your current understanding.

And if you let it, it makes you more open, more curious, and a little more self-aware along the way.

Over to You

Do you reflect on your travels?

Was there a moment where you stopped and thought, “wow… I really had no idea”?

The short version of that idea was simple. Lists should not be about bragging rights or ticking boxes. They are about inspiration. They push you toward places that were not on your radar, and more often than not, those are the places where some of the best experiences happen.

Over the past year or so, I have leaned into that idea hard. Regions, countries, obscure corners of maps that most people scroll right past. Now that I have finished every region in western continental Europe, I have been thinking less about the accomplishment itself and more about what the process actually taught me.

Not in a scoreboard sense, but in terms of how I travel and what I take away from it.

1) Lists are incredible idea generators. Full stop.

This one played out exactly as expected, but probably more strongly than I imagined.

There are dozens of places I visited this past year that I never would have gone to without a list pointing me in that direction. Small towns, overlooked regions, places that do not make anyone’s highlight reel but quietly deliver something much more interesting.

What I found is that once you show up, the label of the place matters a lot less than the experience you create there. The list simply gets you in the door. What happens after that is entirely up to you.

2) Ticking boxes is easy. Filling your story bucket is not.

This is where lists can either help you or completely miss the point.

Yes, you can move quickly and cover a lot of ground. You can check the box, take the photo, and move on. But if that is all you are doing, you are leaving almost everything on the table.

Every “box” is really just an entry point into something deeper. A conversation, a shared moment, an unexpected detour that ends up being the part you remember.

The difference is not how long you stay. It is how present you are while you are there. And yes, it’s pretty hard to have much of an experience if you just hop off the train and get right back on, but I’ve found that if you give a place a chance and at least stay the night…well, chances are much higher.

3) Running became my way of understanding a place

This was not something I set out to prove, nor was it something I saw coming, but it turned into one of the most valuable things I learned.

At some point, I built a lengthy running streak. Minimum 2 km every single day, no exceptions. What started as a simple “let’s see if I can do this for a year” turned into a completely different way of experiencing new places.

Landing somewhere, dropping your bags, and heading out for a run forces you into the real version of a city. Not the curated highlights and tourist hotspots, but the neighborhoods, the side streets, the everyday rhythm of how people actually live.

It strips away the layers quickly and gives you a sense of place in a way that very few other things do.

4) You will never see it all, and that is exactly the point

Finishing every region in western continental Europe does not feel like an ending. If anything, it makes it more obvious how much is still out there.

Even in places I have technically “done,” there is depth I have barely scratched. And when you zoom out further, it becomes almost absurd to think in terms of completion.

Those who know me know I have a giant underwater scene/octopus tattoo sleeve on my arm. I often get asked what the meaning is. Roughly 71 percent of the planet is covered by water. That alone puts everything into perspective. No matter that I’ve seen all 193 countries and hundreds of regions…71% of the planet still remains just below the surface.

The takeaway is not that you should try to see everything. It is that you cannot, and that is what makes the whole thing interesting. There is always another angle, another layer, another place that was not on your radar yesterday.

The Bottom Line

Lists are tools. They can open doors, create structure, and push you into new experiences. But they are only as valuable as what you do with them.

If you use them to chase completion, you will always feel like something is missing. If you use them as a starting point and stay curious once you arrive, they become something much more powerful.

The goal is not to complete the list. The goal is to make the experience count.

Over to You

Do you travel with a list, or do you let curiosity lead the way? And when you think back on your trips, what stands out more: the places you went, or the stories you came back with?

There are three words that I’ve come to notice over time (both in travel and in life) that tend to quietly hold people back: try, can’t, and wrong. They’re words we all use all the time without thinking, but they shape how we approach things more than we realize, and all too often we let them run our lives.

Let’s start with try, because it’s probably the least controversial.

There’s a reason that line from Yoda has stuck around for decades: “Do or do not. There is no try.” It sounds a bit dramatic, but it’s accurate. “Try” sounds like effort. It sounds like you’re doing something. But in reality, it often builds in an escape hatch before you’ve even begun. I’ll try to go to Europe. I’ll try to make it happen. It leaves room for things not working out, and more importantly, for you to accept that outcome a little too easily.

