One of my favorite ways to “travel” is through books. I’ve been a voracious reader since I learned how at the age of four. There’s a certain kind of book that melts my soul when it finds its way to me, and it’s hard to explain. It’s not travel writing in the conventional sense, not self-discovery memoir, not adventure narrative. Something more like: books that have a quality of following curiosity into the unknown, that value the wandering over the arriving, that often have an aesthetic dimension — beautiful objects, strange places, the feeling of being lost in the best possible way. Slightly eccentric. Often visual or tactile in their sensibility. The kind of books that make you want to go somewhere without necessarily telling you where.

Here are five of my favorites of this kind of book:

The Wander Society by Keri Smith

The Wander Society opens with a quote from a Walt Whitman poem: your very flesh shall / be a great poem. The author writes that she has stumbled on a secret society, finding mysterious notes in a library’s copy of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Sovlitur ambulando with a small thunderbolt symbol… The book itself is a collection of documents, handwritten notes, and vintage illustrations, all in service of a uncovering the philosophical manifesto of this strange collection of wandering folk who make up this seret society. It’s a wonderful fun romp that will get you out of your head and into the world.

West with the Night by Beryl Markham

“I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.”

Beryl Markham was the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo from east to west and the first person to cross from England to America. She wrote the above quote of learning to fly, specifically about her early experiences as a pilot, the moment of understanding what it means to be airborne and to see the world from above. West with the Night is her memoir; she writes of her childhood in Kenya, working as a bush pilot in early adulthood, and her later life training race horses. She writes about all of it with a sensibility so precise and so breathtaking that Hemingway said she made him feel like a carpenter with words.

Hippolyte’s Island by Barbara Hodgson

Hippolyte Webb collects antique maps and atlases, and one day he notices something: the Aurora Islands, a tiny cluster of islands in the South Atlantic, appear on maps from the eighteenth century and then simply vanish from later ones. So he sets out to find them, equipped with a centuries-old chart, an inadequate sailboat, and an advance from a skeptical publisher. Whether he finds them — and whether they exist at all — is beside the point. This is a book about the particular madness of following an obsession wherever it leads, illustrated throughout with old maps, handwritten logs, sketches, and specimens that make it feel less like a novel and more like an artifact you’ve stumbled upon. (Hodgson co-founded her publishing company with Nick Bantock, author and artist of the decidedly Heartbeat Travel-approved Griffin and Sabine series.)

Obscure Cities, a series by Benoit Peeters and Francois Schuiten

A woman with mysterious markings on her back — tattoos that look like a map. A mission to a strange city where doors are blocked off and there are no children. Stones, appearing suddenly in different rooms of a man’s home, every one the exact same weight. A cube that grows and changes like something alive, integrating with the architecture of the city around it the way ivy integrates with stone.

This is the world of the Obscure Cities, and Francois Schuiten’s magnificent illustrations bring it to life. Open any of these books and you’ll feel that you’ve stepped in somewhere vast, grand, and strange — a city that operates by its own complex, slightly unknowable rules. The story itself lets you in enough to enjoy, but never to fully understand. The fullness of it is always just slightly out of reach. And somehow that’s the pleasure of it — the world is too large and too strange to be completely known, but each Obscure Cities story enchants so thoroughly that you’ll leave each one hungry for more.

The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte

A fifteenth century Flemish painting. A chess game hidden within it. A question painted into the canvas — who killed the knight? — that a restorer discovers five hundred years later, pulling her into an obsession that becomes a murder mystery in the present. The Flanders Panel belongs on this list, not because it’s a travel book (it isn’t), but because it has the wandering soul’s essential quality: the conviction that the past and present exist in layers, that objects contain secrets worth pursuing, that following a hidden trail will always lead somewhere worth going. It is, in its way, a map of wonder.

What connects these five books is harder to name than it is to feel. You know it when you find it — that particular quality of a world that rewards curiosity, that values the wandering over the arriving, that makes you want to follow the trail wherever it leads. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

If you know of others that give you the same feeling, share in the comments!

When I saw this question come up, I thought, this is exactly the opposite of how to plan a trip with the Heartbeat Travel Method.

To help you understand why, it helps to know a little bit about Kyoto. One site mentioned in the post, Fushimi Inari, is in the southeasternmost area of Kyoto, almost not even in Kyoto. The bamboo forest and monkey park being mentioned are both in Arashiyama, which is in the northwesternmost area of Kyoto. They are a 43-minute cab ride apart. Kyoto is not small, geographically. There is no itinerary, in any itinerary I would ever create for Kyoto, in which Fushimi Inari and Arashiyama would both appear in one day. Even if all you had was that one day. You would miss all the magic of either place.

