Going back is the strangest trip a traveler takes
Returning to a childhood place is travel with the coordinates inverted — the destination knows you, and it has not been waiting.
Essays
Essays and first-person writing about place: returning somewhere after years away, the contradictions of being a visitor, borders and belonging, and the parts of a journey that resist a clean summary. Arguments are welcome and clearly attributed. For readers who take travel writing as literature rather than a booking aid.
Essays on returning to a place, the contradictions of being a visitor.
The plotted route and the wander are different kinds of knowing
Navigation research, a 1960 classic of urban design and the blue dot on the phone all agree: the map and the walk build two different cities in the head.
What the language barrier gives back
Travelers treat not speaking the language as a problem to be engineered away. The evidence — linguistic and psychological — suggests it is one of the journey's last protections.
What a souvenir is for, once the trip is over
The souvenir industry sells objects; travelers buy memory. The mismatch explains nearly everything on the gift-shop shelf.
Nobody has ever been in an airport
Marc Augé called places like this non-places: spaces you pass through without inhabiting. The airport is the purest case — and travel through it deserves a harder look.
The frame between us and the thing we came to see
Why travelers photograph landmarks — and what a decade of memory research says is actually happening when the phone comes out.