Field Notes: The Summer My Sister and I Got Lost on Purpose

I am, by nature, a planner. Ask anyone who's traveled with me — for years I showed up with a binder, color-coded, and I was smug about it. So the trip that taught me the most is the one I didn't plan at all.

It was 2011. I was taking a break from Baghdad — I needed to be somewhere that wasn't there, and I didn't much care where. I told my sister to just meet me in Paris. No itinerary, no plan, which for me was practically a personality transplant. I booked us an Airbnb downtown, back when Airbnb was a brand-new and slightly suspicious idea, and felt very pleased with myself.

Then Paris turned out to be having the hottest day on record. And if you've spent a summer in Paris, you know — no air conditioning, no cross breeze, the old buildings just holding the heat like an oven with the door shut. We spent one stifling, sleepless night in that apartment, looked at each other the next morning, and agreed we had to get out.

So we did the least-me thing imaginable. We decided to rent a car and leave, with no idea where we were going. I remember standing in the train station trying to figure out how to even get to the airport to pick up a car — booking it last-minute on my phone, which was its own new trick back then. And then we were driving south out of Paris with no plan at all. Maybe Burgundy? We weren't sure. We just drove.

After a couple of hours we pulled into a gas station, got two coffees, and spread a big paper map across the table — because it was still map days — to see where we could actually get with the time we had. And then I did the thing you do when you're a grown woman with no plan: I called my mom. She was home in Minnesota, she'd been to France a few times, and I asked her where she thought we should go. She said Normandy. So off we went to Normandy.

It turned out to be one of the best trips of my life. Not in spite of having no plan — because of it. The beaches, the small towns, the long empty roads, the meals we stumbled into. None of it was on a list, because there wasn't one. We just kept following the day to see where it went.

That trip rewired something in me, and it's completely reshaped how I travel and how I build the trips I run now. I still plan — I'm not going to pretend the binder is gone. But I plan the opposite way than I used to. I leave room for the day to go sideways — an afternoon with nothing on it, a lunch that runs long, a wrong turn that turns out to be the point. When I design an edition, the white space is deliberate, not a gap I failed to fill. That open afternoon isn't me being lazy about the itinerary. It's the whole thing — it's where the trip you actually remember tends to happen.

So when people ask me how to plan the perfect trip, I tell them to plan a little less. Leave the seams open. Give the place, and the people you're with, room to surprise you. The most memorable stretch of that whole summer started at a gas station with a coffee and a paper map and a phone call to my mom, and not one bit of it could have been scheduled.

I still overpack the plans sometimes. Old habits. But I catch myself faster now — and I've learned to leave the best part unbooked.

-Cynthia

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