For example, when I went to North Korea, I had only been to maybe 40 or 50 countries. In my mind, it was the most difficult place in the world to visit. I didn’t think I was every likely to get there. Then the opportunity arose out of the blue, and instead of questioning if I COULD go, I called the tour company, and before I knew it I was on a plane. But, here’s the key: I didn’t tell myself I would try to go. I told myself I would go. And once that decision was made, everything else became a problem to solve. Sure, roadblocks came up along the way, but I found ways of solving them…because I’d told myself I could do this.

That same idea carries over into life. You can try to get the job, try to move to your dream city, try to change direction in your career, but when you decide you will, the mindset shifts. You will still fail at times, but you don’t stop at the first obstacle. You adjust and keep moving.

That brings us to the second word: can’t.

This is usually where things stop before they even start.

In travel, I hear it all the time: I could never go there. I could never afford it. And yes, there are things that genuinely aren’t for everyone. But a lot of “can’t” is just fear that’s been given a more acceptable set of clothes

I’ve had those moments myself. White water rafting is not exactly where I’m most comfortable, and there were stretches of that trip where I was very aware of that fact. But the difference between doing it and not doing it wasn’t ability…it was simply deciding that I could, even if I wasn’t entirely convinced at the start.

In life, “can’t” often becomes a default conclusion before we’ve really tested it. Maybe something takes longer than expected. Maybe it’s harder than we’d like. But if it’s within the realm of reality, it’s usually within the realm of possibility. The people who do unusual things aren’t necessarily more capable…they’re just less willing to accept “can’t” at face value.

And then there’s wrong, which is definitely going to come across as a bit more controversial.

I’m not talking about obvious wrongs. I’m talking about the kind that comes from expectations…the idea that there’s a “correct” way to live your life, and anything outside of it needs to be justified. Stable job, predictable path, a life that makes sense to everyone else.

A while back, my friend Johnny Ward gave a talk where he shared one of his harder-earned travel lessons: ego is not your enemy. That stuck with me. We’re constantly told to suppress ego, not to chase things for ourselves, not to do things that might look indulgent or unnecessary from the outside. But if your “ego” is pushing you to explore, to challenge yourself, to see the world…why is that something to feel guilty about?

Travel has a way of exposing this. You don’t end up in unusual places or build unconventional experiences by following a script. At some point, you have to be comfortable doing something that might look “wrong” to someone else. And more often than not, those are exactly the choices that end up defining your life in the best way.

More often than not, those are the choices that end up mattering most.

When you step back, all three of these words are doing something similar.

“Try” softens commitment.
“Can’t” shuts things down early.
“Wrong” adds doubt where it doesn’t belong.

Individually, they don’t seem like much. But over time, they shape what you’re willing to pursue, and what you quietly decide not to.

The Bottom Line

Be careful how you frame things before you even begin. Decide when it matters. Question “can’t” when it shows up. And don’t let someone else’s definition of “right” limit what you’re willing to experience.

Over to You

What’s something you’ve been telling yourself you’ll “try” to do…that you know you either need to commit to—or let go of?

A few weeks ago, we talked about the idea of the “perfect trip” and how it doesn’t really exist. Perfect isn’t something you plan. Perfect is the trip you actually take, with all its imperfections, delays, surprises, and randomness. And sometimes, the best trips are the ones that barely resemble a plan at all.

As I posted earlier, I had a gap of about a month between trips recently. Not long enough to settle down and get “boring”, but long enough to get restless. So I did what any rational person would do… I booked 10 days bouncing around the Caribbean on small planes, mostly just to avgeek and see places I hadn’t been before.

Do I like heat and humidity? Not in the least. Still don’t. But you know what? I had a great time.

That trip reminded me of something simple that we all too often overlook in life: you don’t need the perfect conditions to have a great experience. You just need a reason to go…or at least a reason to get the gears in motion…

So, let me illustrate just a bit more what I mean. A few months back, I committed to a couple of events. Each one spaced out just enough that they could have easily been separate trips. But then the thought crept in: what if I just…connect them? And that’s how the next two months turned into one long, slightly ridiculous, very unplanned adventure.

So, this upcoming trip. It starts in Portugal, where more than 100 of the roughly 500 people who’ve been to every country are meeting for lunch. The largest gathering of “every country people” ever. But can I really go all the way to Portugal without finishing the regions of Spain and Portugal I still have left?

Of course not. So I’ll head over a couple of weeks early.

A week later, I’ve got a travel conference in Brazil. Conveniently, Portugal and Brazil are very well connected thanks to historical ties, so that part basically planned itself.

