Earlier this year, around mid-October, RolfPotts.com went offline for a few days, due to a DNS glitch that happened as my webmaster was moving the site’s content to a bigger server. It was a weirdly unsettling experience, for reasons I’ll try to explain here. On having had a personal website for nearly three decades RolfPotts.com…
This month marks the 25th anniversary of my travel writer interview series at RolfPotts.com. Indeed, I’ve been interviewing one travel writer a month since November 2000, which means I’ve now featured upwards 300 travel writers, from A-list icons like Simon Winchester and Pico Iyer and Pam Houston, to up-and-coming travel bloggers and new-media creators. This…
When my mother, Alice Potts, died last month, part of the process of working through my grief came in digging into the archive of digital files I have collected over the years to document her life. This ritual was in part an endeavor to eulogize her in a way that honored who she was, but…
My mother, Alice Potts, died peacefully last month in her memory-care assisted-living apartment in Salina, Kansas. She was 81 years old, and had in recent years been dealing with dementia (which was compounded of late by cerebral hemorrhages). Mom grew up the oldest of six on a farm near the town of Aliceville in eastern…
The first copy of Vagabonding I ever held in my hands sits in this display case at The Atlanta Hotel in Thailand. The story of how it ended up there is inseparable from the tale of my own travels in that part of the world. As was the reflexive habit among young budget wanderers passing…
Last year around this time I wrote a post called “Rolf’s Top-10 ‘Reverse-Bucket List’ experiences from 2023,” in which I confessed that I’ve near really been one to create “bucket lists” so much as decide, after the fact, that a given experience was extraordinary enough to have retroactively qualified as bucket-list worthy. Many of these…
Though people have been dreaming up “Bucket Lists” to help focus their travel and life goals for as long as the concept has existed, I have never consciously created one. Granted, I’ve had no shortage of year-to-year travel- and life-goals, but my “bucket list” experiences have typically been realized after the fact. For example, I…
As 2023 gets underway, I’ve resolved to be less “virtually present” on social media, and more emotionally present in my own life. Hence, it’s unlikely I’ll be adding many new posts to my Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook accounts in the coming months. Lowering one’s social-media profile might seem like a peculiar choice in 2023, given…
My newest book, The Vagabond’s Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery and the Art of Travel, debuted in October, with a series of virtual and live events in places like New York, Kansas, and San Francisco. Early praise for the book came from The New York Times, which noted: “Rolf Potts, the author who inspired wanderlust…
I am happy to announce that my new book, The Vagabond’s Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel, will be released by Ballantine Books in October of this year, and is available for preorder from your favorite local or online bookstore. Information about promotions, book-tour events, and a tie-in Deviate podcast…
I met Kiki Bush on dating app about two months into the pandemic of 2020. I should have been off traveling in Italy that month, she should have been in Berlin; instead, we met in our shared childhood home-state of Kansas, and we had our first date on the rural property where I stay when…
