These Cards Can Tell You Where to Go Next

As much as I love tarot cards, I’ve never been the kind of person who does a full tarot spread. I can’t decode how the Moon relates to the Seven of Swords or determine what a reversed Empress might mean for my future.

I admire the people who can do that, but I’m not one of them.

What I do is much simpler, and it’s become one of my favorite rituals: I pull a single card every morning.

Some days I look up the card’s meaning. Other days I don’t bother and just sit with the image. Occasionally the card turns into my journaling prompt. But no matter how I choose to look at it, this is my still, calm moment before the day rushes in.

So when I heard about a new tarot deck built around travel — in which every card is tethered to an actual place I could potentially book a flight to — of course I was curious.

As you all know, I’m passionate about going places, so this felt like someone had taken two parts of my brain that don’t usually talk to each other and decided to introduce them.

The deck is called the Lonely Planet Travel Tarot, and it was created by Jeff Hinshaw, a Palm Springs-based astrologer, tarot practitioner, and founder of Cosmic Cousins.

The traditional tarot deck is all there — the major and minor arcana, cups and wands and swords and pentacles — but each of the 78 cards is paired with a destination. That means every pull is like opening a door to somewhere new: Scotland’s Isle of Skye. Mexico City. Rajasthan, India. Naples, Italy. Gondar, Ethiopia.

Even Twentynine Palms is represented, where the Eight of Wands shows a jackrabbit moving swiftly through the desert, fast and alert. It’s a fitting image for a card about momentum and sudden movement, but it also reflects Jeff’s own experience of writing the deck while living in a cabin there.

“People might think of the desert as slower or more reflective,” Jeff said during the launch party for Travel Tarot. “But the vastness of the desert creates an open channel. When you want to create something, you can. Things move quickly.”

None of the pairings are arbitrary. Jeff mapped each place to its card intuitively, drawing from his own travels, his years of tarot practice, and stories shared by other people. So it feels like the deck works in two directions at once, linking the interior work of tarot with the external act of travel.

For instance, Justice is paired with The Hague. Because it’s a city shaped by international law and diplomacy, the card points to recalibration, accountability, and the pursuit of truth.

The artwork, by Studio Muti in Cape Town, South Africa (King of Cups in the deck), is stunning, carrying that same sense of depth. The landscapes, figures, and architectural details layer into each other, so the longer you spend with an image, the more it opens up.

Jeff said his hope for the deck is that it brings a little more intention to the way people travel — that it deepens their relationship to place, to culture, to the experience itself. But he also pointed out that you don’t actually have to go anywhere.

“Without even having to physically travel somewhere, this deck allows you to travel to that place in your internal landscapes,” he said.

That concept is embedded in how the deck came together too.

After talking with editors at Lonely Planet about creating their first tarot deck, Jeff said he went for a walk along a beach in Los Angeles to clear his head. That’s when he stumbled upon a Lonely Planet guidebook for Morocco in the sand.

The moment of serendipity stayed with him and eventually found its way into the deck, where Morocco is paired with the Four of Wands, a card that centers on arrival, belonging, and the feeling of coming home after a long journey.

It’s a thread that runs through the entire project.

You pull a card and suddenly there’s a place attached to it. Lisbon surfaces with the Nine of Cups — a locale for romancing yourself, taking yourself out, making room for pleasure. Another day, you land in Cuba with the King of Wands, and something about that might shift the way you carry yourself.

I used to think of tarot as a mirror.

Now I see it as more of a map.

The Lonely Planet Travel Tarot was written by Jeff Hinshaw and illustrated by Studio Muti. It includes 78 cards and a 96-page guidebook. Find Jeff’s work at cosmiccousins.com.

This post is not an ad. I genuinely love these cards and thought other travelers might too. That said, if you want to use an affiliate link — which doesn’t cost you anything extra but sends a few coins my way — here’s where to find the deck on Amazon or Bookshop.