Then some friends mention they’re doing a 10-day trip after the conference. Easy decision. Then I start thinking…while I’m already in Brazil…why not hit a few more regions?

And that thought snowballed into this:

Eventually, that idea stretched all the way to the Amazon. Then Colombia. And beyond that…we’ll see. Did I “plan” any of this?

Not really. Am I excited for it?

Absolutely.

Will it be chaotic? Without a doubt.

Will things go wrong?

Most likely….But that’s kind of the point.

Because the trips you remember aren’t the ones that went exactly according to plan. They’re the ones where something unexpected happened. A place you almost didn’t go. A conversation you didn’t see coming. A detour that made no sense at the time but somehow became the highlight.

Like Abyei.

If you had asked me ahead of time whether I wanted to go there, I would have asked you where it was. And why I’d want to go there. Maybe overthought it. Maybe talked myself out of it.

Instead, I went…And it ended up being one of the most memorable experiences I’ve had.

Then…there’s St. Pierre and Miquelon.

A Europe trip fell through. Plans changed. Instead of forcing something else, I looked at a map and thought, “Why not here? Why not now?”

So I went….And then ended up doing Europe anyway.

You see, that’s the thing that happens when you stop “planning” and start “living.”

You can follow the standard script. Hit the same top 10 cities everyone else goes to. Optimize everything. Plan it perfectly. Or you can pay attention to the random ideas, the offhand suggestions, the places that weren’t even on your radar five minutes ago… and see where they lead.

Sometimes the best trips don’t come from a plan. They come from curiosity. From restlessness. From saying yes before you’ve had time to talk yourself out of it.

The Bottom Line

You don’t always need a perfect plan. Sometimes, throwing a few ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks creates something far more interesting than anything you could have designed in advance.

The trips you take on a whim, the ones that don’t quite make sense, the ones that feel a little chaotic…those are often the ones that stick with you the longest.

Over to You

What’s a trip you took that made absolutely no sense at the time… but ended up being unforgettable? And if something like that popped up tomorrow…would you say yes?

It comes down to a question most of us avoid asking ourselves honestly:

What are you waiting for?

It’s human nature to procrastinate or put things off, however, “tomorrow” has a funny way of never quite arriving. There is always a reason to push something off. Work gets busy. Money could be better. Timing isn’t ideal. The kids are too young, or too old, or in school, or about to leave. There is always a version of life that feels like it would make travel easier, cleaner, more justified.

But that version almost never shows up.

Instead, what happens is that time moves on without us. Quietly, steadily, without asking permission. And the trip you meant to take “someday” just keeps slipping further and further from your grasp.

There is, of course, something to be said for patience. For planning. For waiting until the time is right. But travel, especially the kind that stretches you a bit, is not just a financial decision. It is also a physical and mental one.

Long flights, unfamiliar places, moving through cities, adapting to “the different”…these things are easier when you have the energy for them. That doesn’t disappear overnight, but it does change over time. The version of the trip you can take today is not necessarily the same one you will take ten or twenty years from now.

And that matters.

One of the more interesting things I’ve seen on social media lately involved a family with two young kids, both under ten. Instead of waiting for the “right time,” they sold their house, sold their car, bought a sailboat, and set off to see the world.

On paper, it sounds chaotic. Risky. Completely impractical.

In reality, they made a decision about what they valued. They chose experience over stability, education through exposure over structure, and time together creating memories as a family over the idea that there would be a better moment later.

That’s not a choice everyone needs to make. But it does highlight something important: there is always a reason not to go.

And yet, when you actually do go, the experience is almost never as intimidating as you imagined.

We tend to build up the unknown into something larger than it is. The “what ifs” stack up quickly. What if something goes wrong? What if it’s not safe? What if I don’t know what I’m doing?

But in practice, the world is a lot more balanced than that.

Yes, things can go wrong. But just as often, if not more often, things go right in ways you couldn’t have planned.

A stranger gives you directions. Someone helps you when you’re stuck. A small moment turns into something memorable because you were there to experience it.

The risk is real. But so is the upside.

This idea played out for me recently in a much smaller way.

I had a few weeks in between trips, and found myself looking at flights to the Caribbean. It’s not typically my go-to region. I don’t like beaches or resorts. I loathe heat and humidity. People often say there’s “nothing to do” on “those” islands. But I realized there was an opportunity to visit as many islands, territories, and overseas “states” as I could reasonably fit into a single trip…and avgeek out in the best way and fly a bunch of new plane types.