Yet this is the kind of question most people ask when planning a whole trip or any given day on a trip. It’s what I call “checklist planning.”

Our Newbie Traveler has heard that, when in Kyoto, one must see Fushimi Inari, the bamboo forest, and the monkey park! Or in Rome, the Colosseum, the Vatican & the Sistine Chapel (plus St. Peter’s, of course), and the Forum! So, how best do we now fit all of these sites into our itinerary?

I’m exhausted just thinking about trying to do all of that in one day in either Kyoto or Rome. It’s going to exhaust you to actually do your trip this way, too. Checklist planning disconnects you from what matters and creates logistical chaos on top of it. Instead of asking, what should I spend my time on?, you’re asking, How do I get from A to Z the fastest?

Here’s the real question to ask instead: What’s the one experience in this place that genuinely calls to me? Start there. Figure out the logistics of having that experience (What day of the week will you need to be there? What time is best? How much time will it take, reasonably, to savor that experience?). Then, find out what’s around it. (Don’t forget food and other breaks, like tea or coffee.) Let the day build outward from that center.

I’ve spent three full days in Arashiyama, across two trips to Japan. The first time I went, I started my planning with what I most wanted to do: the Orgel Museum. A strangely Western outpost in the midst of Japan, this is a museum dedicated to antique mechanical music boxes and automata. The museum houses a collection of Polyphons and historic automata, as well as modern reproductions of several of Jacquet Droz’s automata, which I’d seen demoed in Switzerland the previous fall.

The Orgel is down near the train station, so as I began my research and discovered that there were temples I wanted to see in the north, I slotted it into the afternoon. That allowed me to start first thing in the morning, at what ended up being an unexpected Heartbeat Experience: Otagi Nenbutsuji Temple. This is a quiet temple in the lush forest that is home to 1200 small adorable statues, all with different expressions.

The bamboo grove was not on my list. The monkey park was a “maybe,” but it was first on the chopping block if there wasn’t enough time for other things (and it was chopped; it also didn’t make it into my second or my third visit). I had to evaluate it based on the cost, not in money, but in time and energy: It’s a bit far off from the other sites I wanted to see, it requires a 20-minute hike up hill, and the descriptions in the reviews of how greedy and food-motivated the monkeys were made it less appealing. It became clear to me, as I sifted and sorted, that the experience wasn’t likely to be worth it.

And of course when I arrived to Arashiyama for the first time, I encountered all sorts of other interesting things that I hadn’t planned for at all, like the Folk Dolls Museum, and the tiny shop up the stairs in the Saga-toriimoto preserved street where the old man and his family made tiny dolls and animals out of silkworm cocoons. Or just the sheer, mad joy of meandering south through the Saga-toriimoto preserved street area in the bright February sunshine, gazing at the traditional Japanese buildings, talking to friendly Japanese ladies who told me my hat was cute and talked my ear off in Japanese and then semi-translated English… I wasn’t going to cut any of this short for the monkey park.

I stayed in touch with what mattered.

Stop checklist planning and start tuning in to what gives you that sheer, mad joy I had on a simple wander in Arashiyama.

And if you’re interested in learning how to think this way about travel in more detail, I’ll have something for you shortly. If you’d like to stay in touch and hear about it when it’s finished, subscribe to Heartbeat Travel and I’ll let you know.

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What the swift mind beholds at every turn.

~Edna St. Vincent Millay

Her friends called her Vincent.

Others called her genius, sprite, gamin, mercurial. She was a chanteuse (for what is a really good poet if not a singer of songs?) and a Byronic lover. She had a cheeky, smart-as-a-whip sense-of-life. Just read a poem or two… or a hundred, as you won’t be able to stop once you start. You’ll see what I love about her, I know. She charms everyone who reads her.

She’s been my favorite poet since I first read her, in high school or college. Those cheeky turnabouts at the end of her poems get me every time, whether they are know-it-all sassy or powerfully sad in their romantic desolation.

For about the last 25 years of both their lives, Millay and her husband Eugen Bossevain lived in a house on 800 acres in Austerlitz, New York. They named it Steepletop, after a flower called “steeplebush” that grows in abundance on the property.

