🗝️ Travel Dispatch - In Defense of Wonder
Or how to avoid becoming a jaded luxury traveler.
Travelers,
This week, I’m writing to you from the most amazing agriturismo castle in Umbria, Italy, where I’m co-leading a poetry and yoga retreat. Today, we trekked straight up a largely vertical bridge into the most incredible town of Civita Di Bagnoregio, or “The Dying City.”
The fog had settled in pockets enveloping the medieval buildings, rising above a pastoral scene straight out of a puzzle background. Far below us, farms and wineries dotted the countryside. Bright villas and farm houses broke up the green expanse, occasionaly highlighted by slices of sunlight arcing through the clouds.
I was in complete awe.
Earlier in the day, I arose with my back aching from a hard mattress and I was grumbling about there not being enough hot water. Faced with that scene in front of me, my creature comfort belly aching abruptly seemed silly.
I’ve been ruminating on this concept for a while. In being a luxury travel advisor who spends an inordinate amount of time traveling, I have to remind myself to maintain perspective. Substack is full of accounts like mine that detail our reviews of hotels we’ve stayed in. Sometimes, we need a moment to see the forest for the trees.
I hope you enjoy this issue of Travel Dispatch, my personal travel essays for paid subscribers of The Upgrade.
-Anne Marie
My Substack and Instagram are filled with claims that St. Tropez is over.
According to these taste makers, St Tropez is being relegated to the likes of Iceland, Nantucket, Ibiza, and Tulum, that were cool until you realized they were cool, and then the minute you decided to go there, they were declared passé.
In kindergarten mom language, we call this “yucking someone else’s yum.”
This approach to declaring destinations as no longer worthy of one’s time, as if they were a consumable good and not the homes of actual people who choose to reside there, feels like the jet set version of Mean Girls. “On Wednesday’s, we wear pink. On Fridays, we go to Slovenia, but never Mallorca, because it’s so over.”
Society loves to gate keep, to send signals to each other that define status. The places we choose to travel to are yet another way to judge how in-the-know someone is.
While it used to be summering in the Hamptons that signaled wealth, it’s now going to Milos, because Mykonos is “over.”