The airfare was reasonable. I had the time. I could plan it without too much friction.

So I went.

And it turned into one of those trips that quietly reminds you why you do this in the first place. Not because it was perfect. Not because it checked every box. But because it existed. Because it happened. Because I didn’t wait for a better version of the same opportunity that may or may not have come later.

There is also a practical side to all of this that people don’t always like to talk about.

Money doesn’t sit still. It loses value over time. Points and miles get devalued. Award charts change. Hotels get more expensive. The idea that things will simply become more affordable later is, more often than not, wishful thinking. And then there’s the other uncomfortable truth: none of us are getting any younger. We can do more, and for longer, than ever before, but our bodies will eventually start to set limits. I’m a big believer in using every bit of runway we’re given, but that also means recognizing those limits and making the most of our present abilities while we can.

Waiting can cost you more than going.

Which brings us back to the original question.

What are you waiting for?

If the answer is something real, something specific, something that genuinely needs to happen first, that’s one thing. But if the answer is vague…more time, more money, better timing, fewer unknowns…then it might be worth asking whether you’re waiting for something that doesn’t actually exist.

Because the truth is, most trips don’t happen because everything lines up perfectly.

They happen because you decide to go anyway.

The Bottom Line

There will always be a reason to wait.

There will always be a version of the future that looks slightly better, slightly easier, slightly more convenient.

But travel doesn’t reward perfect timing.

It rewards action.

Over to You

What’s the trip you’ve been putting off? And if you’re honest with yourself…why?

For me, travel is one of the clearest places it shows up.

We tend to overthink our trips before they even begin. The itinerary becomes something to optimize rather than something to experience. More cities, more countries, more “must-sees,” all packed into a fixed amount of time. On paper, it feels efficient. In practice, it often just means moving faster than the experience can keep up. A good itinerary leaves room. The “perfect” almost never does.

The same instinct shows up in how we get there. We wait for the ideal routing, the perfect departure time, the exact aircraft, the connection we like instead of the one we don’t. None of that is unreasonable on its own, but taken together it creates friction. There is almost always something slightly off. The perfect flight rarely exists. A good one gets you where you need to go at a price you can stomach, which is the whole point.

Accommodation follows the same pattern. Every hotel is a tradeoff between price, location, and comfort. You can optimize for one, maybe two, but rarely all three. And yet it’s easy to spend hours trying to find the option that somehow does. Eventually you book something that’s good enough, and once you arrive, it usually is. Not perfect, but entirely sufficient and pleasant for what you actually need it to do.

All of this builds toward a bigger realization: the “perfect trip” itself is mostly a myth. You can plan structure: where you go, how you get there, where you stay, but you cannot plan the parts that actually make a trip memorable. Those tend to be the unplanned moments: a conversation with a local, a detour where you got lost, something that happens because the plan wasn’t airtight. The same way life at home isn’t defined by perfectly executed days, travel isn’t either.

That’s why the idea of not letting perfect get in the way matters more than it seems. Waiting for ideal conditions like more time, better timing, a cleaner plan, often just delays the experience or might even prevent it from happening altogether. A good trip taken now is almost always better than a perfect trip that never happens. And once you’re on the road, holding too tightly to perfection can make the experience more rigid than it needs to be.

None of this means planning doesn’t matter. It does. But there’s a difference between planning to enable a trip and planning to control it. The former gets you moving. The latter often keeps you stuck.

The Bottom Line

There is no perfect itinerary, no perfect flight, no perfect hotel, and no perfectly executed trip. There is only the one you take. And more often than not, it’s the imperfections…the small deviations from the plan…that end up defining it.

Over to You

What’s a trip you almost didn’t take because it wasn’t “perfect”? And aren’t you glad you went anyway? What made it memorable?

It sounds like a simple question, but I’ve spent a few hours thinking about it over the last week and I really can’t come up with a succinct summary.

I went back to Ireland last week for my second trip, but it was my first trip in about fifteen years. Last time I was there I visited Dublin and Belfast. Two cities, two very different identities, two very different experiences… and technically, depending on how you count, two separate countries. At the time, I was all about going to every country, and I felt I’d seen “enough” of Ireland to count it. This trip made it clear how while it made sense at the time, I still had unfinished business.

