NO. 4
On Choosing Where To Travel
“What is there to do there?”
In a living room lit by a northern Idaho sunset, three boys are sitting around a table. The table is littered with chip bags and coke bottles, all stacked on top of the boys’ high school diplomas from earlier that day. A vape sits on the edge of the table, one centimeter from falling. The three boys are on their phones. One of them just ordered pizza for the house.
Believe it or not, they are planning their senior trip to Europe.
“Adam?”
“Huh?” the one scrolling TikTok raises his head.
“I asked, what is there to do there?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Let’s look it up.”
* * *
Far from Idaho, at gate C7 in the Portland International Airport, a woman in her mid-20s is chatting with a man as they stand in line to board an airplane. The destination is Split, Croatia. After a few minutes of conversation, the man’s wife joins him, apparently having just been in the bathroom. “Honey, this young woman was just telling me she plans to go to Vis Island,” he says to his wife as she hands him her purse.
“Oh, really? How nice. I don’t think I’ve heard of Vis. What is there to do there?”
* * *
73 miles from the Portland International Airport, two preschool teachers are talking in a classroom. The room smells of stale PB&J; crumbs litter the floor. Both are roughly the same age, both average in height, both with amber-colored hair and the same tired look on their faces that one gets after teaching a three-year-olds for four hours. But summer vacation is coming up, and this provides a ray of hope.
“Where do you and Michael want to go?”
“I’ve got no idea. Michael’s been going on about some city in Uruguay.”
“Montevideo?”
“No, no, somewhere else. I can’t remember the name.”
“Interesting. I don’t know much about Uruguay. What is there to do there?
When you talk about travel, and by you I mean you you but also everyone else in the world who likes to plan trips, you usually begin with some variation of that question: what is there to do there?
First, you do R&D. You watch a couple Top 10 list videos, decide which ones seem doable, mark them down. You hit Google with a “things to do in Paris” search. Then, getting the feeling you might only be scratching the surface — and deathly worried you’ll visit the tourist traps and be like all the other out-of-towners — you decide to dig deeper, throw on an Anthony Bourdain No Reservations episode from twenty-odd years back. You put one of those restaurants on the list, just to make sure you’re visiting the real local spots. Then maybe, if you’re real daring, you pull up Google Maps and start searching with abandon, scrolling the map to look for points of interest, filtering by 4.0-star reviews and higher, hoping you’ll find a hidden gem.
If you are a particularly organized person, you’ll write this down. Maybe you’ll even put it in a spreadsheet. If you are less-organized, you might pull out your Notes app and type a few things down, or maybe you’ll just entrust a few ideas to memory and hope they stick when your plane lands and you’re hungry and jet-lagged as hell. The details do not really matter. The point is, when you talk about travel, you (again, by you I mean most people) are probably thinking about things to do. If a place has lots of fun things to do, it is good. If a place does not appear to have many things to do, it is bad. This is not an inherently bad approach, necessarily.
But, I think it’s worth stopping to ask: is that the right question?
Is travel just a collection of things to do; a shooting range of destinations, one target after the other until at the end you’ve shot ‘em all and it’s time to go home? You certainly could treat it that way. I think most people do.
I remember meeting someone last year who had planned their Europe trip six months in advance. It was all organized in a Google Sheet: where they’d be going and when, what they’d be doing there, and how much it cost. They had to do it this way, they told me, because if you waited longer than that then all the good hotels would be booked, all the good restaurants would be reserved, and you’d be left with table scraps. Plus, how were they going to look forward to their Europe trip if they didn’t even know what they were going to be doing?
And where this is especially relevant, I think, is how people choose the locations they visit. Paris, for example, receives 30-million tourists a year. Barcelona, close to nine. And yet there are hundreds of villages in Castilla y León which probably haven’t seen a foreign tourist in years. Or cities like Florianópolis, in Paraná, or Ouro Preto in Minas Gerais — cities you likely haven’t been to, or maybe ever heard of, unless you are actually from within a few hundred miles of them. Of course, there are obvious differences between off-the-beaten-path places and some of the world’s most notable cities, but it is likely a fact that many people who go to Paris because it’s the ‘thing to do’ would have had a more fulfilling trip elsewhere.
The idea is that certain places — say, Barcelona — are over-visited by foreign tourists because people believe there are wonderful things to do and see there (which there often are), and other places — say, Florianópolis — are under-visited because social media and legacy media and literature have not built such a memorable image of these places in people’s minds.
So how should you choose the places you visit?