First Eugen (in 1949) and then Millay died there (the following year), and Millay’s sister Norma kept the house and grounds almost entirely as they were during Millay’s life.

At the time I first learned of Steepletop’s existence, it was closed to the public. They had run out of funds and couldn’t afford to open as a museum anymore. But I put the place on my list of places to go, got on their email list and waited.

Three years later, I received an email in the spring that said they would be opening for one day only in July. I took off work and started planning immediately.

Austerlitz is just across the border between New York and Massachusetts, and so I chose to stay in Great Barrington. Starting with the day at Steepletop as the centerpiece, I quickly realized there was a wealth of other Heartbeat places in the area. Nearby Stockbridge is home to Chesterwood, sculptor Daniel Chester French’s home and studio. Naumkeag, also in Stockbridge, is a Gilded Age estate that served as a summer home to a NYC attorney and his artist wife. Amherst, just over an hour’s drive away, features the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and Emily Dickinson’s house, and rounded out the perfect Heartbeat-driven trip.

The weather on the day I visited Steepletop was perfect, warm and sunny. The first thing you notice, when walking up the hill, is what Vincent called “The Ruins” — a strange, whimsical garden with a door that leads to nowhere (there are three of these in the grounds near the house), an almost ritualistic planting of trees, and one small statue of a boy. The pool is the centerpiece — where clothes were never allowed if you wanted to go swimming. (Eugen generally wore just his hiking shorts most of the time in warm weather anyhow.) And, of course, there would have been the bar — beneath a renovated pergola, it no longer exists, but was taken from a New York speakeasy to be the home of Vincent’s ever-flowing gin habit.

Inside the house, you begin to get a sense of the real Vincent, the working Vincent. The tour guide laughed with us as we peeked first in the kitchen — it’s said that Vincent never set foot in it. Eugen was the cook of the household.

Upstairs you find first the working room and then the library. The working room was for organizational editing (like figuring out what order the poems should go in for the book) and proof corrections. The library was for reading and researching.

The writing itself? That took place in a small cabin approximately thirty steps up the hill from the house, with nothing in it but a desk and a potbelly stove and a view of the woods. A place for every stage of the writing process! Not just the dream of me-the-writer, but also the dream of me-the-persnickety-get-all-the-details-right-experience-maker.

Back outside, you’ll also find a flat plain Vincent called “The Dingle,” which was the site of a badminton court in 1935, and scores of blueberry bushes. (When they purchased the land, it had been a blueberry farm! We picked a few and ate them, as they were just in season, and I’m sure Vincent wouldn’t have minded.) Footage from a 35mm film made at Steepletop showed goats and sheep as well.

The property is also home to three graves, because after all, as Vincent wrote: “death comes in a day or two.” Cora, Vincent’s mother (who was also a fairly unusual woman for her time, shown in a portrait in the house with a pixie cut), is buried in the woods about a mile from the house in a fenced rectangle that’s (deliberately, as per Vincent’s wishes) overgrown with mountain laurels. A few steps away, Eugen and Vincent are laid to rest beside each other, and in another part of the same glen, her sister Norma and her husband Charles Ellis.

The special day I attended at Steepletop included a reading of a selection of Vincent’s poetry, including one poem that had not yet been published. The readings were beautiful and funny and sad. They made us laugh and cry, as Vincent always does.

A few favorites from those read that day:

• “Only until this cigarette is ended,”

• “I, being born a woman and distressed,”

• “Loving you less than life, a little less,”

• “It is the fashion now to wave aside,”

• Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies,

• and, of course, one of my lifelong favorites, “Love is not all.”

There is something ethereal about the way the sun dapples the leaves on the Poetry Trail and in the way small magic seems scattered about the gardens, the house, the writing cabin. Each turn you take at Steepletop reveals a new surprise. Spending the day there felt like living alongside the laughing fae spirit of Vincent herself, in a place that feels just like her poetry.

Today, Steepletop usually opens for 2-3 weekends each summer. You can find out when on their website at millay.org.

I was at Tokyo Disney. It was 9:30 PM, after park close, and I was standing at the check-in desk at the Hotel Mira Costa, trying to pick up my vacation package, which started the following morning with a day at Disneyland. I’d traveled by Shinkansen that morning from Hiroshima, dropped my bag at the Hilton, then spent the afternoon and evening at Ikspiari and DisneySea.

