Bad Experiences Make the Best Stories

Lisa Abend on traveling unplugged

A pedestrian tunnel in Glasgow, courtesy of Lisa Abend.

Welcome to Wanderlust Salon, a monthly travel series about new places, new experiences, and new perspectives. Each month we meet up with a different guest to explore a corner of the globe (or an aspect of travel) that’s left a permanent mark on their heart.

I suppose I’m fortunate to have met

Lisa Abend

in a place she often deliberately avoids: the internet. 

Lisa and I got in touch in the comment section of my recent post asking readers whether they would travel without advance planning—and for Lisa, the answer was an emphatic yes. She travels without a predetermined itinerary or any form of internet connection. No hotel bookings, no dinner reservations, no maps, no checklists. She just picks a place, figures things out when she gets there, and documents the results (some good, some bad, some downright strange) in her newsletter, The Unplugged Traveler. 

As an intrepid freelance journalist of 20 years, covering everything from learning to knit in Iceland to searching Vietnam for stories from her father’s past, Lisa is well-equipped for the sort of challenge internet-free travel presents. But it’s a challenge nonetheless, and I had a hundred questions about it. The first was: why? What would possess someone to show up somewhere without so much as a place to sleep (the stress of which would be enough to make my anxious heart give out)?

Lisa’s answer touched on a frustration many of us have experienced firsthand. She felt as though “travel had become flattened somehow” by the internet. Google reviews and Tripadvisor help us navigate and plan, but they also tend to funnel crowds of tourists to the same restaurants, shops, and attractions, where we end up having similar experiences. “I wanted to see if, by disconnecting from the internet, I could recapture more of the serendipity and sense of discovery that travel once had,” Lisa told me. 

Her gamble paid off. While traveling unplugged, Lisa has stumbled into plenty of attractions she never knew existed, and that’s led her to fun, whimsical, and memorable experiences. Flying by the seat of her pants might mean that Lisa missed the tastiest tagliatelle in Bologna or the best-reviewed Scottish breakfast in Glasgow, but her journeys are unique to her. The unknown element turns them into voyages of wonder and discovery.

Of course, unplugged traveling isn’t for everyone, and whether it could be for you depends on what you value. Is it comfort, luxury, and eating at the highest-rated restaurants so you have the “best” time possible in a given place? Or is it an interesting experience, even if it isn’t the most comfortable, beautiful, or delicious? 

Only you can answer that. But if you’re someone who wants to learn and grow through travel, there’s a good argument for adopting Lisa’s show-up-and-see-what-happens approach. That requires gumption, and a willingness to have a couple flops. Then again, as Lisa says: “the bad experiences often make the best stories!”

Read on for more of Lisa’s insights from traveling unplugged. 

Thank you so much for being here, Lisa! Tell us more about your project. How long have you been traveling unplugged, and what gave you the idea?

The short answer is that the project is born of failure: I had pitched a column in which I traveled to different places without using the internet to a bunch of different editors, and they all turned me down. And so I did the pig-headed thing and decided to publish it myself, as a newsletter. 

But the idea behind that pitch had been brewing for a while. I had been thinking a lot about how predictable and known travel has become as a result of the internet. These days, we all travel with lists that we’ve gotten off of Instagram and Google and Tik Tok of restaurants where we have to eat and precise spots for optimal sunset viewing. As a result, we not only end up visiting the same kinds of places as we frequent at home—the fourth-wave coffee shops, the sourdough bakeries—but we also end up being surrounded by scads of other people just like ourselves who are traveling with the same lists. And once we are in a place, we tend to interact more with our phones—taking selfies, staving off the first whiff of boredom with endless scrolling—than with the place and the people in it.