In my view, which will probably change someday but is my opinion for now, the places you travel to should not be determined by some arbitrary list of ‘things to do’, because by determining this in advance, you close the window to many of the things that make travel special.
It may be more useful to think about travel as giving all the good things about you — your curiosity, your love of life, your optimism, whatever it may be — a new canvas to paint on.
Instead of what is there do there?, it may be better to ask,
What kind of place would be ultimately fulfilling for me?
Not what kind of place did all my friends go to last summer, not what kind of place did I see in a movie (and thought it looked cool), not what kind of place do I see in newspapers and books, not what kind of place has all the things to do I hear about.
Here is how an example of how all this works when I travel: I first determine what kind of trip I want to take. There is a big difference between a backpacking-fly fishing trip, a city trip, and a calm trip in a cabin somewhere, so I first decide how I’m feeling and what kind of trip I’d like to take.
Then, I choose a place by using a list of things I already know about myself: that I don’t like overly-busy places, that I don’t like overly-hot places, that places with rich history make me curious, that good (and different!) food makes me incredibly happy, that I love beautiful views of nature more than just about anything else, that I like wildly new cultural experiences, that being in the outdoors has a high correlation with me writing more, that I like going to places where I can practice languages I’ve been learning, and a million-and-one other things I’ve learned about myself.
From there, I can pick a place to go.
While this sometimes provokes another question I also hate, “why would you want to go there”?, the answer is that I know myself, I know what types of trips I like to take, and so I decide where I’d like to travel based on those things in particular — which means it should be no surprise that I want to go somewhere very different from where you want to go, because we are very different people and our happiest trips will, naturally, look very different.
“Do you really wait to decide what you’re going to do until you get there?”
Sometimes, not always. The point is that I decide where I’d like to go by looking inward instead of outward. Then, I’ll do some research to broadly decide what sorts of areas in that place might interest me. When I finally arrive, I’ll ask questions like…
Which street in this town is likely to have the best restaurants? What’s around that alley? When was this village founded? Why? Who used to live in this house? What was this hotel before it was a hotel? What’s that village over the hill, and how long would it take for us to get there? What is the view like at the top of that mountain? These are the questions I like to ask. Unfortunately, if you must always have an itinerary beforehand, if you must always know what there is to do before you go there, you will miss out on some of the greatest moments of your life.
Right now I am sitting beside a panoramic waist-high window in the countryside of Castilla y León, in Spain. It was too hot in Madrid to do much of anything so I came out here, where it is still hotter than the devil’s kitchen but at least it is not to the point that you can’t think or write or do anything. The house I am in is in a village that’s been around since before they invented airplanes or Wonder Bread. It is a house split up into two parts: the old and the new. The old part is where my friend’s grandma and her sister live, and it confirms my theory that grandparents’ homes look more or less the same no matter where you go in the world: a strange lack of natural light even though there are plenty of windows, old family photos on the wall, intricate tablecloths and maximalist bedspreads, classic oil paintings of scenes that sit on the border between real and fairy tale; paintings like the one in the hallways here, which is of some old cabin in the Alps (or is the Alps?) next to a lake that looks almost too-blue, thunderstorms that you can see on the horizon but that haven’t arrived to spoil the afternoon just yet, a few children enjoying the last drops of sunshine along the lakeshore. Those sorts of paintings.
Every night the older women in the village pull chairs out into the street and pour themselves a few beers and chat. What they chat about I do not know, and I think I probably will not know until I reach that age myself and then I, too, will be chatting about god-knows-what in the streets with my old friends, having reached a tranquil age of life now that we have seen off our children and our children’s children into whatever lives they have decided to lead. During the day I write, but sometimes we take the car out and go to some of the surrounding villages and walk around, no real itinerary in hand, to see where the road takes us.
This is a place I only would have chosen if I had followed the steps I outlined in this essay.
To the parallel-universe version of me clubbing in Barcelona, I hope you are having the time of your life (he probably is, and good for him).
* * *
Just one note on this essay — I do not want to give the impression that visiting places like Paris and Barcelona is universally-bad. I have been to Barcelona and to Paris. I liked Paris.
The point, though, is that Paris and Barcelona are likely fulfilling vacation spots for a very small percentage of the people who visit them. While Paris might genuinely be a perfect vacation for someone who adores the things that specific things that Paris excels in (or uniquely has), the city is over-hyped for the majority of people, who could probably find a location that better-suits their own desires and personalities elsewhere.
It is no surprise that ‘Paris Syndrome’ is a real term for a real effect. These are people who probably didn’t do enough introspection before deciding where to travel.
