A Month in Siena 10/16/2023
About Scott: Travel
Travel is everything. But you know this.
Mount Pilatus, Switzerland, November 2014
Reading time: 2 minutes
Please consider disabling your ad blocker, it disrupts site functions in addition to blocking ads. Thank you!
The cliche. The big duh.
The thing that makes me just like millions of people: I have always loved traveling.
Read about my travel book, Backseat Cities.
Nevertheless, it's true. As a boy growing up in Columbus, OH, I looked forward to trips to Cincinnati or Lake Erie to visit family. The logistics often interested me as much as the destination. Where would we stop to eat, what roads would we take, which towns were we passing through, etc.
Travel is the poetry of daily life.
After graduating from high school, I went on a trip to France with my best friends. As a kid from the bland suburbs of Columbus going to Europe for the first time, I saw the possibilities. It changed everything.
As a junior in college, I spent a semester in Paris. I got to know the city and I traveled around western Europe.
During my senior year, my girlfriend and I considered starting a tour company offering trips to France and Germany. It never happened, but it was the first thing I thought of when facing the onset of The Rest of My Life™.
In graduate school at UC Davis, I traveled extensively in the western US and in Europe, particularly in France.
My wife and I started taking cool trips almost as soon as we met: the Adrenaline Tour (2010), the Grand Tour of Europe (2014), the Food and Music Tour (2015), etc. We began traveling with our son about a year after he was born. As of October, 2022—at six years old—he has already been to twelve American states, Denmark, Norway, and France.
Taking a trip isn't just fun, or a recharging of your batteries, or a way to open your mind. It's involving yourself in history, art, food, spirituality, nature, commerce, politics. Travel is everything.
Compared to someone who works for the State Department, or veteran travel writers, I'm not even close to widely traveled.
Most of all, when done right, travel is a series of distilled experiences which encapsulate what we're doing during our brief time on this planet. Travel is the poetry of daily life.
Travel Writing
See Reading, check out the 44 Reviews, or learn about my travel book, Backseat Cities.
Travel Maps
Compared to someone who works for the State Department, or veteran travel writers, I'm not even close to widely traveled.
I've created three maps to show where I've been. I did them for myself as much as for site visitors.
- These are places I visited from childhood to the end of 2009.
- This map starts in the fall of 2010, the first time I traveled after my first wife and I divorced.
- I ran out of layers on #2, so I had to start a new map! It's 2020 to the present.
There are so many blank spaces on these maps, the markers read like a travel brochure for middle class white Americans. I will rectify that.
- Favorite American cities: New York, New Orleans
- States I have not yet been to: North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Alaska
- Favorite foreign countries: France, Mexico, Switzerland
- Countries I would especially like to visit: Costa Rica, Argentina, Senegal, Morocco, New Zealand, Japan, Russia, India
If you're on a decently-sized screen, you can look at these more closely by clicking on the "View larger map" icon.
Recent Posts
Eyewitness Travel: France 4/24/2023
L'Africain du Groenland 8/2/2022
On the Plain of Snakes 5/17/2022
Volcanoes, Palm Trees, and Privilege 3/22/2022
L'axe du loup 2/28/2022
The Art of Travel 12/31/2021
Postcard: Los Angeles 11/5/2021
Afropean 8/6/2021
Roadrunner 7/22/2021
Popular Tags
Archive
Show moreAbout
Recent Tweets
If you toggle the switch above the words "Recent Tweets" and it still says, "Nothing to see here - yet," it means the idiot who broke Twitter either hasn't gotten around to fixing this feature, or intentionally broke it to get us to pay for it (which is moronic, I can easily live without it and it generated traffic to his site).