I Dream of Spain. Or, Well, I Used To.

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In the year 2023, the nation of Spain attempted to worm its way into my consciousness. First, I read a novel, Carnality, by the Swedish writer Lina Wolff, about a Swedish writer (not named Lina Wolff) who arrives in Madrid and becomes embroiled in a batshit drama involving a sad-sack adulterer, a vindictive nun, an underground reality show, and the dark history of the Franco era. (Read it!) Then I started watching Warrior Nun, about a secret group of, yes, warrior nuns battling demons, tech entrepreneurs, and the Church from their base in Andalusia. (Watch it!) At the end of the summer, we visited our friends J. and A. in Matsumoto, Japan, and they were planning an extended trip to visit J.’s family in Madrid, and all of a sudden it seemed obvious that this was where I, too, would go next—to Spain, a country I have almost no experience with. I’d been there twice—a few days in Galicia and a long weekend in Barcelona in 2006, a one-night stopover in Madrid in 2007—but had found no way to get back. Now I knew where I was headed.

I was wrong. I still have not been back to Spain, for a million boring reasons—time, money, blah blah blah. But chief among them is that Spain fell out of my brain almost as quickly as it had arrived there; it seemed to want to spend as much time with me as I had with it. Meanwhile, its ancient rival Italy pushed its way back in: My neighbors had moved to Torino, so I planned a 2024 trip there with my younger daughter, Sandy, and threw in Venice and Rome as well. My Italian is much better than my Spanish anyway.

If you are a person who travels, none of this is unusual: You get obsessed with destinations as casually and energetically as you do new Netflix shows. (I’d make a Tinder comparison, but let’s not kid ourselves: I’m an old.) A plate of momos might steer you toward Tibet and Nepal, a butter-topped bowl of miso ramen toward Sapporo, a silky cup of Gesha toward Ethiopia. (This is pretty much why I moved to Vietnam in 1996.) Railroad nuts gravitate toward the latest HSR service or heritage restoration; architecture fans seek out, and stay in, their heroes’ creations or the unsung works of forgotten craftsmen. Maybe you go and fulfill your fantasy, for better or worse, or maybe you don’t, and the fantasy lingers or withers.

The randomness is lovely. When you embrace the idea of travel, you never know what may spark your imagination, or where it will lead—or where that will lead. Once you get used to going wherever you feel, once you realize that with a bit of time, the right passport, and enough cash or points, you can go anywhere, do anything, and be anyone, the possibilities proliferate, so much so it can be difficult to make a decision, especially given the boring-ass limits of time, money, and competing responsibilities.

As the years of travel progress, though, the universe has a way of winnowing out the lesser options. Friendships and family ties will sway you. My wife’s family lives in Taiwan, so we can’t go anywhere in Asia without also going there; my old friend E. lives in Denmark, so I’ve never found time to explore the rest of Scandinavia. These relationships have a gravity that bends our own personal space-time, warping our world maps far beyond Mercator’s projection.

There is also a counter-balancing force at work in the travel cosmos: propaganda.

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Decoding Travel Propaganda

In the summer of 2021, the first summer after the Covid vaccine was introduced, everyone I knew, it seemed, went to Greece. Beaches and islands and islands and beaches flooded my social feeds. And yours, too. Because everyone really was going to Greece. The country had “opened its doors,” as we say in the travel press, to vaccinated tourists, and airlines introduced new direct flights there from the U.S., and Greece was already more affordable than other European countries, so Americans flooded the country, from the Ionian Sea to the far reaches of the Aegean. The New York Times, Forbes, and The Guardian all wrote about this early on, the first two in May, no doubt stoking desire among readers to take advantage of this increasingly popular bargain destination.

A year later, however, no one was thinking about Greece at all. We had collectively moved on to Portugal, the next beautiful, affordable, accessible destination, whose residents had one of the highest Covid vaccination rates in the world and where you could, if you had a spare couple of hundred thousand dollars lying around, buy a home, gain residency, and enjoy the high-quality public health-care system, not to mention the high-quality seafood (both fresh and tinned!) and wine. And, of course, Americans just fucking love tiles. The Gross family went for two weeks in July, and it was one of our best vacations ever. We’d love to go back, only it’s now less affordable (thanks to people like us) and no one cares about vaccination rates anymore because no one gets sick or dies from Covid, right?

Does it detract from the joy of a wonderful trip to realize that you made it because you learned about the destination in a magazine in a newspaper on some website on Instagram on TikTok because your tween showed you an influencer on TikTok? Does it hurt knowing that your choices—of places, hotels, restaurants, boutiques, activities—were not choices at all but rather determined by a loose collective of media entities?

For me, it does a little. But that may be just because I spent so much of my life writing travel articles whose purpose, most of the time, was to show people where to go, how to get there, and what to do once they arrived. This is, you know, the goal of most travel media—to help people travel. And when it works, it really works! If you write about a place for a major media entity, civilians will go there. And if all the media entities—major or minor, print or digital, critical or credulous—write about a place, civilians will ruin it. That’s the way of the tourism world.

