How to Travel
Meaning of Life List 131, Sept 2, 2024; Written for my teenagers on the occasion of their first independent international trip
Part I: How to Pack
Checking bags is a moral failure. They weigh you down—literally and cosmically. You can’t move quickly, change flights, or hitch a ride on a spaceship leaving the solar system.
Codify your travel routine with checklists. Reserve travel-only kits (e.g., electronics, toiletries) and versatile clothes that you can drop easily into your bag.
Lay out everything you are going to pack and then get rid of more than half of it. Carrying all that you need to live grandly for a month in one small bag generates an exuberant sense of freedom and purity. Also, you may get mistaken for a drug mule when going through customs.
It is occasionally acceptable to check bags (e.g., expedition to Mars or large sports equipment). If you do, expect that your bags will get lost. You will spend hours in the bowels of the airport in a sad office filled with abandoned suitcases that aren’t yours, trying to extract information from a stricken luggage agent. Your bags may or may not show up three days after you have been wearing other peoples’ clothes and the same pair of underwear washed daily in the hotel sink.
Part II: How to Survive Air Travel
Airport lines have similar energy as the simmering discontent before the outbreak of mass social unrest. Navigating these lines requires ninja-like judgment on whether to follow instructions and wait your turn or aggressively assert your place in line and your right to put luggage in the overhead compartment.
Assume that your flights will be delayed or canceled, that you will sit on the tarmac for hours, and that you will miss your connection. You will be filled with gratitude when you get to your destination, unlike the rest of the plane full of apoplectic people.
When persistence and politeness fail, bursting into operatic tears is an effective way to get rebooked on the only flight that is leaving an airport that has been shut down by weather, systems outage or airline incompetence. It can also be useful in grabbing the second to last room in the airport hotel if you don’t manage to get your flight rebooked.
Airplanes are debilitating spaces – you are dirty, cramped, and powerless to escape. Maintain your sanity through sensory deprivation: headphones, sunglasses, a scarf wrapped around your head, an all-encompassing hoodie, a Korean beauty mask.
The most efficient thing to do on an airplane is to sleep. Some people take a sleeping pill, but you risk being awakened abruptly in a drug-induced paranoid haze when your plane makes an emergency landing in Iceland halfway through a transatlantic flight.
Traveling business class on a domestic flight is not worth it, unless someone else is paying for it. Traveling business class on an international flight with a fully flat seat after being strung out on adventure is one of the most delightful luxuries in the world.
Traveling with young children compounds stress and exhaustion exponentially. View it as a family trip rather than a vacation, knowing you will be more exhausted at the end of the trip than when you left.
It’s never worth it to drink alcohol on an airplane (unless you are traveling with young children).
Your gut-brain axis is subconsciously terrified that you will be stuck on the plane forever with only these crappy pretzels as sustenance. Eat high-protein snacks so you don’t gobble airplane food as if it is your last meal.
Get an aisle seat so you can get up multiple times during the flight to stretch and go to the bathroom. Wear compression socks. Fill a 32oz lightweight water bottle once you have gone through security. Add electrolytes. Slowly drink the entire bottle on the flight. Dehydration is real – you lose 4 times more water on a plane.
If you have a long connection, take a shower if you can get into an airline lounge. Otherwise, brush your teeth, wash your face, and change your clothes in the airport bathroom. The bathroom may be disgusting but you’ll feel remarkably refreshed.
Be polite but don’t strike up a conversation with the person sitting next to you. Unlike in romantic comedies, they are not attractive or interesting and they don’t want to talk to you.
Customs is always stressful. Your agitated brain thinks that if you answer any of the question wrong you will be detained indefinitely in a small windowless room. Listen carefully, answer crisply, do exactly what the customs agents tell you.
Take an Uber to the airport but a taxi from the airport. The taxis are usually curbside at arrivals, and you don’t have to wait long – except in San Francisco where Uber has made taxis an endangered species.
International travel expeditors are rarely worth it – they ease anxiety but don’t do much else. Pre-booking international airport transfer is worth it when you land bleary-eyed in an unknown place and are immediately harassed by so-called taxi drivers.
If travel times are similar, take the train. Train stations are architectural wonders. You can swan into the station 5 minutes before your train leaves. If you miss your train, you can blithely catch the next one. The gentle rhythm of watching the landscape pass by elevates your soul.