“What is there to do there?”
In a living room lit by a northern Idaho sunset, three boys are sitting around a table. The table is littered with chip bags and coke bottles, all stacked on top of the boys’ high school diplomas from earlier that day. A vape sits on the edge of the table, one centimeter from falling. The three boys are on their phones. One of them just ordered pizza for the house.
Believe it or not, they are planning their senior trip to Europe.
“Adam?”
“Huh?” the one scrolling TikTok raises his head.
“I asked, what is there to do there?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Let’s look it up.”
* * *
Far from Idaho, at gate C7 in the Portland International Airport, a woman in her mid-20s is chatting with a man as they stand in line to board an airplane. The destination is Split, Croatia. After a few minutes of conversation, the man’s wife joins him, apparently having just been in the bathroom. “Honey, this young woman was just telling me she plans to go to Vis Island,” he says to his wife as she hands him her purse.
“Oh, really? How nice. I don’t think I’ve heard of Vis. What is there to do there?”
* * *
73 miles from the Portland International Airport, two preschool teachers are talking in a classroom. The room smells of stale PB&J; crumbs litter the floor. Both are roughly the same age, both average in height, both with amber-colored hair and the same tired look on their faces that one gets after teaching a three-year-olds for four hours. But summer vacation is coming up, and this provides a ray of hope.
“Where do you and Michael want to go?”
“I’ve got no idea. Michael’s been going on about some city in Uruguay.”
“Montevideo?”
“No, no, somewhere else. I can’t remember the name.”
“Interesting. I don’t know much about Uruguay. What is there to do there?
I.
When you talk about travel, and by you I mean you you but also everyone else in the world who likes to plan trips, you usually begin with some variation of that question: what is there to do there?
First, you do R&D. You watch a couple Top 10 list videos, decide which ones seem doable, mark them down. You hit Google with a “things to do in Paris” search. Then, getting the feeling you might only be scratching the surface — and deathly worried you’ll visit the tourist traps and be like all the other out-of-towners — you decide to dig deeper, throw on an Anthony Bourdain No Reservations episode from twenty-odd years back. You put one of those restaurants on the list, just to make sure you’re visiting the real local spots. Then maybe, if you’re real daring, you pull up Google Maps and start searching with abandon, scrolling the map to look for points of interest, filtering by 4.0-star reviews and higher, hoping you’ll find a hidden gem.
If you are a particularly organized person, you’ll write this down. Maybe you’ll even put it in a spreadsheet. If you are less-organized, you might pull out your Notes app and type a few things down, or maybe you’ll just entrust a few ideas to memory and hope they stick when your plane lands and you’re hungry and jet-lagged as hell. The details do not really matter. The point is, when you talk about travel, you (again, by you I mean most people) are probably thinking about things to do. If a place has lots of fun things to do, it is good. If a place does not appear to have many things to do, it is bad. This is not an inherently bad approach, necessarily.
But, I think it’s worth stopping to ask: is that the right question?
Is travel just a collection of things to do; a shooting range of destinations, one target after the other until at the end you’ve shot ‘em all and it’s time to go home? You certainly could treat it that way. I think most people do.
I remember meeting someone last year who had planned their Europe trip six months in advance. It was all organized in a Google Sheet: where they’d be going and when, what they’d be doing there, and how much it cost. They had to do it this way, they told me, because if you waited longer than that then all the good hotels would be booked, all the good restaurants would be reserved, and you’d be left with table scraps. Plus, how were they going to look forward to their Europe trip if they didn’t even know what they were going to be doing?
And where this is especially relevant, I think, is how people choose the locations they visit. Paris, for example, receives 30-million tourists a year. Barcelona, close to nine. And yet there are hundreds of villages in Castilla y León which probably haven’t seen a foreign tourist in years. Or cities like Florianópolis, in Paraná, or Ouro Preto in Minas Gerais — cities you likely haven’t been to, or maybe ever heard of, unless you are actually from within a few hundred miles of them. Of course, there are obvious differences between off-the-beaten-path places and some of the world’s most notable cities, but it is likely a fact that many people who go to Paris because it’s the ‘thing to do’ would have had a more fulfilling trip elsewhere.
The idea is that certain places — say, Barcelona — are over-visited by foreign tourists because people believe there are wonderful things to do and see there (which there often are), and other places — say, Florianópolis — are under-visited because social media and legacy media and literature have not built such a memorable image of these places in people’s minds.
II.
So how should you choose the places you visit?