It felt to me like travel had become flattened somehow. With so little left to chance, and with so few risks involved—not even the minor risks of a so-so meal or a spoogy hotel room—the dips had been eradicated (even though—as any travel writer can tell you—the bad experiences often make the best stories!). And conversely, the flashes of brilliance, the wonderful surprises and unexpected experiences, had also been smoothed away.  I wanted to see if, by disconnecting from the internet, I could recapture more of the serendipity and sense of discovery that travel once had. 

How do you choose your destinations?

The first criterion is that I haven’t been there before. And then, even for places that are new to me, I can’t know enough about it that I would be able to orient myself in some way. I really wanted to go to Bergen, in Norway, for example, because I’ve heard it’s beautiful, but then I remembered that I know of a couple of restaurants there that I would want to try, and that didn’t seem fair. After that, to be honest, a lot of it comes down to me trying to find flights I can afford. I use the ‘Explore Everywhere’ function on Skyscanner a lot. 

Cotswold Way, courtesy of Lisa Abend.

What has been your favorite thing about traveling without the internet? 

The way it turns everything into a discovery. When you show up in a place without knowing much about it, every encounter becomes its own mini-revelation: wait, Hamburg has canals? Oh, Zadar is where maraschino cherries come from? There’s a collection of wax uteruses on display in Bologna? I mean, who knew?

An experience in Karlovy Vary really drove that point home. Wandering aimlessly around town, I came across a very grand building that looked like a theater, and to my surprise, found the door open. There was a woman selling tickets there, who made it clear it was a museum of some sort, but that was as far as her English and my Czech got us. I bought a ticket anyway, and soon discovered I was in the former Imperial Spa, where a wing of the old treatment rooms had been turned into this wonderful exhibition about the town’s heyday as a destination for Europe’s cultural elite, who would come to “take the cure” in the hot springs there and hike around in the mountain forests. The exhibitions included these charming animations, as well as some frankly amazing holograms of former patients, including one of a very stressed looking Franz Kafka soaking restlessly in a tub. If I had read about it online, I probably would have decided not to visit it—I mean, on paper, a museum about a spa doesn’t sound like the most scintillating way to spend a couple of hours. But the place was utterly delightful, and my delight was only increased by having found it unawares. 

In your experience, what have been the best and worst destinations to travel to without an internet connection, and why? 

This is going to sound very pollyannaish, but it’s true: Every trip I’ve taken this way so far has been wonderful, even the one (looking at you, Cotswold Way), that was also kind of terrible. But of all of them, probably Bologna was the one where going internet-free taught me the most, because it forced me to deal with some serious FOMO. 

One of the things that the internet has done is persuade us that there are certain places where we simply must visit—that gelateria in Florence or taqueria in Mexico City that is supposedly the best and if you don’t eat there you might as well not have gone to Italy or Mexico, since you not only have settled for less but wasted your time. Bologna is perhaps the most food-obsessed city in Italy, and so the possibility of having a mediocre meal, or even a freaking mediocre mortadella sandwich, can start to feel existentially tragic. And it’s true that when I first got there, and I didn’t have the internet to tell me which places were the best, I found myself mildly tortured by the first plate of tagliatelle I ate, because although it was good, how could I be sure that it was as good as it could be? Was there someplace better that everyone knew about but that I was missing? But after enough tagliatelle, I finally realized: it was all pretty damn delicious and maybe I should stop comparing phantom plates of pasta and just enjoy the one in front of me. 

As for the worst, the afore-mentioned Cotswold Way trip went awry in several different ways, most of which cannot be blamed on being unplugged, but one of which definitely can: finding a place to stay. I had planned on being able to hike into a town each day and find a hotel or bed and breakfast, just as I had in all of the cities I’ve visited for the newsletter so far. But some of the towns along the way were so small they only had one or two places that quickly filled up with groups. And it turns out that a lot of bed and breakfasts in that part of the world don’t have signs marking them as such, because they are also their owners’ homes. Which means that, if you haven’t done any research ahead of time, you wouldn’t know they were there. That caused some definite complications. 

What’s the coolest thing you’ve stumbled upon that you wouldn’t have found if you had been traveling with an internet connection? 

