The Unplugged Traveler

Articles

Not Unplugged: Phu Bai, Vietnam

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

It’s Father’s Day in the United States,1 so I thought I’d commemorate the occasion with a story I wrote about a trip I took soon after my dad’s death. It was not unplugged, but to this day, it remains one of the most serendipitous journeys I’ve ever taken. It started with that startling realization that most people make at some point in their lives, the one in which we recognize that our parents are people independent of ourselves.
The Fans of Riga

3 weeks ago | unpluggedtraveler.substack.com | Lisa Abend

First, some housekeeping:We have a winner! In the first anniversary Unplugged Traveler new paid subscriber sweepstakes, Allison Kowalkowski has won Patron of the Unplugged status. Thanks to a kind gift from my brother Andy (whose Stories from the Field you should definitely check out), Allison gets to choose an upcoming unplugged destination for me. Stay tuned to learn where she decides to send me.
Riga

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

First, a personal note: I’m in the middle of helping put on a major gathering here in Copenhagen that takes place at the end of May, which is both why this edition is a little late in getting to you and why it’s frankly anyone’s guess how the rest of the month will go. But by June, I’ll be back on a more regular schedule. Now, onward to Riga:After ignoring me for a few moments in favor of her computer screen, the hotel receptionist finally looked up.
Tuna Tongues and Human Folly in Teruel

2 months 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.
Not Unplugged: Malta

Mar 16, 2025 | 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).
The I Came Alone Pub of Sofia

Mar 2, 2025 | 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?
How To Unplug Your Map

Feb 23, 2025 | 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.
Sofia

Feb 16, 2025 | 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.
Not Unplugged: Suwalki

Jan 26, 2025 | unpluggedtraveler.substack.com | Lisa Abend

Since we’ve been talking about Gdansk, I thought I’d use this month’s Not Unplugged to write about the only other time I’ve been to Poland. It was 2012, and I was on a completely different kind of trip: on an assignment for TIME, rather than for you lovely readers, with a tightly planned agenda, rather than a spontaneous one, and with a bunch of well-known chefs as travel companions, rather than solo. This was Cook it Raw, a kind of traveling road show for the gastronomic set.
The Heroes and Villains of Gdansk

Jan 20, 2025 | unpluggedtraveler.substack.com | Lisa Abend |Timothy Snyder

As you may remember from last time, there were many things I did not know about Gdansk before I went there, including:It has gorgeous architectureIt has excellent doughnutsIt has Lech Walesa soup memesThere’s one more important thing to add. Gdansk, it turns out, is where World War Two started. On September 1, 1939, a German battleship pulled into the harbor of what was then the free city of Danzig and started firing on a Polish munitions depot. Probably all of you know that.