It’s hard to imagine a worse feeling than the pure anxiety that exploded in my chest, looking at the patient Japanese man waiting for me to produce my passport, and knowing I was not going to be able to, thinking of how very many places I had been that day, and that I also hadn’t checked in to the Hilton yet… I had no other ID on me; I’d left my drivers license at home.

Fortunately the man at the Mira Costa took pity on me and gave me my vacation package anyway. I got back onto the Resort Liner, my heart beating so hard I felt like I might die, my mind racing a mile a minute on what in the world I was going to possibly do, was I going to miss out on my Disney plans? Was I going to have to head to the embassy to get a new passport? Fortunately, at least, I had another two weeks in Tokyo, so I had some time if I did have to do this.

I perched on the edge of the bench on the train, running scenarios in my head at light speed. There was nothing else I could do but go to the Hilton and ask for help, but my whole nervous system was shouting at me to DO SOMETHING NOW. It felt impossible to calm down.

Next to me on the train sat an older Japanese gentleman. A woman who looked to be his wife sat to his right.

He said, with a concerned look: “Do you know where to go?”

He started to explain the stops on the train to me — that the partner hotels like the Hilton and the Sheraton were at the Bayside stop, and that if I were staying at one of those, I should get off there, and I could get a shuttle bus from the station.

I knew all of this, of course; I’m not the sort of person that goes anywhere without knowing how to get there, and I’ll admit that, at first, I was a little annoyed that he was telling me something I already knew.

But as he spoke, I realized something. He was trying to help. The look on my face… the tension in my body… He had seen my distress, and without knowing its cause, wanted to help, and so he was offering knowledge, on the off chance that it would.

And somehow, it did. For those brief few seconds, it took me out of my head and reminded me that I was in Japan, where visible distress is attended to with care and kindness.

Back at the Hilton, the desk clerk had lived in the US and spoke fluent English. He reassured me: “This is Japan; no one wants your passport” and checked me in without ID. He left notes in detailed Japanese so the concierge would know my situation in the morning.

Early the next morning, I went down to the concierge. The girl working there used Google translate to communicate with me and then begin calling the places I’d been. The taxi company hadn’t found it; Ikspiari and DisneySea weren’t open yet for calling; the hotel in Hiroshima… oh, my heart, when she looked at me and gave the smallest of nods while on the phone with the hotel in Hiroshima. They had it. They would deliver it, cash on arrival, and it would arrive by the morning of my departure from the Hilton.

It arrived a day early. Another concierge clerk crossed the lobby and sat with me while I opened it. I unwrapped layer after layer after layer of paper, then plastic, then more paper, then plastic — each one wrapped with perfect corners born of fastidious care.

“The Japanese way,” said the clerk, and we shared a knowing smile and a small laugh.

And it’s true.

This is Japan. The man on the train who couldn’t have known what was wrong, but tried to help anyway. The clerk who left notes for the morning staff. The hotel that wrapped a traveler’s passport as if it were something precious.

A culture that pays attention.

The relief of getting my passport back was immense. But the sense of pure trust, and the feeling that I never did have to worry — because this is Japan — was even greater.

Arima Onsen has two types of water: gold and silver. The water in this bath, in this ryokan, is of the gold type. The gold water is such because it has so much iron in it that it rusts on contact with the air, turning it a rich golden brown that looks a bit like a pool of stagnant quarry water… let’s be real, it’s ugly. But plain clear water doesn’t look like it has healing magic. Weird golden brown quarry swamp water? Yeah, there might be magical properties there.

Once the button is pressed, you’re in the hardest part: waiting for the tub to fill up.

I dipped a toe or two in at the halfway mark, and the water felt so hot I yelped. I turned on the regular cold water tap and swished it in, but also felt a moment of recognition that part of this experience, perhaps an essential part, was going to be lowering myself into that steaming hot bath, and that before it (potentially, as I didn’t really know!) felt good, it was going to hurt.

I looped a leg over the high side of the tub and slid it into the steaming water, letting the prickle of the heat sting me as I pulled my second leg in and crouched, hovering over the rising water and feeling the pain, tuning into it, letting myself adjust.

The next step had to happen all at once; there was no other way. I lowered my bum, slowly, carefully, and then all at once, to the bottom of the bath. I sat, letting the searing heat of the water soak into my skin.

I waited, and I breathed. Deeply, in and out, trying to handle the pain of the heat, letting my body adjust. I slid deeper into the tub, slipping down to cover my whole body with the golden (seriously, let’s be real here: it’s brown) hot water.