Part III: How to Find Your Bearings
Ask your coolest and most cosmopolitan friends for recommendations of hotels, restaurants and things to do in cities they have visited. Wow your uncool friends with all the amazing places you know around the world.
Make reservations at a good boutique hotel or short-term apartment, and a few great restaurants – you won’t be able to get into them otherwise. A little pre-planning provides a scaffold for the trip on which you can be spontaneous in other activities.
Schedule a class or force yourself to exercise as soon as you arrive. Your oxygen-deprived, cramped, dehydrated body wants to curl up in a fetal position and die. You will feel miraculously better if you stretch, move, and get fresh air.
There is no cure for jet lag, but a few things will make it a little better: fluids, sunlight, exercise.
The small things are surprisingly exhausting – unintelligible signs, cars on the opposite side of the road, weird outlets, strange door handles. Move slowly, be patient with your overwhelmed brain, and always check both ways for traffic.
Create comforting patterns — coffee or ice cream at the same place every day! You will have more energy for adventure the safer you feel in a foreign space.
You will lose things. Commit to the few extra seconds needed to put things away – especially your passport – in a safe spot. Reflexively check your airplane seat, hotel room and restaurant table for straying possessions. If your passport, phone and all your money are stolen, go to the embassy – they are surprisingly effective at aiding stressed-out travelers.
When your travel plans go to hell - which they will - view it as a puzzle rather than a catastrophe. I promise that you won’t be stranded penniless and alone for the rest of your life in some random city.
Part IV: How to Experience New Cultures
Be a traveler not a tourist. There is little pleasure in following hordes of slow-moving tourists to gape at mummified national icons. There is great pleasure in experiencing the rhythms of ordinary life and discovering the less accessible places of extraordinary beauty.
Try to speak the local language. You will be embarrassed by your inability to conjugate verbs, remember vocabulary, and comprehend what anyone is saying. But you will get better, and people will be charmed by your effort — except for Parisian shopkeepers who consider your horrible Quebecois accent a desecration of their language.
Be patient with locals. It will drive you crazy that the barista tells his life story to every customer and takes 10 minutes to make your coffee. Learn how to move at this different pace.
The best way get insights into a culture is to build relationships with people. The best way to build relationships is to work professionally with people. Once you become friends, they will reveal how bad your accent is, how absurd your opinions are, and how much they enjoy the learning about each other.
Part V: How to Have Epic Adventures
Be up for anything. Whether or not you loved scaling sea cliffs, learning to dive, or dancing in abandoned warehouses until dawn, the rawness of the experience will change you.
Try all the foods – except for raw vegetables in microbial-laden environments. Some foods (e.g., camel’s feet in Beijing) may be disgusting, but others (e.g., the foie gras mille feuille at Berasatagui in San Sebastian) are foods from the Gods that you will remember forever. You may occasionally get food poisoning. It is a small price to pay.
Workout every day so you can eat more the next day.
Choose a place to shop or eat that is far enough for a long walk. Take the subway to far neighborhoods and walk back. Wandering allows for serendipitous encounters with beauty – viewpoints, murals, street musicians, amazing outfits.
Most souvenirs will be thrown away. Instead, bring back food as gifts (acorn-fed prosciutto or Marriage Freres easter tea for me please!). If you find something truly beautiful, spend the money. Bring an extra fold-up bag to carry these things home.
Do something hard (be like your Dad and win a half-marathon in Maui!). Then go lie on a beach for a few days. It will feel so much more satisfying.
Travel alone sometimes. It is terrifying and exhilarating to be utterly self-reliant away from everyone you know.
There is a fine line between freedom and safety, between courage and fear. The wide world can indeed be dangerous, but being afraid of it will dampen your joy. Trust your instincts: if you are worried about the pack of men following you on your run on the beach, turn around and go play tennis instead.
It is not a moral failure to spend an afternoon or even an entire day curled up in your hotel room reading a book and ordering room service. Sometimes, the adventurer needs to lie fallow.
Please come home. I miss you.
Although this was written for your children, I suspect many of us will be saving and bookmarking this email for future refernce!
As a life-long frequent traveler myself, and now as a full-time international nomad, I fully agree with this collection of travel advice. This is spectacular and should be REQUIRED reading for everyone who ever leaves home for someplace wholly different. (And, in my opinion, everyone should be REQUIRED to leave home at some point to experience someplace wholly different.)