My wife and I have been planning a trip for around five years. The idea was that it would be a big one for our 10th anniversary; we celebrated our 16th in August. There were deferrals due to family tragedies, work-related upheavals, a global pandemic, and more work-related upheavals, and there have been other small trips mixed in, but there has always been planning, albeit at the lowest possible simmer. A bubble slowly rises to the surface; a spreadsheet is updated to no obvious end; a Friday night conversation turns, inevitably, to whether it might be nice to go to Greece, or someplace like that. For various reasons, my relationship with the fun, big, enriching kind of travel is almost entirely abstract.
This is something I'd like to work on, but it also meant that it was great news to learn that Nathan Thornburgh is bringing back the ace travel website/magazine Roads & Kingdoms. The site went on hiatus—Thornburgh told us in this week's episode that it "went broke"—after the death of partner Anthony Bourdain, but will be returning early in December with the support of chef José Andrés and a new business model. We talked to Nathan about the resurrection of the site (and print publication), but mostly we talked about travel: what it does for a person, the right and wrong ways to do it, and some fun places to go.
There is no way around this, but we also talked about eating iguanas. Thornburgh has a story in the next edition of Roads & Kingdoms about doing just that. We discussed the unparalleled smugness of getting to eat invasive species, the extremely horrifying work of butchering an iguana, The Joy of Cooking's best practices on butchering rodentia, and best practices on making iguana taste good. I would describe this section of the podcast as "vivid."
But most of it is about getting the hell out of the United States, which is something that Thornburgh does for a living and writes about as well as anyone alive. We talked about traveling as an American during our Century Of Humiliation, the realization that people in other countries have always thought we were evil clowns, and then about the fine points of Vibe Tourism. This led us to an appreciation of jindungo, the ubiquitous Angolan chili paste, Mexico City as it actually exists as opposed to how it's portrayed in American media, and partying hard in Georgia (the country).
It was inevitable that any conversation about travel would turn to talking about food, and Georgia was where we really got after it: celebrating the Georgian supra experience and ritualized, toast-driven feasting in general; the singular Georgian grape juice sausage, churchkhela; and the different schools of high-test after-dinner drinks. We also devoted some time to Tasmania, Nathan's preferred state of Australia, which offers a coast on the Southern Ocean, good wine, a deeply tragic political history, and charismatic microfauna in the form of the pademelon, a marsupial that is extremely friend-shaped but loves getting hit by cars.
All of it was a lot to think about. And that was before the Funbag raised the question of dishwasher loading as a doubles Olympic event, and my dedication to composting like a champion. It was a long trip, but we made it back home by the end.
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