That would be an entire convention hall filled with thousands of avid science fiction fans from all over the world. I had a hard time finding a place to stay in Glasgow, because as I gradually discovered in my futile journey from one hotel to the next, my trip happened to coincide with World Con, which is where the Hugos—the most prestigious awards for sci-fi literature—are awarded. Anyway, one thing led to another, but eventually I met a couple of mohawked, vaguely futuristic storm troopers (they turned out, I later learned, to be dressed as Vault Boy and Vault Girl from the game Fallout) who encouraged me to check out the convention. So I did, and discovered a massive hall full of happy people decked out in the most fantastic costumes and geeking out to talks on things like “Fighting Fungi in Space.”

Have you felt any shifts in your mindset or your spirit since you started going off the grid? Has it changed how you interact with the world?

Absolutely. Traveling this way has made me more confident of my ability to navigate unfamiliar situations. But more than anything, it’s helped me cultivate a kind of openness to experience that is how I want to be in the world.

What’s the craziest, funniest, or most touching thing to have happened to you while traveling unplugged?

That also happened on the Cotswold Way. My birthday fell during the time I was walking, and in fact I had planned the trip to celebrate it. As I mentioned earlier, it didn’t go as expected, and in fact, the whole trip was full of enough strange coincidences that I felt like I had passed through some weird portal in the time/space continuum. But the strangest came on my actual birthday. As I was about to enter the town of Painswick, I passed a couple walking in the opposite direction; we smiled at each other and kept going our different ways. I soon came to the town center, where the road forked into two streets. I chose the one on the left, and headed down it about 100 meters, but then decided that the other street looked more interesting, and retraced my steps. Right as I rejoined the fork, I crossed paths again with the couple I had passed before, only now we were all going in the same direction. I sped up so we wouldn’t be awkwardly walking side by side down the narrow street. 

But then, from behind me, I heard the woman in the couple tell a local who had emerged from her house that it was her partner’s birthday. Amazed, I stopped, turned around, and said, “It’s my birthday too.” Their names were Evie and Jason, and they were visiting from the US. The three of us went to a café in town, where Evie told the waitress that it was Jason and my birthday, and the waitress immediately put on a recording of ‘Happy Birthday’ for everyone in the café to sing along to. I was floored—and not just by the coincidence of Jason sharing my birthday. What really amazed me was how many things had to have aligned for me to hear that it was Jason’s birthday right at the moment when Evie decided to tell a random stranger about it. And then, to find myself serenaded by a café full of strangers in a tiny town in England. I still can’t really explain it. But it was deeply consoling, as if the universe was telling me it saw me. 

Zadar, Croatia, courtesy of Lisa Abend.

Say I told you I would spend an unplugged 24 hours in whatever location you recommend—where would you send me and why? Would you give me any hints about how to spend my time?

This is going to sound like a cop-out, but I really mean it: anyplace works. The beauty of traveling unplugged is that it allows you to meet a destination without an excess of preconceived ideas. And when you go in like that, you’re almost guaranteed to get a memorable experience—to say nothing of a good story—out of it. 

Thanks again for joining, Lisa! Subscribe to The Unplugged Traveler for more stories of serendipitous, internet-free travel.

Psst—did you know that paid subscribers get more good stuff every week? That includes access to my archive of travel guides; monthly inspiration for living an adventurous, net-positive life; and my more vulnerable personal essays and travelogues.

This week, paid subscribers got a lyrical letter to my younger self. Next week they’ll get my guide to Slovenia and Croatia’s Istrian Peninsula. If you’d like to follow along, please upgrade by clicking here.

Thanks for reading Caravanserai. I hope it leaves you with a more nuanced understanding of the world around you—because the more we know, the kinder, saner, more compassionate people we become. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. If you’re a free subscriber, I’ll be back in your inbox after Thanksgiving.

See you for our next adventure,
Sam