In February 2019, I returned to Houston and drove my mother and grandmother eight hours to Pine Bluff, Arkansas to attend the funeral of my oldest aunt. This was the second of my grandmother’s 12 children to die, a devastating event for any parent. After years of poor health, my grandmother never expected to outlive her children.
I booked a two-suite room for $259 a night at the Residence Inn in downtown Little Rock, a 40-minute drive away. My grandmother was impressed with the size of the bathtub. We talked about her upbringing in rural north Louisiana, and she told me things I had never heard about her and her life. She relished the opportunity to talk about her hard-earned youth. We mourned with family and friends in their dreary hometown of Pine Bluff, which was voted the worst place to live in America many times when I was a child. On the way home, I bought her a three-meat barbecue combo from one of her favorite places. She ate it all before we crossed the Texas border, then dozed off while driving through the darkness and silence.
When we finally got back to Houston, we hugged and she thanked me. “I’ve never taken a vacation before,” she said.
At first I was sad that the funeral weekend in a 2.5 star hotel was her first and only “vacation,” but I also appreciated the low-budget travel because at 92 I had no idea what other people were doing. Meanwhile, I’m in a group chat with two people with plenty of disposable income and worn-out passports.
It was the Fourth of July when Spencer Hall posted a photo of himself in a small group chat of his college football-loving friends, a giant eagle aloft on his right arm. “Good morning,” he said.
I knew immediately where he was. We had previously discussed my fascination with Mongolia; its vastness, isolation and inhospitable environment that make it the least populated country in the world; its status as home to the world’s last remaining nomadic culture; the history of Genghis Khan and his ruthless fight to control the region; and, of course, the country’s veneration for golden eagles, which I first encountered in a college textbook. I’ll never forget the photo of a large eagle perched on a falconer’s glove; it looked so majestic, so cool, and so strange. And now, almost 25 years later, my friend has recreated that photo in an incredible way.
Hall, who runs the website Channel 6 with his partner Holly Anderson and co-hosts a college football podcast, Shutdown FullcastFollowing his desire to travel, he came to Mongolia. He had already traveled extensively throughout Asia and was looking for a reason to go back, but it was a place he hadn’t seen yet.
“It’s very, very different and remote,” Spencer says, “and most importantly, it’s supposed to be beautiful. It’s supposed to be an outdoor lover’s paradise, and yet it’s in Central Asia.”
Another member of our group chat, Bomani Jones, was leaving in a few days for a two-week trip to Spain. But he had a very different calculus for choosing his destination: “I want to be as comfortable on the road as I am at home.”
Jones said, The Right Time with Bomani JonesHe spent most of his time in Barcelona, but also had a short stay in Andorra, the tiny tax haven sandwiched between Spain and France, where he spent his time on the beach and enjoying five-star luxury accommodation.
I felt jealous as I watched my friends enjoy their adventures, and a big reason for this was that I had made plans to join Jones on his trip earlier this year. But unexpected family commitments, some of which cost more than we anticipated, meant we weren’t able to join them. We were both disappointed.
It was a real shame, because it was a real opportunity to escape from a brutal few months. Several My wife and I found solace in the fact that we were able to book a babysitter for our 2-year-old son and spend a night in June at a luxury beach hotel just 45 minutes away. We spent most of that time in our room, munching on snacks from the pantry and watching the Pacific Ocean from the balcony. That felt just about enough.
I realized I was thinking about my group chat the same way other people think about social media and travel influencers.
It’s hard to flip through Instagram or TikTok without seeing influencers and well-heeled friends posting from incredibly beautiful destinations like Greece, Iceland, and the Amalfi Coast. For those of us scrolling at home, these images convince us that luxury travel is the only kind of travel worth pursuing. Suddenly, a quick trip around Las Vegas or a weekend on a balmy Florida beach just doesn’t seem enough. And a night at a cozy bed and breakfast definitely isn’t enough.
“Media outlets and tourism boards are giving millions of dollars to influencers and writers and everyone else to make you feel like this is how you should vacation,” said Tarilo Muzezewa, an Atlanta-based travel writer and host of the new podcast “The Travel Guide.” Peak Travel“And if you’re not doing it that way, you feel like you’re missing out on something.”
When we’re caught up in the daily grind at home, it’s easy to forget that social media doesn’t tell the whole story about a holiday. The images we scroll through on Instagram are often curated and leave out the more annoying parts of travel.
“People don’t want to read about their wallet being stolen or their food poisoning,” says Victoria Walker, a Washington, DC-based reporter who writes for a travel newsletter. continue.
But Jones sees value in giving friends and followers a glimpse into the richness of life, and before signing a lucrative four-year contract with ESPN in 2013, he said the photos have opened his eyes to parts of the world he’d never considered before.
“I think what social media has done to travel is demystify the concept of travel. I think it’s showing that this type of travel is more accessible than people realized,” Jones said.
But whatever you think about the influence of social media, it’s clear that the emphasis on luxury travel is causing people to overlook affordable travel opportunities closer to home.
“I think very few people have that experience, so I don’t think anyone should try to take that kind of vacation,” Mzezewa said. “I think a lot of times, the unknown is better than the unknown. For me, I’m just happy to go somewhere and have a really good time.”
Take my late grandmother, for example (she passed away in 2022 at age 95). She may be an extreme example, but I was inspired by her understanding of the simple joy of traveling, an experience that is far more universal than a cruise to the Turks and Caicos Islands.
The people I spoke to hadn’t taken a long-distance trip since they were kids. Instead, most of them would hop in their car or van and head off to the nicest place nearby.
“We went to the Gulf Coast, yes, to the Destin and Fort Walton areas,” said Hall, who grew up in Nashville.
“I never got on a plane and left the country,” said Jones, who spent much of her childhood in the Houston area, “just a lot of driving to see family.”
So was I. As a kid, I loved traveling to visit family in the Texas Hill Country and Arkansas and exploring the countryside. If I was lucky, my parents would treat me to dinner at Catfish King on Highway 59 near Livingston or freshly smoked brisket at City Market in Luling. And when in Little Rock, we always made sure to check out TCBY frozen yogurt shop, the only one of its kind in the country.
At the time, I considered myself very lucky because I barely knew what my classmates were doing or where they were going in the summer. My family didn’t have much travel experience, growing up in a time when black people didn’t have much freedom of movement in the Jim Crow South.
That was also true for Brandon LeBlanc, who is originally from New Orleans but now works as a technology lawyer in Singapore.
“I understood that at the time, especially for a Black family, being able to travel was a special thing,” he said, “but at the same time, I was very content just staying in New Orleans and being with my friends.”
I met LeBlanc in 2007, when we were young professionals sharing a bunk with a mutual friend on a trip to Austin. Neither of us made much money then. But over the years, I couldn’t help but notice on social media that he was visiting one beautiful place after another: Facebook posts show that this year alone he’d visited South Korea, Japan, France, and Indonesia.
“Financially, my travels have changed a lot over the years, split into two periods: before and after I moved abroad,” Leblanc says. “Since moving to Spain in 2015, I’ve traveled much more frequently and easily. More generally, I’m still very cost-conscious, whether I’m traveling or not. I’m not looking to spend a ton of money on my travels. I just want to get out and see the world.”
And if you can somehow avoid travel envy (I’m still working on it), your reward will be seeing the world, which might look like a road trip across Mongolia, but it also might look like a road trip to the most miserable small town in America. grandmother.