But there’s no grand conspiracy. When all of travel media hypes Greece or Portugal, they’re not working together to do so. Okay, maybe the tourism boards are lobbying hard, both via publicists nagging editors and writers and via ad spends that sway publishers. But most travel writers—the good, uncorrupted ones, at least—are just looking at the same information about a place and coming to the same conclusions: There’s a new airport, there’s a new national park, it’s easier to get a visa now, the local celebrity chef just got her third Michelin star, Kylie Jenner went there, someone said Kylie Jenner was thinking about going there, there’s a big historical anniversary coming up, the local currency just cratered but the living standard remains high, they just legalized sex tourism euthanasia cannabis and the living standard remains hiiiiiiiiigh. All of these are good reasons to do a story, and there are a lot of writers and influencers who are going to do those stories.

For a great look at how this process works, check out the New York Times’ perennially popular feature, 52 (?) Places to Go in TKYear. It is a beautifully produced work of travel journalism, the kind of thing civilians can clickscroll through for hours on end, gaping at the photography and dreaming of a life in which they could visit each one each week. (The reality of actually doing so, I’m told, is somewhat less dreamy.) For those who create the project, things are slightly different. Back when I contributed to it¹, more than a decade ago, Places to Go was described to writers as a kind of testing ground: What’s on your radar? Where are you thinking about? It was a way to get paid for a short, sexy story pitch—one that, if it looked like it had legs, you could then rewrite and resell as a full-fledged feature later in the year. Obviously, if it was a Place to Go, the paper should devote more attention to it than just a gorgeous little January blurb, right?

This was, for us travel writers, a great system: one destination, two stories, two paychecks—and for a package that everyone, from editors to civilians to publicists to tourism boards, sees and loves. I love it, too! This year, was very happy to see Alishan, Taiwan, at No. 19 on the (unranked) list, and I will definitely be going to No. 23—Concord, Massachusetts—but then I go there all the time because my parents live there. (But not Lexington, because fuck Lexington!) I would love to go hike the Dolomites (No. 15), and I’m perversely attracted to the idea of visiting Scotland to marvel “at the rugged beauty of a UNESCO-recognized peat bog“ (No. 20). If there’s one thing Americans love more than tiles, it’s staring at peat bogs.

The real problem with Places to Go is that its success has spawned imitators. Afar has The 25 Best Places to Travel. Travel + Leisure has The 50 Best Places to Travel. Condé Nast Traveler has The 25 Best Places to Go. With all due respect to my friends who work for these publications, these packages don’t measure up. The information and choices are excellent, but they’re simply not as lushly produced as the Times’ version. They don’t fill your browser with spectacle, and the blurbs are overlong. They look like print packages adapted for the web², which is why print is dying dead dying. Meanwhile, the addition of the superlative “Best” sounds desperate to me, a craven SEO ploy that betrays a lack of faith in their editors and writers and pretends that civilians are getting their travel intel from a single source only. Three Best Places lists can’t all be right. Travel is not a competition.

The biggest problem with all these packages: They’re just too much! I don’t have the energy to check, but surely there is a ton of overlap among their choices, in part because all their creators are subject to identical influences: news hooks and publicists, primarily. Everyone knows about the new airport, everyone saw Kylie Jenner’s IG story. By flooding our minds with options, they turn the process into nonsense. Why should I go here? Or there? Or anywhere? What really is new and hot, and is that what I, now a civilian traveler with limited time and finances, want anyway? I imagine there’s “something for everyone” within the 152 places enumerated in these four packages, but I want something for me, and I don’t really expect to find it in anything I read.

The best travel inspirations come at you out of nowhere: a snippet of music in a bar, a photo you spot while flipping through an art book left on someone’s stoop, a story your uncle once told you, the noodles your college roommate’s mother would bring him during finals, a weird Swedish novel about Madrid. Those moments can lodge within you, and though you may not seek out their origins overseas for years to come, they never lose their potency. You wonder, you remember, you make plans and cancel them, but still: There’s a place you can go to turn anticipation into reality, to live the dream you’ve dreamed so long. It’s unlikely that the contrived productions of travel media, whether old-school or newfangled, can seed those dreams, but maybe news about a new airport will be the impetus for you to book that long-planned flight. So I guess travel media isn’t so useless after all.

One day, dear friends and dearer paid subscribers, I will get myself to Spain. And when I do finally arrive, there better damn well be a vindictive nun waiting for me. Will she be friend or foe? And will she show me where to get really, really good churros and chocolate? Like all travelers, I want only the best. 🪨🪨🪨

Notes

1. It’s worth noting that I have no idea what goes into it now.

2. To be fair, they’re likely locked into web templates designed years ago.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt