Notes on Traveling Well

Why the Best Trips Require a Little Friction

To travel well is a difficult skill.

The first rule of the road is perhaps the most demanding of them all: nosce te ipsum. Know thyself.

Becoming a good traveler is a subset of life’s primary task: becoming a healthier, more mature, more knowledgeable version of yourself. The truth of any experience is that the lens is entirely your own. You can only receive the pleasures of the world if you are intimately familiar with what allows you to be open to them in the first place. It is a profound tragedy to travel halfway around the world and stand before a genuine marvel and realize your capacity for awe has been hollowed out by pure exhaustion.

So becoming a better traveler requires seeking a ruthlessly unvarnished understanding of your own machinery. You must know your own instincts, both good and bad. You must know what feeds your soul and what drains your capacity for joy. You must identify where you sabotage yourself and where you must simply lean into your own limitations.

After all, travel done for pleasure should ideally be an exercise in restoration rather than an endurance test (unless you are one of those brave, mad souls for whom an endurance test is, in its own way, an act of restoration; I am not one of you, so if this describes you, you might do better to seek advice from another source).

By restoration, I mean more than just physical rest. I mean nourishment of the soul. I do not believe that the soul can be nourished without some kind of discovery or realization, which means that proper restoration requires more than mere comfort. Another way of saying this is that restoration is not possible through stasis: restoration is growth. You know a plant is well-rested because it sprouts a new bud.

Of course, comfort and rest are of great value. A secure base of operations, like a comfortable hotel room, can provide a necessary sanctuary in the midst of adventure. A spa visit may help compensate for days of walking.

Nevertheless, you cannot feed yourself without at least a measure of productive discomfort. You need a bit of friction. You have to have some appetite for disorientation, to allow experience to change you so that you emerge a bit different on the other side.

Coupled with friction is a need for depth. This runs counter to much of the travel industry and culture. “How to do Rome in 48 hours” and all that rot. Resist the compulsion to merely collect new coordinates. There is little value in the repetitive cycle of planting a flag, capturing the digital proof, and then immediately moving on to the next uncharted territory.

There is a profound reward in the act of returning. Knowing a few places intimately is infinitely richer than possessing a wide, shallow catalog of the globe. Familiarity breeds a superior kind of discovery. You begin to build a quiet rapport with the patron of your preferred cafe. You notice how the shifting angle of the morning light entirely alters the mood of a public square. You visit a crowded monument at an uncommon hour, and suddenly it feels intimately yours. You wander down a rain-slicked alley you previously ignored and discover a vendor of curiosities that leaves you with an unusual, prized possession.

Through revisitation, you transition from a transient spectator to a minor participant in the daily life of the city.

To do this, you must not optimize every waking hour. The better approach is to perform just enough reconnaissance to secure the heavy anchors. Know the specific museum, historical site, or neighborhood you absolutely must engage with on a given day. Let the remaining hours fall loose around it. Give yourself the luxury of exploration.

Follow your impulses. The finest experiences and the most memorable meals are rarely the ones booked months prior. They are discovered by walking down an unmarked street or by acting on the quiet recommendation of a local bartender whose trust you earned the night before.

Force empty, unstructured space into the afternoon. Contemplation of the day’s events carries the exact same weight as the events themselves. Without the time to process your experiences, everything blurs into an indistinct montage. Rest is not a pause from the journey; it is the mechanism required to digest it.

Claim a quiet corner table in an empty bar. Order an espresso or a cocktail, sit in silence, and watch the local cast of characters. Find a municipal garden, open a book, and let time slip away unmeasured. The space between the experiences is as necessary as the experience itself.