This trip, after going to Italy and Spain, I headed to Ireland where I started in the west, spending a few days in Galway and Cork. On paper, these pretty common stops for visitors to Ireland, the kind of places people associate with “real Ireland” at least from a city perspective. And in many ways, they delivered. Lively streets, people music spilling out of pubs, that unmistakable Irish energy.

What surprised me, though, was something that in retrospect should have been expected, but I hadn’t given it any thought

The crowds.

Not just crowds, but severely intoxicated crowds. Weekend energy dialed up to a level that felt closer to a major festival than a cultural experience. And layered on top of that, a heavy presence of American tourists. Familiar accents, familiar patterns, a version of Ireland that felt almost like St. Patrick’s Day on steroids, almost exported, almost a caricature of the place.

Then I went north.

When I got to Derry, it felt different immediately. Still busy, still alive, still social… but the composition of the people I encountered had changed. There were visitors, certainly, but no Americans. More local movement, more regional travel, a different rhythm entirely. Sadly, also, this is where the intoxicated crowds in Galway and Cork gave way to socioeconomic realities…twice I witnessed medical emergencies as a result of drug/alcohol overdoses. That’s not to say that’s what Derry “is,” but it was the Derry I experienced…and at the core of it, that’s what this post is about: depending when you go, where you go within a city/country, you can have vastly different experiences.

Places like this force you to slow down, even if you don’t intend to. They ask different questions. They tell different stories depending on the parameters of your visit. And they make it very obvious that what you experience in one city…or even two…is only a fragment of country.

I finished the trip in Dublin.

And Dublin, in its own way, brought everything full circle and provided the common link between my two trips to Ireland. Not because it was representative of the entire country, but because it showed yet another version of it.

Crowds again, but this time truly global. Americans, Europeans, travelers from everywhere. A capital city energy that felt both local and international at the same time. Familiar, but still distinct from everything that came before.

So, after this long ramble, what do I think it means to “see” a country?

Because I’ve now spent time in multiple parts of Ireland, across different trips, in different contexts. And I still wouldn’t claim to fully understand it.

This is the illusion of travel at scale.

You can visit 193 countries and still only scratch the surface of each one. You can hit the highlights, the capitals, the major cities…and miss everything in between that actually defines the place.

Or you can do the opposite. Travel slowly. Move overland. Spend time in smaller towns, different regions, less obvious stops. Build a more layered understanding of a single country.

Neither approach is right or wrong.

They are just different ways of engaging with the world.

And this is exactly why I’ve come back, at least in part, to travel “lists.”

Not as a finish line, not as a scoreboard, but as a prompt, because lists force you to go beyond the obvious. They push you to see France as more than Paris. Spain as more than Madrid and Barcelona.

And even within a single trip, they remind you that diversity exists within borders, not just between them.

And then there’s places like this:

The United States alone proves the point I’m trying to get at. New York is not Chicago. Chicago is not Alabama. Alabama is not Alaska. Each one could be its own story, its own lens, its own version of what that country is…and depending when you go to each…very different experiences. New York City in July is not New York City at Christmastime.

And yet, we often reduce places to a single experience.

One city. One trip. One impression.

The reality is more complicated, and far more interesting. Because “seeing” a country is not a box you check. It’s a process. One that evolves over time, across trips, across different moments in your life. You don’t finish it.

You build it.

The Balance (Yes, Again)

This brings me back to where we’ve been over the past few weeks. You don’t need to see everything. You can’t see everything.

But at the same time, if you move too quickly, you risk seeing almost nothing at all.

The balance is in how you engage.

Not just how much ground you cover, but how deeply you experience the ground you’re standing on.

Now…Over to You

When you think about a country you’ve visited…how much of it have you really seen?

And what’s a place that completely changed your perception of a country you thought you already understood?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been writing a lot about risk. Not eliminating it, because that’s not possible, but understanding it, managing it, and deciding which risks are actually worth taking, both in life and in travel. Travel has a way of forcing those decisions on you, often in moments where you don’t have the luxury of time or perfect information. But there’s another tension that sits just beneath that conversation, one that’s less obvious but just as important: not whether to take risks, but how fast to move once you do.

Because in travel, as in life, there is always the pull to do more. Especially in our 24/7 always plugged-in and online lifestyle of 2026.

We are living in an era that rewards acceleration and “likes”. Scroll through social media and it feels like everyone is in motion, racing toward something: the youngest to visit every country, the fastest to visit every country in Europe, the most efficient itinerary imaginable. There is an unspoken assumption that if you are not maximizing your time, you are somehow wasting it. And if you are someone who is naturally curious, ambitious, or driven, it is very easy to internalize that message without even realizing it.

