Travel Dreaming

My team’s very inspired ideas for where to go this year, and me whining about traveling too much

These Adrian Gaut images (which became covers) from my Traveler days—still make me dream

After a year of being on the road for over 300 days, I think I’m traveled out.

In my last post, I wrote about the beauty of spontaneity. This post, which is about where we are dreaming of going this year, was supposed to come out a week ago, but I had a major mental block about it. I had no problem making a list of all the places on my want-to-go list (India, Hong Kong, Georgia, Calabria, South Africa, Benin, Cairo, New Orleans, Vietnam, Chicago, Merida, Ireland, Tangier, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Kenya, Oman, Zapallar, San Juan Islands, Maine), but that’s as far as I got. Going any deeper, talking about why these places have a hold on my imagination… I just couldn’t put a sentence together.

Our idea to talk about “travel dreamscapes” came from a conversation Alex and I had with Tyler Dillon of Trufflepig, a travel planner who mainly specializes in Asia (but knows everywhere), and who is one of the most interesting people I know (not just about travel!). He mentioned that this time of year is an opportunity for people to think about planning out their future travels, not dissimilar to how they plan their investments—really making a plan for even several years out, and nudging their imagination beyond its natural limitations. “We should do this on Substack!” we said, and everyone but me got to work.

That was several weeks ago. I loved writing about spontaneity, but this assignment just choked me. After multiple conversations trying to figure out why, I finally realized it was because I really don’t want to go anywhere right now. I just want to stay in one place for a while, and not have to plan anything. Because of my work, so much of my travel is predetermined—trade shows in Florence twice a year, a watch convention in Geneva, a furniture fair in Milan, and a trip to Napa twice a year for a consulting project. Plus we have an office in NYC with a team I love and need to spend time with. I enjoy all of these places and am so happy I get to return with frequency, but it also means fitting in other destinations can be challenging, not to mention fitting in some actual downtime.

My honest travel dreamscape right now is short and not so adventurous. It’s much more about spending time with family and taking opportunities to be still. Once I’m more settled, I think the travel imagination floodgates will release and I’ll be excited to get planning again. For now, I’m focused on planning trips for my family. Our daughter is graduating from the University of Edinburgh in July, and I’ve invited her grandmas to come to Scotland for it, and to visit us in the Médoc beforehand. Both places will be firsts for them, and I’m working to make this as seamless and as beautiful a trip as I can. For Clara’s graduation, she really wants to spend time in Japan. Both of us have only ever been to Tokyo, and I can’t wait to dig into our Japan Travel Planner and really use it for myself. Further afield, I have a strong desire to go to Hong Kong—Matt and I have never been—and I’d like to do one big trip in the late fall to India for the first time, and take a long time to do it. I’ll be keeping you posted here, of course. And in the meantime, maybe your imagination will be sparked, as mine was, by some of our Yolo team’s ideas below.

P.S. We’ll be doing a Q&A with Tyler next week and we’d love to hear any questions you have for him in our Chat! Born in Georgia (US) and now based in Toronto, he specializes in Asia—particularly Vietnam, Cambodia, Bhutan, Mongolia and China—but he’s also obsessed with Ireland and used to guide in South America. So share your questions about traveling to all those places, as well as his advice for how you might start to think of travel planning as a long-lead proposition, not just a last-minute fix.

ALEX POSTMAN, DEPUTY EDITOR

Although I’m a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, in another lifetime I could have been a Norcal girl living in a weathered modernist wooden cabin and tending my kombucha scobies on the wild coast somewhere between Marin and Mendocino. I’m dreaming of a Norcal road trip this spring that would start at Mankas, the fisherman’s lodge on Point Reyes National Seashore that burned down nearly two decades ago and is being revived by Ken Fulk…soon! (The website still says 2024.) If not Mankas, then the Lodge at Marconi on Tomales Bay would do nicely. Then I’d head up to Sonoma for a couple of days of beachcombing and analog living at the Timber Cove Resort, a light-filled, midcentury-modern wooden structure with a huge vinyl collection (some rooms have turntables). From there I’d meander up to Sea Ranch, on my bucket list since forever, and hole up with a volume of Gary Snyder poems at the newly revitalized Lodge on its 53 acres of isolated coastline. The only thing that could pry me out would be my next stop: Harbor House Inn, a Craftsman-style beauty on the Mendocino Coast, where after a beautiful foraged and just-hooked seafood dinner at chef Matthew Kammerer’s restaurant, I could roll upstairs to one of the oceanfront rooms and fall asleep to a cracking fire. Finally, I’d pull up to The Inn at Newport Ranch for a couple of days of hiking over windswept coastal bluffs and through redwood forests, while stopping in town to check out realtors’ windows—maybe it’s not too late for me after all!

I haven’t been able to get Sterrekopje—an incredible “healing farm” in South Africa’s Cape Winelands—out of my head since we ran a Guest Book about it, and then meeting its effortlessly cool co-owner, Fleur Huijskens, last fall put it over the top for me. It has 11 of the chicest “sanctuary” houses scattered across 50 hectares, with energy balancing and sound baths, painting, cooking and ceramics sessions, plus herbal products made in the apothecary and organic meals plucked straight from its farm. I mean, yes please!

