Erica, and the notebook that turned into a website

I did not set out to write about travel. I set out to stop forgetting it. The early trips left me with a stack of notebooks, a hard drive of unsorted footage and a persistent feeling that I had missed the point of half the places I had been to, usually because I had gone in the wrong month or spent three days doing what a list told me to do.

The first guide I published was a corrective, written for a friend who was going somewhere I had just been and was about to make every mistake I had made. It was far too long, far too specific, and people kept sending it to each other. That told me something: there is an appetite for the version that does not flatten a place into a top ten.

The film work grew out of the same frustration. Some things about a city simply do not survive being written down. The noise of a market at opening. How long a walk actually feels. The particular quality of light an hour before sunset in a place with hills. So I started carrying a camera properly, and cutting slow, quiet films that let a place take its own time.

Now the two feed each other. A trip produces a guide, a film, a handful of shorter posts, and a very long list of things I got wrong and would do differently. That last list is the most valuable thing I own, and most of it ends up on this site sooner or later.

I plan roughly three years ahead. Not because I am organised, but because the good version of a trip usually depends on being somewhere in a specific eight-week window, and those windows fill up. The destinations page is that plan, published openly so that anyone travelling to the same places can use the research.