Welcome to The Unplugged Traveler

One small attempt to put the serendipity back in travel

Like so many things in life, this project was born of failure. 

For the past year or so, I’ve been trying to place a story. I’ve been a freelance journalist and travel writer for a long time, and I’ve got a pretty good roster of editors whom I regularly pitch. But one by one, they each turned down the idea. A normal person might have taken that slew of rejections as evidence that her story idea was flawed, and abandoned it. But I am the kind of person who, when she found herself—after hours of hiking—alone in a remote part of the Scottish highlands that bore no resemblance to the landscape depicted on her map, somehow convinced herself that the map was wrong. 

So here we are. 

The story idea that now forms the organizing principle behind this newsletter is simple: it’s about traveling without the internet. In short, I go to a new place and, without using any digital anything, see what happens. Then I write about it.

In an age in which Instagram and Google have made it so that most every aspect of a trip is not only planned but known before departure (not just where to eat but which dishes to order; not just where to stay but which room to request; not just which sites to see but how to pose next to them, preferably while wearing a fetching straw sunhat), I try, as best I can, to travel unplugged.

To be clear, I’m not doing this because I hate the Internet. I definitely spend too much time online, but this is not one of those tiresome recovery stories, in which the writer attempts to break her addiction to her smartphone by locking it away for a weekend and playing board games with her family instead. I am keenly aware of how much the internet makes possible, especially when it comes to travel.

Yet I’m also aware of how much it has taken away. The same Airbnb that offers me the seductive illusion of feeling like I live in the place I’m visiting has also dramatically altered European cities, driving real estate prices out of the reach of locals and transforming once vibrant neighborhoods into sticky-streeted warrens of souvenir shops and restaurants serving microwaved paella. Social media has lured unsustainably large crowds to spots never meant for them: residents of one picturesque Paris street had to petition the city council for a gate to lock out the Instagramming hordes who camped outside their brightly painted homes snapping selfies, and an official from the Lofoten Islands once told me that local rescue services had been overwhelmed by tourists who, lured by a few posts showing the archipelago sparkling in the summer sunshine, had neglected to pack anything sturdier than a t-shirt for a destination 300 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. 

These are some of the internet’s tangible effects on travel . But there are so many other things we have lost, including the delicious possibility of getting lost itself. 

Instead of observing our surroundings, or interacting with people who might point us in the right direction, we stare at a blue dot blinking from the device in our hand. We search online for the insider information that will offer us the best dinner or hike or artisanal ceramics, and then, once there, end up disappointed to learn that we are not alone in experiencing it, that we are in fact surrounded by scads of others who have read the same websites and scrolled the same feeds. Armed with checklists of the fifty best restaurants in Asia or ten most Instagrammable spots in Croatia, we travel burdened with the anxiety that if we ourselves do not make the same rounds, our experience will somehow be less than it could have been. 

And it’s not just that the Internet has a way of encouraging everyone to travel to the same places;  it also spurs the places themselves to become more like each other. This is not, strictly speaking, Instagram’s fault—we can blame late-stage capitalism for that. But by visually cataloguing and disseminating the latest objects of desire, social media has encouraged a kind of global sameness, a world in which we travel to a far-off place only to seek out the kind of sourdough bakery and midcentury modern furnishings we enjoy at home. In this way, the distinctive sharp edges of place are filed down to a smoothness where they can not discomfort us. We say we want authentic, but mostly what we want is the soothingly familiar, sprinkled with a light dusting of local color. It’s as if travel itself has become flattened.

I want to see what happens if we unflatten it a bit. 

Each month, I’ll travel to a place in Europe that I’ve never been to before. Beyond buying the ticket that gets me there (because no chance of serendipity in the world is strong enough to make me spend time on hold with an airline call center), I’ll do it entirely without the internet. That means no Googling, no navigating by GPS, no scanning Instagram to find the spots I want to visit, no online translators, no apps ranking the best restaurants, no Uber, no Airbnb, and definitely no mindless scrolling as coping device. Recommendations from real people are fine, and actually to be sought, so long as the people giving them live in the place being visited. 

I'll have to hone some skills that most of us let lapse long ago, like map reading, or figuring out which restaurant seems most promising solely on the basis of how it looks. It will almost certainly mean that I'll experience the kinds of risks—like bad meals and arriving in a fully-booked town without a reservation— that the Internet has largely inoculated us against. It will mean wrestling on a regular basis with the profound internal struggle that is FOMO--knowing, for example, that entire instagram accounts exist just to showcase the best pizzerias in Naples, and knowing that I might miss all of them. And because I won’t have the consolation of my phone every time I feel awkward or bored, it may mean more connection with actual people. 

More than anything, I hope that taking a digital-free approach will restore to travel some of the serendipity that drew me to it in the first place. That it will highlight the idiosyncrasies of a place, rather than the similarities. And that, by allowing for major disappointments and minor catastrophes, I’ll emerge with better yarns to tell. Because as anyone who has ever spent the night in a hotel bed with sheets polka-dotted with blood, or has been forced from social politeness to eat reindeer hooves, or has even gotten good and lost in the Scottish highlands can tell you, the worst travel experiences often make the best stories. 

My plan is to publish one story a month for as long as I can afford to keep traveling. If you want to help me with that, please consider a paid subscription. The essays themselves will be free for the foreseeable future, but paid subscribers—at $5 a month or $50 a year— will get an additional section that includes the names and addresses of the places where I stay, eat, drink, and shop in each destination. And anyone who pays the $350 (an amount that is enough to get me to just about any city in Europe) to become a Patron of the Unplugged also gets the opportunity to choose my next destination.

This is an experiment, and I don’t know how it will turn out. It’s entirely possible that all those editors were right, and this is a terrible idea. Maybe my assumptions are wrong, and traveling this way won’t result in good stories. Maybe the disasters are going to outweigh the moments of transcendence. Maybe no one but me is interested in finding out what happens.

But just as I kept slogging through that boggy landscape in the Scottish highlands way, way past the point when I should have realized I had made a wrong turn, I’m going anyway. 

First stop, coming next week: Hamburg.