My skin prickled with the heat, but as I adjusted and sank down into a full length laying position, with my head resting against the back of the tub, I felt the loosening. The tension in my muscles melted. The ever-running, ever-shouting blurring-together thoughts, worries, mental pains — everything — in my head wafted out, disappearing with the slow burn of the water.

My eyes closed. I drifted off without realizing, coming to suddenly, laughing with surprise. I’m not much of a bath person. I’ve never fallen asleep in a bath before. But this was not like other baths.

In the morning, I woke early and ran the bath a third time before breakfast.

I pressed the button, as before, more impatient than before, waiting for the rushing hot water to rise and rise in the tub. It was only halfway full by the time I climbed in. I sat, with my knees up, breathing, trying to handle the pain, trying to adjust to the heat of the water.

I couldn’t adjust. My chest felt bound in tiny rubber bands. The spaces in my wrists hurt. My knuckles ached.

I lay down, briefly, only to get back up again — with a feeling like a deep cavity opening up in my chest, beneath my lungs, around my heart, turning my skin inside out and leaving my organs outside my body, shriveling, peeling, brushing against the air, exposed to the grief.

I broke into soul-wracking sobs. My body shook with it.

It was the end of November, the weekend of Thanksgiving, and instead of being cozy at home in our (my) beautiful apartment with the southwest-facing 12-foot ceilings and the man I loved cooking up a whole chicken in the kitchen, I was alone in Japan, and my (our) beautiful apartment was empty of him and his things.

Anxiety spiked in me, flooding my system with tension and panic. How do you sit with grief like this, being yanked out of you, the water pulling, pulling, pulling… dragging it out and holding it at the surface? What can you do in the face of that?

I couldn’t resist: I had to reach out. I had to tell him I missed him. So much. He responded immediately. But the things he said… it was clear his head was elsewhere. It was clear his head had been elsewhere.

I collected my organs, stuffed them back inside, picked myself up and packed myself out to my next stay in Nagoya.

When I returned home six weeks later, I unpacked my treasures of Japan. I had brought home two boxes of bath salts from Arima Onsen. These salts are said to be made from the actual hot spring waters. Skeptical, I set out to find out if at home they would feel anything like they had in the wild.

I tried the gold first, then the silver, and the gold again. It was in this third bath at home, in the gold water, that I noticed: it was happening again. The gold water wrung me out. It dug up all the tension and hard emotion living under my skin and pulled at it, turning me inside out. It was more relaxing, ultimately, with some kind of deeper relief, but it also hurt. It hurt a lot.

The silver water felt lighter, more peaceful, more like the fuzz on a peach. It loosened and lightened, but without the wrenching harshness of the gold water.

I found myself wondering if there was anything real behind the difference I felt — so I looked it up.

I was disappointed that I couldn’t find real, hard facts to back up my theory, only some vague anecdotal and AI-generated notes that said the gold spring was considered more intense and the silver more relaxing. It sometimes feels like it’s hard to go deep into anything in Japan, as their culture and language just don’t go there (or don’t reveal their secrets to foreigners, anyway…)

What I did learn was that the gold spring (known as Kinsen, from kin, the word for gold in Japanese) contains high levels of not just iron but also salt, significantly more concentrated than seawater. This could account for the feeling of the water pulling at me that I experienced; it does help remove dead skin cells and pull impurities from pores.

The ryokans in the area report that the gold spring also has heat retention properties; after bathing, your body stays warm for a long time and doesn’t cool down easily.

In contrast, the silver water (Ginsen, from gin (sounds like geen), the word for silver) contains radium and carbonate. It’s recommended for soothing joint aches, boosting blood flow, and clearing lactic acid — more of a circulation aid, getting things moving. The Japanese even drink it for health, in the form of Arima cider (I didn’t try one).

I cried again in both waters. It’s an incredible thing, bath water that feels like a transformation. But mostly, when moving through grief, you might want a bath salt that doesn’t leave you with your organs hanging out. So I decided to leave the gold for a time in the future when I have a little more strength.

For now, I’ll reach for the silver waters of Arima Onsen when I want my calm evening bath.

The idea of a Renaissance man is, in the modern era, often looked down upon as someone who dabbles in many things, never really focusing and never really getting good at any of them.

I’ve historically been critical of myself for this, thinking that if only I could knuckle down and focus on one thing, instead of loving writing fiction and papercrafting and travel and history and art and relationships and psychology, I would be more successful.

