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Everything feels new at the outset of a journey (online book club remix)
Travel can return you to a kind of childhood (online book club remix)
What museums reveal about places (and what they have to offer travelers)
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A look at how museums work (live from a presidential museum and a Barbie doll museum)
Remembering internet cafes, and how they affected the experience of travel
Internet cafes were so central to the lives of long-term travelers 20 years ago that my memories of vagabonding through Asia in the late 1990s and early 2000s are inseparable from occasional stop-offs in these little storefronts full of dial-up-connected computer terminals. At the time, internet cafes felt revolutionary in their ability to connect travelers…
Vagabonding audio companion: How to study abroad (even if you aren’t a student)
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A “Vagabonding Audio Companion” remix of a GFU study-abroad podcast.
Fear, family, and walking the Camino de Santiago (live with Andrew McCarthy)
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Author and actor Andrew McCarthy on walking across Spain with his son.
15 insights from Jonathan Gottschall’s book “The Storytelling Animal”
1) Reading stories is an act of imagination for the reader Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence, authors trick readers into doing most of the imaginative work. Reading is often seen as a passive act: we lie back and let writers pipe joy into our brains. But this is wrong. When we experience a story,…
Travel burnout is a real thing (and it’s OK to feel it sometimes), with Matt Kepnes
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Matt Kepnes on how to preempt (and deal with) travel burnout on the road
What we hope to see in places can be at odds with reality
This image from my trekking journey in Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands figured into the recent Deviate episode wherein Ari Shaffir and I discussed the idiosyncrasies of travel onstage at KGB Bar in NYC. Specifically, we talked about the tourist desire to see a “pure” vision of distant cultures, and how years of working with travelers in…
The Mystical High Church of Luck: Decoding Las Vegas (with Ari Shaffir)
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Ari Shaffir and Rolf discuss the power of luck (and the peculiarities of Las Vegas)
How travelers create quests and find community (online book club remix)
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Rolf and his online book club discuss quests, guidebooks, and other issues from The Vagabond’s Way.
Your first vagabonding journey remains in conversation with the travels that follow
Exactly 10,603 days days ago this week I packed a few belongings into a second-hand 1984 Volkswagen Vanagon (into which I’d built a homemade fold-out bed), and embarked on a journey across North America that wound up lasting eight months. Nowadays this endeavor is known as #vanlife, but in that pre-hashtag era it was (for…