How Two Years of Phone-Free Travel Rewired the Way I See the World
About this episode
Lisa Abend discusses her experiences with phone-free travel and its impact on her perspective of the world.
What if the secret to a great trip was leaving your phone in airplane mode — forever? Journalist Lisa Abend has been doing exactly that, arriving in cities she's never researched, GPS turned off, without a hotel reservation or itinerary of any kind. The result isn't chaos; it's the kind of travel that actually surprises you. In this episode, Lisa makes a compelling case for leaving the phone out of the travel process. Meet this week's guest Lisa Abend is a Copenhagen-based journalist and former Time magazine correspondent who covers food, culture, and travel across Europe. She is the creator of The Unplugged Traveler, a Substack newsletter in which she visits a new European city each month without internet access, a booked hotel, or a plan, and writes about what she finds. In this episode How social media and over-researched itineraries have stripped travel of serendipity, and what Lisa is doing about it The step-by-step logistics of arriving in a foreign city with no hotel, no map, and no plan — and why it's less stressful than it sounds A birthday coincidence on a Cotswolds hiking trail that felt like the universe intervening Why "second cities" — not capitals — are the ideal…
People in this episode
Guest: Lisa Abend
Topics covered
- phone-free travel
- serendipity in travel
- unplugged travel
- travel logistics
- Cotswolds hiking
- second cities
Keywords
- travel
- phone-free
- itinerary
- Cotswolds
- Europe
- serendipity
- unplugged
- journalism
- culture
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Time magazine, The Unplugged Traveler
Places: Copenhagen, Cotswolds, Europe
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