My top travel tips
How I approach going to, and spending time in, a new place
A friend who recently moved to Washington, DC asked me for a barber recommendation. I told him that I tend to roll the dice whenever I’m traveling and need a haircut in a random city. Actually the way I phrased it was, “I’m a barber slut.”
“I didn’t realize you were the bravest man I’ve ever met,” he replied.
The thing is, I have had experiences that I will never forget chatting with barbers in Portugal, Iraq, Costa Rica, and cities across the US. Just a couple weeks ago in Albuquerque, I found what seemed to be the only barbershop open on a Monday and booked a cut. When I showed up early in a Lyft the place was shuttered, and it was pouring. I texted my husband, “I think I made the wrong choice.”
The barber soon arrived and opened the shop for me. Inside, it was like a time capsule overlayed with rock & roll stickers and contemporary hair paraphernalia. The barber told me he had grown up in this neighborhood, and this little whitewashed building on the corner of a residential block had been a barbershop since long before he was born, even though its current incarnation was only a year old. On a wall, he’d framed a price list he found from the shop’s early days. Haircuts: 1 dollar. Beard trim: 75 cents. While he cut my hair, he told me about the ways Albuquerque had changed since he was a kid. I’d stumbled into the coolest spot - and a travel experience I never would’ve had if I’d limited my excursions to well-vetted, tourist-oriented places.
If my promiscuous behavior occasionally lands me with a bad haircut, that’s a price I don’t mind paying. Part of my philosophy of travel is to take a chance on something unknown. And not only with hair. Yesterday morning before a Pink Martini show in Victoria, British Columbia, I wandered along the harbor in search of a coffee shop and stumbled into one of the best savory pastries of my life - a tomato/pesto/ricotta danish from a spot called Duo. I ate it at the edge of the bay watching a seal play in the water as ferries and seaplanes passed by and a seagull chased a bald eagle over my head. Later, I wandered into a casual spot for lunch and my food had so much raw garlic in it that my breath could have killed someone on stage last night. Win some, lose some.
A friend has encouraged me to write a “traveling with grace” book, but I don’t think I have enough travel tips to fill a book. I do have enough to fill a substack post, though. So, just in time for summer vacation season, here are some other things I do when I’m on the road that help improve the journey:
Buy the flowers yourself.
If I’m staying in one spot for five days or more, I put flowers in the hotel room. They don’t have to be anything fancy - tulips from a bodega, potted hyacinths from Trader Joe’s, or just something blooming in a roadside ditch. It makes coming “home” feel a little more homey for the duration of the trip.
Embrace the inevitable travel headaches.
Last summer, my musical director Henry and I were on tour with my solo cabaret show. We got stuck at the Chicago airport for hours as our flight to St. Louis was delayed longer and longer. I told him to choose a number from 1-4 and a letter of the alphabet. He picked 3 and J. So we set off for terminal 3 on a scavenger hunt for things starting with J: a flight to Jackson…a sandwich with jalapeños… On the way we stopped to look at things that caught our eye. An art exhibit, a vintage airplane, and a tchotchke shop with a crazy selection of novelty socks where we each guessed the pair the other would be most likely to choose. Then we bought the socks for each other.
When a friend told me he was afraid that his flight home from New York would be canceled during the government shutdown, I suggested he choose a museum that he wouldn’t have time for unless he had an extra NYC day and a movie he wouldn’t watch unless he were stuck on the tarmac. With airport delays or any other travel hiccups, you can rage at the situation you’re in or accept the unexpected and see what it might offer.
Fly in uniform.
If you’re ever on a plane and think you see someone who might be me, here’s an easy test: Is the person wearing a navy blue cashmere zip up hoodie from Todd Snyder? It’s my flying uniform. It was expensive, but I wear this one article of clothing more than probably any other item in my wardrobe, making it possibly the least expensive item amortized over its lifespan? I don’t know I’m not a math expert, but I’m wearing the hoodie on five flights this week alone. The zipper helps regulate my temperature when the plane goes from hot to cold; the hood gives me a privacy cocoon; the cashmere is comfy to nap in. Maybe a zip-up cashmere hoodie isn’t right for you, but figure out what is and wear it on every flight. (This is not sponsored content, I just really love my hoodie.)