But the original concept of the Renaissance man was an ideal, with man at the center, at his best, able to and — importantly — worthy of accomplishing great things in a wide scope of activities. A Renaissance man might excel at painting, sculpture, poetry, anatomy, cartography, botany, and architecture — and, instead of this beggaring belief, it would feel like the most natural thing in the world.

For me, Rajiv Surendera is an echo of that lost world of Renaissance men. He’s classy and stylish, with a finely tuned eye for design that elevates. He sculpts; he makes candles; he writes letters by hand. The New York Times writes about his organizational skills; HGTV shares a tour of his apartment. He plays duets with a banjo-ist (banjo-neer?). He cooks from scratch.

He once acted in a movie you might have heard of, but it has no bearing on the delightful, creative life he’s living and sharing now.

People in YouTube comments ask if he’s from this planet. He is an anomaly in today’s culture, but he is, most decidedly, and most naturally, from this planet — more than those who are not like this.

I don’t know exactly how long I’ve been following him — a year? Two? The Facebook algorithm presented me with his Facebook page, and I said, who is this incredibly fascinating fellow? He was spinning wool on an old spinning wheel.

Rajiv is, in many ways, the embodiment of what Heartbeat achieves through travel: filling life up with moments of wonder. With the pursuit of wonder. The pursuit of a life full of curiosity, a life that sings with delight in exactly the kind of things Rajiv spends his time on. Wax seals on letters written with an ink quill on antique rag paper with a deckled edge — this is what his doings feel like to me.

The video I watched today starts with him talking about how he’s making a doll’s head out of Plasticine so he can make a plaster mold of it that he’ll use to add decor to flower pots he makes. (He first did this with a sculpture he made based on a Neoclassical man’s head on a building in Munich; I mean, who does this?)

The broader theme of the video has to do with letting yourself pursue your creative interests without giving in to the urge to justify them to yourself. Without needing to have a plan to sell them in order to give value to listening to what strikes you, to let yourself follow what calls you to make it.

He says, “Don’t pull yourself out of the present moment of doing it just because you want to do it.”

This is actually quite hard.

It reminds me of something Peter Keating said in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand: “It’s the hardest thing in the world — to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage.”

We’re relentlessly taught, instead, to ignore what we want, to do what others want from us, to give ourselves and our time away, away, away; to only do things if we can guarantee they have some productive value to someone else (or even a specifically financial value to ourselves).

There’s an approach here, a methodology and mindset, that we can apply to our travel specifically, both in how we plan and how we behave while in foreign lands, but there are also broader lessons for how we think about our lives.

Rajiv honors his interests. When his curiosity catches on something, he follows it. He lets himself pursue the things he wants; he makes room for them in his life, financially and with his time. It’s not just that he gives himself permission; it’s that he actively encourages himself to chase the things that make him light up.

This has led to a life rich with intriguing, widely varying creative pursuits (and ultimately to one in which he makes a living from these things, but that was not the point or drive from the start).

I fall into this trap with everything I love (“How can I make money from this?” “Should I even do it if I can’t?”), and even starting this newsletter, another, different thing I love, engenders criticism from my strict inner judge.

But Rajiv’s approach to his creativity is the same fundamental principle at the base of how I think about travel (and about building a life full of wonder). It must start with letting yourself want.

It starts with noticing a place or an experience or an activity that makes your heart beat faster, and letting yourself explore what it might look like for you to actually experience it. Letting your curiosity catch on something, and then following it and believing in it, without criticism, enough to make it real, the same way Rajiv does with his widely varying creative projects.

I’m grateful to Rajiv Surendera for setting the example of a true Renaissance man, and for the calm beauty of his work, his presence, and his quiet dedication to following his creativity wherever it takes him.

It matters.

Especially real, physical ones printed on brittle, crumbly old paper that smells like fusty tree.

I am a lover of atlases — even just the idea of a conglomeration of places that will make my heart beat faster.

I am even, weirdly, a lover of Google maps — particularly the process of sitting down with the Google map of a new place I am about to visit and exploring it, learning it, and finding what delightful points of interest there are to find in it.

When I started this article, I intended to write about itinerary planning. But as I started to think more about it, I realized: We’re not itinerary planning.

We’re mapping wonder.

And here’s the thing about maps: they don’t show you everything right away. You need to spend some time with the richness of a place before you can unearth the true gems. This is a more valuable part of trip planning; it’s in the deep dive that you’ll find the hidden places, the ones that will form even more of your Heartbeats.

