Travel is Hard

What happens when a city offers you no obvious entry point, and the resistance you arrived with turns out to be less grounded than you thought.

I texted a colleague last night after finding out about their pregnancy. I smiled knowing what's coming, not the baby, but the advice. Sleep schedules, feeding routines, what worked in the car on long drives. All of it well-intentioned. Most of it worked for someone. Almost none of it will translate directly to them. They'll have to take it in, filter it, and figure out what actually fits their family. Travel advice works the same way. The first thing worth saying is that tra

The airplane is not designed for sleep. That's not an oversight. It's the architecture. Seats recline just enough to feel like a gesture. The cabin temperature swings between too cold and not cold enough, depending on where you're sitting and how recently someone opened the overhead vent above your head. The drink cart comes through at intervals that bear no relationship to your sleep cycle. And the air itself, pressurized to simulate an altitude somewhere between six and eig

I was standing in the check-in line last week watching two travelers lose their composure at the desk agent. One was a single mother traveling with a toddler. The other was a business traveler with an airline status tag hanging from his backpack like a merit badge. Both were upset. Both raised their voices. But I had more patience for one than the other. The mother was anxious, you could see it in how she held her child, how her voice cracked when she explained her situation.