Don’t be productive in the air.
I fly in goblin mode. That’s not to say I make a mess or go barefoot. Please don’t do that. But I fully let go of any list of things I “should” do on a flight. On airplanes, I watch movies that I would never watch anywhere else - most recently the 2025 remake of The Running Man. It was exactly as good as I need any airplane movie to be. Halfway through it, I paused it and took a nap. I don’t think I have ever once bought the WiFi on a flight. I get pings and alerts in every other part of my day. Why would I want them in the air? What bliss to read a book uninterrupted, flip through a magazine, or just zone out with music in my noise-cancelling headphones while I sip a glass of wine.
Take 15-minute vacations.
There is something I actually prefer about work trips over vacations. I love a good holiday, but when you use up annual leave and pay your own money to schlep someplace, you have expectations for how good the experience should be to justify the cost. If I’m traveling for work, on the other hand - whether it’s a reporting trip or touring with Pink Martini (as I am now) - then any vacation-type experience I have is extra credit. It’s not what I’m there for, so bonus points if I squeeze it in. A meal, a walk, or even a beautiful view can all qualify as a 15-minute vacation. Spotting orcas from the ferry, as we did this morning? Check.
I’ve only ever been to Rio de Janeiro once, and it was when I was covering President Obama’s trip there in 2011. I finished filing a story half an hour before the motorcade was scheduled to leave. All the press corps had seen of Rio up to that point was the filing center in the conference room of our hotel. So another reporter and I crossed the street to Copacabana beach. We took off our shoes, walked in the sand, and bought a coconut from a vendor who hacked it open in front of us. 30 minutes later, we were in the motorcade rolling to our next stop. And I remember that walk on the beach far more vividly than I would’ve if it had been one short moment in a long slideshow of Brazilian vacation experiences.
Read books set in the place you’re going.
I’m not talking about reading histories as a sort of homework, although if that’s your thing knock yourself out. When I spent six weeks in Malaysia filming The Mole for Netflix in 2023, I loaded up my iPad with novels set in the parts of the country we’d be visiting. As we filmed Episode 7 in the city of Ipoh aboard an old tin mining dredge, I read Yangsze Choo’s The Night Tiger, set in Ipoh’s Perak state. When we finished the season on the island of Penang off Malaysia’s West Coast, I sat in the coffee shops and wine bars of historic George Town reading Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain. Fiction brought these cities to life for me in deep, nuanced ways and helped me see foreign places through the eyes of an insider.
When I returned home at the end of the trip, I was delighted to learn that Tan Twan Eng was releasing a new novel, also set in Penang. I interviewed him about The House of Doors that October, and we talked about what makes the winding streets of George Town so special.
Treat jet lag like a Murakami novel
I picked up Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 during a stretch when I was working an overnight shift. Trying to sleep during the day and work at night, everything in the real world seemed slightly off in an elusive way. Things that were supposed to be aligned felt ajar. The familiar felt foreign. Then I would read 1Q84, where the protagonist finds herself in a parallel Tokyo with two moons and everything is slightly…odd. The parallel between my life and the world of the novel felt somehow both eerie and reassuring.
That feeling returned to me in force the next time I landed in a foreign country with jet lag, wandering midday streets when my body told me it should be the middle of the night. It was strangely exciting, like the fog of being in any new city had reached deep into my bones.
I think one reason we travel is to feel a sense of disorientation. Unfamiliarity is bracing. It can open our eyes to new ways of seeing. When I feel jet lag, I don’t battle it like an adversary. I try to embrace it as another facet of the uncanniness of travel.
Extra! Extra! Extra!
If you don’t live in Washington, DC, you might not realize that we still have thousands of national guard troops patrolling our neighborhoods every day. And you’re paying for them! My friend and former colleague Kat Lonsdorf provided this helpful summary of what’s going on and why it matters:
I love this post! So much of how we experience travel is the attitude we bring to it.
Loving Ari, such great gems of life!