Travel is supposed to broaden the mind. It also empties the wallet, tests the bladder, introduces you to hotel plumbing of questionable engineering, and occasionally leaves you standing in an airport wondering which particular sequence of poor life choices brought you to Gate B47.
Welcome to our Travel Reviews, where we visit places, spend our own damn money, wander around like semi-responsible adults, and report back on whether you should bother doing the same.
We’re not professional travel influencers. Nobody is flying us to Bora Bora so we can photograph breakfast floating around a swimming pool while pretending syrup near chlorinated water is a normal way for human beings to eat.
We’re just people who like going places.
Beautiful places. Historic places. Weird places. Overrated places. Places with spectacular scenery and nowhere to park. Places where the hotel is wonderful but the front desk treats your arrival as a personal betrayal. Places where you stop for twenty minutes and suddenly realize you’ve spent three hours learning about an 1870s mining disaster.
Those are our kind of places.
And these are our kind of travel reviews.
Travel Reviews for People Who Actually Travel
A lot of travel writing seems to be produced by people inhabiting a parallel universe.
Every hotel is luxurious.
Every downtown is vibrant.
Every restaurant is an unforgettable culinary experience.
Every mountain view is breathtaking.
By the third paragraph, the writer has apparently stopped breathing altogether.
Our travel reviews work differently.
If somewhere is gorgeous, we’ll tell you.
If somewhere is historically fascinating, we’ll probably disappear down a historical rabbit hole and tell you considerably more than you asked to know.
If the crowds suck, we’ll tell you that too.
If parking requires divine intervention and the turning radius of a forklift, you deserve to know before arriving.
And if something is expensive but actually worth the money, we’re perfectly capable of saying that.
This isn’t about crapping on everything simply because the website has Crap in the name.
It’s about figuring out which experiences are worth your time, money, gasoline, vacation days, and remaining reserves of patience.
We Actually Like Travel, Which Is Why We Complain About It
Complaining about travel and loving travel are not mutually exclusive activities.
In fact, I’m increasingly convinced complaining about travel is part of traveling.
You can stand beneath towering redwoods that have survived centuries of storms, fires, and assorted human stupidity and still mutter:
“Jesus Christ, there are a lot of people here.”
Both statements can be true.
A Colorado mountain town can be absolutely gorgeous while the seasonal traffic makes you briefly consider abandoning civilization and communicating exclusively with squirrels.
A historic site can be enormously important while its parking lot appears to have been designed when Americans traveled exclusively by mule.
And a hotel can have a spectacular room, wonderful staff, and a toilet so technologically advanced that returning home makes your bathroom feel like something discovered during an archaeological excavation.
These contradictions are half the fun.
Perfect places rarely exist.
Interesting places do.
That’s what we’re looking for.
History Usually Sneaks Into the Car With Us
Some people travel somewhere, take twelve photographs, buy a magnet, and leave.
I inevitably start wondering:
What the hell happened here?
Who built this?
Why is this town here?
Who lived here before them?
Why did five thousand people once live in a place where approximately eleven people and a gift shop remain today?
That curiosity means our travel reviews tend to wander into history, archaeology, geology, old railroads, mining booms, Indigenous history, national parks, strange local characters, abandoned buildings, and occasionally some poor bastard from 1873 whose terrible afternoon became historically significant.
Because places become much more interesting once you understand why they exist.
A mountain isn’t merely scenery.
An abandoned mine isn’t merely a hole.
An old building isn’t merely something preventing developers from constructing another Starbucks.
Every place has accumulated stories.
We like digging them up.
Figuratively, of course.
The National Park Service generally frowns upon tourists arriving with shovels.
The Great American Road Trip Is Beautifully Stupid
We have a particular affection for road trips.
Not because they’re efficient.
They’re not.
Airplanes can transport you across several states in a few hours, while road trips require gasoline, snacks, questionable gas-station coffee, and lengthy negotiations concerning who exactly forgot to refill the water bottles.
But airplanes skip everything in between.
Road trips don’t.
You discover tiny towns.
Old diners.
Mountain passes.
Historic markers.
Roadside attractions whose continued existence defies both economics and common sense.
And somewhere around hour six, somebody inevitably announces that they have to pee despite insisting fifteen minutes earlier that they absolutely did not have to pee.
That’s America.
Stretching endlessly between two bathroom stops.
Sometimes the Destination Is Incredible. Sometimes the Story Is Better.
Not every trip goes according to plan.
Thank God.
Because perfectly executed vacations make terrible stories.
The memorable ones involve weather, traffic, delayed flights, misunderstood directions, questionable restaurants, strange encounters, unexpected discoveries, and occasionally someone behind a counter informing you that absolutely nothing can be done about your situation despite the enormous illuminated corporate logo directly behind their head.
Those moments become part of the review.
Because travel isn’t just where you went.
It’s what happened while you were trying to get there.
So… Should You Go There?
That’s ultimately what these travel reviews are supposed to help answer.
Not:
“Is this destination objectively good?”
That’s boring.
The better question is:
Is it worth going there for you?
We’ll look at things like:
- What makes the place interesting
- History and background
- What we actually experienced
- Best reasons to visit
- Possible reasons not to visit
- Crowds and seasonal headaches
- Costs when they’re relevant
- Hotels and accommodations
- Food and nearby attractions
- Things we wish we’d known beforehand
- Weird shit we discovered along the way
- Whether we’d actually go back
Sometimes the answer will be an enthusiastic hell yes.
Sometimes it’ll be:
Yes, but avoid Saturday unless you enjoy participating in a slow-moving parade of rental SUVs.
Occasionally it’ll be:
No. Save your money and go somewhere else.
All three are perfectly acceptable conclusions.
Welcome to the Shitty Travel Department
So grab a map.
Or Google Maps, because apparently we’ve decided folding paper correctly was too demanding a skill for modern civilization.
Below you’ll find our growing collection of travel reviews, road trips, historic destinations, national parks, towns, hotels, attractions, accidental adventures, and whatever other strange places we wander into.
Some will be famous.
Some will be obscure.
Some might be fifteen minutes from somebody’s house and somehow more interesting than the attraction they traveled 1,200 miles to see.
That’s the beauty of travel.
You really don’t know what you’re going to find until you get there.
We already went.
Now let’s figure out whether you should.
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