Flashy, touristy places are right there on the surface, the second you start planning — at the top of the list on Trip Advisor. Marked on Google Maps. The real Heartbeat places are beneath layers of talking to people, digging through map after map, and diving down unexpected Internet rabbit holes.

I already had my flight to Switzerland booked when I discovered the main Heartbeat of the trip. It was open-jaw, into Geneva and out of Zurich. I was deep in trying to figure out the puzzle of traversing the country in two weeks: which cities to stay in, which to skip, how long to stay where. Which side of the country would I like better, the French influenced-west or the German-influenced east? And then what about Lugano? I knew I wanted to spend some time in the Alps, of course, but…

I asked friends who’d been. I followed YouTubers who focused specifically on Switzerland. I read pages and pages of websites about traveling there.

And then. A reel captured me. It showed a room with every surface decorated. A rich Rococo style, full of winding, curving balconies and Corinthian columns, stacks of books on two levels and a parquet floor, pyramid-shaped display cases and richly painted ceilings. My eyes went wide as saucers and I immediately looked up the name and location of this place.

The Abbey library of St. Gall, in St. Gallen, Switzerland.

This would be a stop on my trip.

I booked two nights in St. Gallen, not really sure there’d be enough to fill the time, but confident I’d find other things. Shortly I discovered I could get to the Zeppelin museum in Friedrichschafen, Germany, by train and ferry if I liked. Then, while on the trip, two Swiss ladies who shared my food tour on my first day in Annecy, France, told me there was a festival happening — OLMA, the Swiss Fair for Agriculture and Food.

But upon arrival in St. Gallen in the afternoon of the first day, I realized I wouldn’t make it to either of those places, because I’d underestimated the strange beauty of this small Swiss city. I spent the entire afternoon at the library. I listened to each number on the audio tour, fascinated. The exterior grounds of the Abbey and parts of the Alstadt, or Old Town, had numbers, too, and I didn’t have time to finish before the library closed.

I decided to return the following day, take a free walking tour in the morning (to have someone to ask questions of!), and return to finish the audio guide in the afternoon.

The charm of St. Gallen is a bit of an enigma. The Abbey was built on top of St. Gall’s original hermitage in 719. Because of its lengthy history, it brings together a fascinating mixture of architectural and art styles, a kind of medieval romanticism all wrapped up with Fachwerkhaus (a German architectural style that features exposed wood beams) and featuring oriels (they’re like bay windows that homeowners built to show off their wealth) hanging off buildings throughout the Alstadt.

It felt like being inside a Harry Potter novel; I imagine that Hogsmeade looks something like St. Gallen. You’ll find turrets with witches’ hats for roofs and gold weathercocks shining in the rain, whole sections of buildings that stick out of the inner corner of two other buildings, a tall half-rectangle with a sloping roof protruding in front of an otherwise flat rectangular building, with windows precisely aligned and yet decorated with artsy frames. The oriels are covered in intricate wood carvings, and many building faces are painted with splashy murals, sometimes looking half-finished.

And yet, the city doesn’t feel old. Not in the way of some medieval cities that have stagnated. (Bruges, I’m looking at you.) St. Gallen has a fresh, almost younger spirit that feels modern and comfortable and like it has kept up with the 21^st century.

Two days was nearly enough time for this personality-rich city, and it was easily my favorite city qua city compared to anywhere else I stayed in Switzerland.

I had a late itinerary arrival when planning my second trip to Japan as well — Kurashiki. Kurashiki (sounds like kurrash-key, not kura-shiki) is a small town outside of Okayama, between Kyoto and Hiroshima. I didn’t have it on my radar until deep into my planning, when someone in one of the Japan Facebook groups mentioned it and shared photos. The photos immediately captivated me, and I started working it into a weekend of my trip when I could stay overnight.

Kurashiki is home to the Ohara Museum of Art, the first collection of Western-style art to be permanently exhibited in Japan — a wonderful melding of cultures that offers delight in its history more than its art (which is sadly influenced by modernist tastes).

It’s also home to the most charming schoolchildren, whose chaperones chased me down in the street to ask for help with answering questions for their English-speaking project. I tried my best to speak a little Japanese, and they tried their best to speak a little English, and I’m not sure we understood each other much at all, but we had a lot of fun trying.

Maps of wonder have layers, and often, the best experiences are farther below the surface.

