The Unplugged Traveler

1 week ago | unpluggedtraveler.substack.com | Lisa Abend

I should have known better. I’ve learned that after hotels, the most nerve-wracking arena of unplugged travel for a lot of people is restaurants. I’ve written about the reasons for this before— about how, in our food-obsessed age, the possibility of a bad or even so-so meal has come to seem like an unacceptable risk, and so we arm ourselves with lists and recommendations and annotated maps pulled from all corners of the internet as a talisman against a ‘wasted’ meal.

1 month ago | unpluggedtraveler.substack.com | Lisa Abend

I got my first taste of traveling without making any preparations in 2010. A couple of years earlier, I had started writing for the travel magazine Afar, which ran a regular feature, called Spin the Globe, in which they literally did just that. Turning an old globe kept in the office for just this purpose, the magazine would send a writer to wherever it was that the editor’s finger happened to land (with re-dos allowed for conflict zones and the middle of the ocean).

1 month ago | unpluggedtraveler.substack.com | Lisa Abend

It was my second day in Sofia and I was looking for lunch. A soup place I walked into smelled a little too cabbagy; a café filled with students served suspicious looking burgers. I passed a low, white building wedged between two taller ones, with a tile roof that would have made it look vaguely Mediterranean had everything around it not been so resolutely cold and gray. I got a few doors down when something caught me. I paused, turned around, and walked back. Had I seen this place before?

2 months ago | unpluggedtraveler.substack.com | Lisa Abend

Earlier this month, Google Maps turned 20. That’s two decades of being able to chart a course across town or across continents in seconds, two decades of calculating your arrival time on your means transportation, and whether there are traffic jams or volcanic eruptions in the vicinity that might impede your progress. Two decades of scanning a destination on Street View, so you know what to look for before you arrive. Two decades in which it has become almost impossible to get lost.

2 months ago | unpluggedtraveler.substack.com | Lisa Abend

Among the things that I thought might happen during my travels when I started this newsletter, sitting in an ornate theater to watch a play written by George Bernard Shaw, directed by John Malkovich, and violently protested by pro-Putin Bulgarians was not on my dance card. And yet, two days into my trip to Sofia, there we were.