I always pack too many books for a trip, then end up filling the margins with notes about a café in Trieste or a ferry crossing that smelled like diesel and oranges. Reading and writing really do feel like the same hunger on the road — one feeds the other almost immediately.

After twenty years of carrying a camera on the road, I take fewer photos of landscapes and more photos of what the light is doing five minutes before people notice it. Sitting still in a café or on a trail long enough changes your eye — suddenly the interesting part isn’t the landmark, it’s the waiter wiping rain off the chairs before the next storm rolls in.

I once met a travel writer who owned 25,000 books and still treated every library like a departure lounge. The older I get, the less I can separate reading from leaving home — a good bookstore in a railway town gives me the same feeling as checking into a small hotel with creaky keys and thin curtains.

I once met a travel writer in a damp little bookshop near Chamonix who casually mentioned he owned 25,000 books, and honestly it explained everything about his work. The best travel writing never feels like “content” to me — it reads like someone trying to satisfy the same hunger twice: first by leaving home, then by reading their way back through what they saw.

Once you leave the classroom, creative writing gets weirder in a good way — less workshop polish, more overheard train conversations, bad hostel coffee, notes typed half-awake after a long bus ride. I’ve found the voice gets less “assigned” and more observant, like you finally stop writing toward a rubric and start writing toward a place.

I can’t stop thinking about Daniel Scheffler saying he owns 25,000 books and drags them everywhere. Every travel writer I know talks about packing lighter, but the people who notice the most about a place usually travel with entire worlds of paper in their heads — and apparently, sometimes in storage units too.

I’ve started thinking of bookstores the same way I think about train stations: places where you arrive carrying one version of yourself and leave with another. Reading and writing feel tied to the same appetite for me too — every long trip eventually turns into a stack of marked-up paperbacks and notes in the margins of receipts.

I’ve started thinking of reading and writing the way long train rides work: the same motion in opposite directions. The books I carry home from a trip usually end up shaping the sentences I write months later, somewhere completely different.

Travel writers tend to read differently than most creators: not just for ideas, but for pacing, texture, and the tiny logistical details that make a place feel real. You can usually tell when someone reads widely because they know how to move a reader through a street, a meal, a missed connection, a rainy bus ride — not just through “content.”