Twelve centuries of breakfast
Every day for over 1,200 years, monks have carried a freshly prepared meal through a forest of 200,000 graves. The recipient has not moved since 835 AD. To...
He left Japan to figure out what Japan was worth
Shota grew up near this valley, where his neighbors grew tea for decades. Then he left for Mexico to do import/export. He came back fluent in three languages...
Nine million empty houses - A Japanese Motorcycle Tour
I've been to Japan eight times. The first few trips stuck to the bullet trains and the cities. Then I started renting motorcycles. Years later, I somehow...
The Floating Onsen named after a Crab
The name comes from a small blue crab. Guntû - the species that moves through the shallows of the Seto Inland Sea, unremarkable to most, familiar to anyone...
The Xerox salesman and a half-millenia Dynasty
Taking a short break from sharing hotels; this edition of the newsletter is about an experience I had two years ago in Nara, Japan. Thank you to Gaston and...
Vlad the Impaler and King Charles have this in common
In 1967, a Romanian count made the journey back to a village his family hadn't seen in nearly twenty years. The communist regime had taken everything: the...
She bought the desert on a detour
Lauren Werner was supposed to keep driving. It was 2017, a road trip to Santa Fe. Someone mentioned a piece of land in the Chihuahuan Desert with...
What the birds believed
Seabirds have been diving at the pool for years. They're searching for two marlin, swimming in the clear water. Except those marlin are ceramic - hand tiled....
The bar named for the birth year of Alexandre Dumas
You take the fast ferry from Fromentine. Thirty minutes later, you step off somewhere that runs on bicycle time. Île d'Yeu sits 20 kilometers off the Vendée...
The bathroom is a hundred meters away
The bathroom is a hundred meters away. That's not a complaint – it's an intentional part of what makes this stay special. You see, you're not staying in a...
No good story started with a salad
The bathroom tiles were made from clay pulled out of an Etruscan pit, twenty minutes down the road. This former monastery in Umbria, Italy is entirely...
The elephant at the foot of your bed
Before dawn, the bamboo stops moving. Then something large shifts outside the curved glass of your room, and you realize it isn't wind. As you rustle in bed,...
Wine in the "Other" Dolomites
My wife and I were somewhere in the grass with a bottle of Georgian wine when I realized my monkey mind had finally shut off. That's what happens when you...
The grocery carts are still in the aisles
This is a city frozen in time, and in such a strange time at that. On April 27, 1986, the buses arrived and 49,360 people walked out of their city with a...
A Bali that's quickly disappearing...
The wood in your bungalow is 150 years old. You can feel it in the floorboards - a warmth no synthetic surface replicates. Overhead, the carved teak rafters...
Dinner above the well
Walk twenty minutes east from Chania's Venetian Harbour in Crete and the tourists disappear. The seafront promenade thins out. The souvenir shops stop. You...
Still in the Estonian Wetlands
The water rose because of beavers. They built their dams in the wetlands west of Tallinn, flooded a former forest, and killed many of the trees. Now the...
The Alps out Every Window
The kitchen is open. You can see the fire from your table. The man cooking is the same man who, thirty-five years ago, walked into Ljubljana and started...
An LA Firehouse turns Japanese
The legend above the door still reads "Engine Co. No. 17." It's been there since 1927, cast into the Beaux Arts façade of a building that spent more than...
The architect who came home
The air wells in traditional Penang shophouses are open to the sky. Not decorative — functional, necessary, the way the building breathes. Stand beneath one...