So when you’re diving in to planning a trip, go deep. Explore all the nooks and crannies. Talk to people. Go down the weird Internet rabbit holes. Study the maps for what they reveal not on the first, second or third looks, but only later, after you know them well.

You’re not just filling activities into holes on a calendar. You’re not just noting down the top 3 places everyone goes to and slotting them in. You’re mapping out your own wonder. You’re preparing the full, rich landscape of your trip. You know that the most interesting places on any map are the ones you have to hunt for — the ones not labeled in big letters, but found instead in the mysterious waters of “here be dragons.”

This is the first time you’ve been to Italy, and you weren’t sure you would ever get here. You’ve seen the large plaster cast of Michelangelo’s David at the V&A in London, and you’ve seen plenty of incredible Neoclassical, Renaissance, and ancient sculpture in New York, London, and countries in Europe.

You’ve seen lots of photographs of David, and you think you know what it’s like to see great sculpture. You think you know what it will be like to see the David in person.

But that’s why you’re completely unprepared for what it’s actually like when you stand in front of (and below) him.

It’s hard to draw breath. The people around you disappear; all you can see is this heroic, shining man in front of you. You don’t even want to take photographs, because it feels sacriligeous (even though the only religion you could be said to have, if you were to be called religious, is that of man-worship).

In fact, what you feel most powerfully, what you most want while standing there, is to kneel before him.

And maybe, to never leave here.

Just to gaze up at him for eternity, because what else could possibly matter in the face of such… grace?

This was me in February of 2017. I’ll never forget that experience.

This is what I call a Heartbeat Experience, or Heartbeat for short.

In a world where it’s so easy to fall into screens and never come back up, we can lose touch with living with meaning, preferring to curl up in bed and read page-turning thrillers and watch friendly YouTubers traipsing around Japan. It’s so easy and comfortable to just stay home.

But that’s why I find myself wanting — no, yearning — to hold on to experience. To living in the world. To feeling it through all five senses. Being out there in a big way, risking, trying. Filling up on awe. Standing in wonder and letting that feeling wash over me. Witnessing the incredible innovation and great civilization mankind has produced — is capable of producing. Getting back in touch with what’s jaw-droppingly amazing in the world, in all its glorious detail.

Imagine watching the Jacquet-Droz “Draughtsman” automaton draw you a tiny sketch of a dog at a little museum in Neûchatel, Switzerland, and wondering: What must it have been like for the Jacquet-Droz family building these small mechanical marvels as early as the late 1700s? Or better, what was it like for the folks witnessing such a creation for the first time, in their aristocratic parlors, in awe of this new-fangled marvel?

Or what if you could fly high above the Hudson River in a working 1929 biplane? Complete with goofy aviator hat and goggles to protect your eyes? All the while thinking that this must be something like what Beryl Markham, first woman to cross the Atlantic West to East, must have felt flying the Percival Vega Gull by herself, mostly in the dark, across more than 2,000 miles of open ocean.

Or how about sailing away on an historic schooner, sleeping on deck under the stars, hoisting the sails with the crew, and stopping off at Block Island for ice cream and views, celebrating a classic New England summer weekend, just because?

And even walking into St. Peter’s in Rome, wandering the church, with its lavish interior, not being much of a fan of Catholic churches, looking for Michelangelo’s Piéta, knowing it’s there somewhere but not really sure exactly… oh. Coming upon it, suddenly, after walking the whole circuit of the nave, with horizontal lines of people in front of you, between you and the sculpture, and the sculpture itself behind glass, feeling at a distance from it … and then, totally shocked at yourself, bursting into tears.

Spoiler alert: you can. You can have every one of these experiences and more.

I’ve been planning trips based around Heartbeats like these for myself and friends for decades. Wonder is woven into the delicate threads of every trip, not as an incidental after-thought, but with a pure intention to witness the innovation, intelligence, and heart and soul of what Man has created across the ages.

To worship at the altar of greatness, especially (and so importantly), as it struggles to exist in our time.

This is the real foundation of wonder, and it is the girders of Heartbeat Travel.

When I finally got up from the floor at the Accademia and left David behind, I was flooded with a sense of the importance of keeping this feeling with me — I didn’t want to return home and lose it. But the gift shop was littered with lifeless photographs.

And then I saw it — a graphite drawing of just his head, hand, and shoulder. I took it home and framed it in black. It hangs next to my bed.

Every morning, I see David gazing into the distance, poised to strike.

And I remember.