It’s an instinct I’ve certainly lived, and I know it’s one many of my friends experience as well. But over time, I’ve also come to recognize the tradeoff that comes with it. Because when everything becomes about the next place, the next milestone, the next achievement, you begin to lose something along the way. You stop fully experiencing where you are, because part of your mind is already somewhere else. Planning the next trip instead of enjoying the one you’re on. Looking for the next race instead of enjoying the process of training for your current one. You get the drift….

I learned this lesson long before I finished visiting every country. Before I did my first Ironman triathlon in 1996, I asked a veteran of the race what it would feel like to cross the finish line. I expected something dramatic, something transformative, the kind of moment that changes how you see everything that comes after it.

His answer was much simpler, and at the time, a bit surprising. He said you would feel incredible…for a moment. And then, almost immediately, you would start to wonder what comes next when the goal that’s consumed so much of your life for so long is finally accomplished.

It took me years to fully understand what he meant. When you invest so much time and energy chasing a goal, the achievement itself can feel fleeting. The finish line, which you imagined as an endpoint, turns out to be just another transition. And if you are not careful, you move on too quickly, without ever really sitting in what you just accomplished.

Travel can fall into that exact same pattern.

Looking at something like this, it is easy to feel a sense of scale. Nearly 3,000 flights, hundreds of airports, millions of miles traveled across the world. It represents years of movement, planning, and experience. But it also makes something else very clear, something that is easy to overlook when you are caught up in momentum.

You cannot see it all.

No matter how fast you go, no matter how efficiently you plan, no matter how many places you check off, there will always be more. Entire regions, cultures, and experiences that remain just out of reach. That realization can feel overwhelming at first, but over time, it becomes something else entirely. It becomes freeing.

Because once you accept that you won’t see everything, you can finally stop trying to.

There is a line in Billy Joel’s Vienna that captures this tension perfectly: “You can get what you want or you can just get old.” And the story behind the song adds another layer to it. Billy Joel once described visiting his father in Vienna and noticing an elderly woman, well into her later years, sweeping the street. When he asked why she was still working, his father explained that she had a job, she felt useful, she was part of something. She wasn’t finished.

That moment became the metaphor behind the song. Not everything in life is meant to be rushed toward an endpoint. There is no single moment where you are “done.” The meaning comes from the act of doing, of participating, of being engaged in the world over time.

That idea runs directly against the urgency we often bring into travel.

There is always more you could be doing. Another viewpoint to chase, another restaurant to try, another town just an hour away that everyone insists you have to see. The list is endless, and if you let it, it will define your experience.

But sometimes the right choice is the opposite. To stay where you are. To watch the light change. To let a place reveal itself slowly instead of trying to extract everything from it as quickly as possible. Those quieter moments rarely feel urgent at the time, but they are often the ones that stay with you long after the trip is over.

Places like this reinforce that idea in a different way. You can spend hours, days, even weeks in a landscape like this and still feel like you have only scratched the surface. And yet, the value is not in how much ground you cover, but in how present you are while you are there.

Because even in the most visually striking places, it is rarely just the scenery that defines the experience. It is the conversations, the unexpected moments, the subtle interactions that were never part of the plan. Those are the things that give travel its depth, and they are also the things you miss when you move too quickly.

For all the miles, all the flights, and all the places, something like this still stands out more than almost anything else. Not something acquired along the way, but something given. A reminder that behind all the movement and ambition, there are people who support you, encourage you, and make those journeys possible in the first place.

Travel, at its core, is not about accumulation. It is about connection. And the moments that carry the most weight are rarely the ones you can plan or optimize. They are the ones that happen when you slow down enough to actually experience them.

This is the balance.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to see more, to go further, to push yourself beyond what feels comfortable. That curiosity is what drives travel in the first place. But if you move too fast, you risk turning the experience into something transactional, a series of boxes checked rather than moments lived.

Because whether you have two weeks, two years, or fifty years ahead of you, the goal is not to fill that time as efficiently as possible. It is to fill it with things that bring meaning, joy, and connection. And those things do not come from rushing.

They come from being present.

Over to You

Have you ever felt this tension while traveling…the pull between doing more and actually experiencing what is right in front of you?

And when have you gotten that balance right?