This isn’t a travel blog.
I want to say that up front because the word “travel” carries some assumptions on the internet, and most of them aren’t what this section is. I don’t do destination guides. I don’t do “Top 10 Things to Do in [City].” I don’t do affiliate-loaded itineraries optimized for SEO. There are entire blogs that do that well, and I am happy to recommend a few; this isn’t one of them.
This is a personal blog and a food blog that incorporates travel. Sometimes I go somewhere and write about it. Sometimes the writing is about the food. Sometimes it’s about a place that matters to me for reasons that have nothing to do with whether you should also go there. Sometimes it’s about a trip that didn’t go the way I wanted it to and what I learned from that.
This section is where all of that lives.
What goes here
Road trips. Long drives. The hours on the interstate where you have a lot of time to think and the music gets you somewhere the destination didn’t.
Vacation posts. The full version, not the highlight reel. The thing we did, the thing that didn’t work, the meal that was great and the meal that wasn’t, the weather, the rental, the hotel, what we’d do differently. Jekyll Island, Austin, Tucson, the desert road trips, Maine, New Orleans, the Florida girls’ weekends, Tulsa.
Solo trips. Girls’ weekends. Trips with Zach (which are their own different kind of trip). Trips that are about going somewhere new and trips that are about going back to a place that’s been pulling at you.
Trips that mattered for reasons beyond the trip itself. The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Oklahoma, which I went back to with my cousin David after a private memorial trip the year before. Austin in 2018, where I went looking for the houses my family had lived in and found a photograph of my dad I didn’t know existed. Those posts get cross-categorized with Personal when the weight earns it.
The non-tourist stuff. The grocery store run in a new town. The morning at the rental with coffee on a porch that isn’t mine. The drive itself. The unexpected thing at the side of the road that becomes the thing I remember most about the trip. The mundane part of being somewhere else, which is often more interesting than the planned part.
And the international trips that didn’t happen. We had two trips planned that COVID killed and we’ve never managed to rebook. That’s its own kind of travel content; the trips you didn’t take are part of the story too.
What does NOT go here
Restaurant reviews from a trip. If the meal is the subject, it’s a Restaurant Reviews post. If the trip is the subject and the meal is one moment in it, it’s Travel. Some posts get cross-categorized when both pieces are doing real work; the Antoine’s review and the future NOLA December 2019 trip post are an example of that pairing.
Posts about being home. That’s Our Creek House. The contrast between leaving and returning is part of what makes travel writing work; you have to have a place to come back to for “going somewhere” to mean anything. Both sections benefit from the other existing.
Trips that are really memorial essays or family essays that happen to involve travel. The line is fuzzy and I draw it post by post. If the destination is the subject, it’s Travel. If the emotional weight is the subject, it’s Personal. Cross-categorization for the rare post that genuinely does both jobs.
A note on timing
Trips where I’m alone or with girlfriends and Zach is home get posted in real time or close to it. Friday Roundup live from Tulsa, posts written from the road, photos uploaded the day they’re taken. The house has somebody in it, and that means the timing doesn’t need to be careful.
Trips where Zach and I are both away are different. Those posts go live after we’re back. Sometimes weeks after. The trips with both of us tend to be the bigger ones anyway (international when it’s possible, longer road trips when it’s not), and bigger trips take longer to write about; so the delay isn’t usually noticeable. But it’s deliberate. I’m not announcing to the internet that nobody is home.
You may see real-time content from those trips on social media because that’s a different audience and a smaller window. The blog waits.
How to read this section
If you want a destination guide, this isn’t going to give you one, and I don’t apologize for that. If you want to know what an actual trip was actually like for actual people, you’re in the right place.
Some of the posts are funny. Some are wry. Some are honest about disappointment (the New Orleans trip where Zach got sick and Antoine’s was a disaster, the Jekyll Island restaurant that wasn’t worth it). Some are quieter, slower, about places that meant something more than they should have on paper.
Pick the destination that catches your eye. Read the post. If you decide to go yourself, you’ll have at least one real account of what it was like for someone who paid for it out of pocket and wasn’t being compensated to be enthusiastic. That’s the most I can promise. It might be what you needed.
P.S. The two international trips that COVID killed were a 14-day Scotland distillery tour and Ireland. I think about both of them every time someone else posts photos from either place. Someday.
P.P.S. If you’ve been to one of the places I’ve written about and had a wildly different experience, the comments are open. Travel is subjective in a way recipes aren’t; you can follow the same itinerary and have a completely different week.
P.P.P.S. Yes, the Antoine’s review was harsh. I am still not sorry. The Jekyll Island Wharf was almost as bad. There may be a pattern there about iconic destinations coasting on past glory, and if there is, I’ll keep documenting it.