Hi, happy summer! I spent the first week of July in North Carolina with my sister, Zack, and his family. We usually avoid visiting during peak summer because our hometown’s beaches enter 𝓉𝓊𝓇𝒷𝑜 𝓈𝓊𝓂𝓂𝑒𝓇 𝓂𝑜𝒹𝑒 from May–September and it is truly tourist chaos. We’re talking two-hour waits at tiny 50-person restaurants. Intense traffic. Super-long lines for smoothies and burgers, folks attempting to put in online orders while they wait, and then throwing fits when it all takes too long. Also the sand is really, really hot.
We had a nice time though. ♡
I reflect on the tourist : local binary during and after these trips. It is very, very weird to grow up somewhere with a hyper-specific vacation experience at the forefront of local culture. To see the same holiday rhythms play out in vacation homes and seaside motels and campgrounds. Especially if you work in the service industry, so much of the tourist : local thing is about managing expectations and stress around how folks expect their vacation to be going.
But it is also so pleasurable to be a local in a small town. To know the heartbeats of a place when it’s at its quietest. Finding comfort in extreme repetitive seasonality. Carving a path of solitude and calm around the swell of seasonal visitors. Maybe this is what it’s like to really be from somewhere (I wouldn’t know! I’ve moved a lot!) but it feels like a very special and secret club.
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I’ve been thinking about these pieces:
Partly because I’m taking a little anti-consumerism finance course which posits that we travel to be seen and as a status play. (See also: Status and Culture.) I am feeling my brain get twisted around here because — while I agree that there’s status-stuff caught up in travel, of course — I’ve always approached travel as an excuse to experience the world as an artist. I think that means you move slowly and soak up the differences and delights of a new place as the primary activity…
Old things, new things, swimming in strange bodies of water, looking at the sky literally from a different place on the planet, plants. When I travel I rarely make activity plans and spend long periods of time doing nothing, or walking.
Traveling in artist mode is why my vacation pictures all look like nothing:
Nothing! But to me, they’re little moments of surprise, something beautiful and silly, a texture or tone to take home with me. I guess my artist travel mindset is a little like being a trash collector.
If you’re the same way, I’d love to hear about (or see) your approach to travelogues. ☻
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Closing hot take: Past Lives is the real best movie out right now. Catch it while you can. And see you next month! xo
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