Half of Instagram seems to have been in Egypt last year, especially after the long-overdue opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum near Giza. Our friend Philomena Schurer Merckoll is working with Egypt Beyond—a collection of some of Egypt’s most interesting properties, on a trip that threads the needle in a really original way, a journey along what she calls the “Egyptian Silk Road.” It begins in Cairo, with a stay at their Immobilia apartments in an Art Deco skyscraper with art and antiques on loan from notable Cario galleries. Then you fly down to Luxor and the Al Moudira hotel, a historic estate of antiques-filled villas and flowering courtyards, plus a farm with ricotta made from their resident cows. After which you set sail for Aswan over three nights along the Nile on Set Nefru, a traditional sailboat beautifully restored for Egypt’s Royal Family. The trip ends with a couple of days’ kicking back at La Maison Bleue, a pastel-hued, 13-suite holiday home on the Red Sea, designed by architect Olivier Sednaoui. Finally, I would somehow get myself to Adrère Amellal in the desert of Siwa, for 3 days of silence and candlelight.

I like to take a trip every year with my mother (I plan, she pays!); the hitch is finding something that feeds our mutual interests (history, craft, nature), at our pretty different paces. This year I’m weighing a springtime Cotswolds garden tour run by Stancombe Park, a 300-acre estate in Gloucestershire centered around an eccentric early 19^th century garden—complete with tunnels, grottos, water gardens, and a Doric Temple. It was created by a collector/antiquarian employing soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars and was one of Evelyn Waugh’s inspirations for Brideshead Revisited, but has been out of public view for years. Their garden tours traverse the Cotswolds, opening up private heritage gardens that have rarely been seen by outsiders. The 2025 schedule is here.

I’ve been reading Along the Enchanted Way, William Blacker’s account of a decade spent in Transylvania, Romania—a medieval world of small stone Saxon villages surrounded by a mosaic of small farms and wildflower meadows, crisscrossed by horse-drawn carriages. The landscape here is all too fragile (agribusiness greed, of course!) and the craft tradition (ceramics, textiles, woodworking) is incredible—all of it at risk of vanishing. I want to see it while I still can, and maybe I’d even brave a multi-day horseback journey through the Carpathian mountains with Mihai Barbu of Villa Abbatis Equestrian Centre, staying in little local guest houses and B&Bs.

Bill Bensley is sort of the Willy Wonka of the hotel design world, and when I saw he had created a Shinta Mani hotel in the remote kingdom of Mustang in northern Nepal, with a 5-night adventure that takes you through high-elevation Thakali villages, rhododendron forests and Buddhist monasteries, I was like… when do we leave?

CARLY SHEA, ASSOCIATE EDITOR

I’m itching to return to Japan and explore even deeper. I’d love to freedive with the Ama women in Ise-Shima, soak in the onsens at Zaborin or Shiguchi in Hokkaido after a day on the slopes, learn more about warosoku candles, which I fell in love with on my first visit this past winter, and revisit my friend Junko at her family’s temple lodge, Kakurinbo, in the Alps. On the way, I’ll spend a few nights in Tokyo, where I’m eager to check out the Park Hyatt post-renovation or experience the new Janu Tokyo—a younger, more approachable spinoff from Aman.

My inner child would be over the moon to have room service delivered to a bamboo treehouse by a pulley system, which is exactly what you can do at Nayara Bocas del Toro in Panama.

I’m a proud New Englander to my core, but even I can admit the slopes here just don’t cut it. It’s been a while since I’ve skied out west, and even longer since I’ve skied in Europe, so I have a dozen or so google flight alerts set for places like Jackson Hole, Bozeman, Geneva, Zurich, and Milan. Less likely to happen this year, but also on my radar is Zakopane, in Poland, where my dad grew up skiing. He hasn’t been back to Poland since he was a kid—they might even have Waffle Cabin by now!

I’ve been dreaming of a road trip that I’m determined to make happen this year. It starts with a few nights in Naples (yes, it’s worth it’s own stop!) before picking up a car and heading south. I’ll zip past Amalfi and go straight to Cilento, where I’ll stay in a dirt-cheap Airbnb with terrible thread count sheets but an amazing view near Santa Maria de Castebellate—I’m intrigued by this cave for $9/night. Piano, piano, I’ll wind my way down the snaking coastline, possibly checking into Palazzo Mazziotti or splurging on Santavenere before heading to Calabria. Along the way, I’ll stop in Verbicaro—if only for gas—to see the town my family lived in a century ago. A few days on the beach in Tropea might be the final destination, or maybe I’ll carry on all the way to Sicily—perché no?!

Nihi has been at the tippy-top of my (and everyone’s!) dream-trip list since forever. Alex told me the Spa Safari experience she had there was one of the best she's ever had—which is high praise coming from her. Their new property opens later this year on Rote Island, which is so far east it’s closer to Australia than Bali and seems like it will live up to their “edge of wildness” tagline.

LINDA DENAHAN, PHOTO DIRECTOR

Perhaps due to my obsession with watching BBC series, I’m dreaming of the English countryside with long walks, quaint villages, and chic country hotels - notably, The Newt (after an inspired visit to its sister property last year, Babylonstoren), Cowley Manor in Cheltenham, which has the all- important indoor and outdoor pools, and the over 400 acre Heckfield Place in Hampshire, to name just a few..

As a photography fanatic, I love the idea of traveling to see art fairs or special exhibitions - it simplifies travel dates, and it’s easy to meet like-minded people. The first one on my list for 2025 is the Arles Photo Festival in early July.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve been dreaming of visiting the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust for ages, so this trip would start in Nairobi, with the requisite stay at Giraffe Manor and a visit to the Trust’s elephant orphan nursery, before venturing onto their eco-lodges in Ithumba and Umani Springs. All look very chic, plus only guests at the lodges can visit the organization’s elephant reintegration units in those locales, which is where several of my elephant “fosters” now live until they choose a completely wild life. A few extra days on the island of Lamu would be the perfect itinerary!

I’ve been itching to go back to Spain ever since we published Yolo’s Summer 2024 issue - particularly, Madrid, Cadaques, and San Sebastian.