In my view, which will probably change someday but is my opinion for now, the places you travel to should not be determined by some arbitrary list of ‘things to do’, because by determining this in advance, you close the window to many of the things that make travel special.
It may be more useful to think about travel as giving all the good things about you — your curiosity, your love of life, your optimism, whatever it may be — a new canvas to paint on.
Instead of what is there do there?, it may be better to ask,
What kind of place would be ultimately fulfilling for me?
Not what kind of place did all my friends go to last summer, not what kind of place did I see in a movie (and thought it looked cool), not what kind of place do I see in newspapers and books, not what kind of place has all the things to do I hear about.
Here is how an example of how all this works when I travel: I first determine what kind of trip I want to take. There is a big difference between a backpacking-fly fishing trip, a city trip, and a calm trip in a cabin somewhere, so I first decide how I’m feeling and what kind of trip I’d like to take.
Then, I choose a place by using a list of things I already know about myself: that I don’t like overly-busy places, that I don’t like overly-hot places, that places with rich history make me curious, that good (and different!) food makes me incredibly happy, that I love beautiful views of nature more than just about anything else, that I like wildly new cultural experiences, that being in the outdoors has a high correlation with me writing more, that I like going to places where I can practice languages I’ve been learning, and a million-and-one other things I’ve learned about myself.
From there, I can pick a place to go.
While this sometimes provokes another question I also hate, “why would you want to go there”?, the answer is that I know myself, I know what types of trips I like to take, and so I decide where I’d like to travel based on those things in particular — which means it should be no surprise that I want to go somewhere very different from where you want to go, because we are very different people and our happiest trips will, naturally, look very different.
III.
“Do you really wait to decide what you’re going to do until you get there?”
Sometimes, not always. The point is that I decide where I’d like to go by looking inward instead of outward. Then, I’ll do some research to broadly decide what sorts of areas in that place might interest me. When I finally arrive, I’ll ask questions like…
Which street in this town is likely to have the best restaurants? What’s around that alley? When was this village founded? Why? Who used to live in this house? What was this hotel before it was a hotel? What’s that village over the hill, and how long would it take for us to get there? What is the view like at the top of that mountain? These are the questions I like to ask. Unfortunately, if you must always have an itinerary beforehand, if you must always know what there is to do before you go there, you will miss out on some of the greatest moments of your life.
IV.
Right now I am sitting beside a panoramic waist-high window in the countryside of Castilla y León, in Spain. It was too hot in Madrid to do much of anything so I came out here, where it is still hotter than the devil’s kitchen but at least it is not to the point that you can’t think or write or do anything. The house I am in is in a village that’s been around since before they invented airplanes or Wonder Bread. It is a house split up into two parts: the old and the new. The old part is where my friend’s grandma and her sister live, and it confirms my theory that grandparents’ homes look more or less the same no matter where you go in the world: a strange lack of natural light even though there are plenty of windows, old family photos on the wall, intricate tablecloths and maximalist bedspreads, classic oil paintings of scenes that sit on the border between real and fairy tale; paintings like the one in the hallways here, which is of some old cabin in the Alps (or is the Alps?) next to a lake that looks almost too-blue, thunderstorms that you can see on the horizon but that haven’t arrived to spoil the afternoon just yet, a few children enjoying the last drops of sunshine along the lakeshore. Those sorts of paintings.
Every night the older women in the village pull chairs out into the street and pour themselves a few beers and chat. What they chat about I do not know, and I think I probably will not know until I reach that age myself and then I, too, will be chatting about god-knows-what in the streets with my old friends, having reached a tranquil age of life now that we have seen off our children and our children’s children into whatever lives they have decided to lead. During the day I write, but sometimes we take the car out and go to some of the surrounding villages and walk around, no real itinerary in hand, to see where the road takes us.
This is a place I only would have chosen if I had followed the steps I outlined in this essay.
To the parallel-universe version of me clubbing in Barcelona, I hope you are having the time of your life (he probably is, and good for him).
* * *
Just one note on this essay — I do not want to give the impression that visiting places like Paris and Barcelona is universally-bad. I have been to Barcelona and to Paris. I liked Paris.
The point, though, is that Paris and Barcelona are likely fulfilling vacation spots for a very small percentage of the people who visit them. While Paris might genuinely be a perfect vacation for someone who adores the things that specific things that Paris excels in (or uniquely has), the city is over-hyped for the majority of people, who could probably find a location that better-suits their own desires and personalities elsewhere.
It is no surprise that ‘Paris Syndrome’ is a real term for a real effect. These are people who probably didn’t do enough introspection before deciding where to travel.