Nomadic Spirit is a weekly newsletter for travelers who care as much about the why as the where.
Dispatch
Where Travel and Life Intersect
Go Where You’re Wanted
Some places are still glad you came.
We’ve been planning a trip to Vienna and Salzburg. The first advice we got wasn’t about where to go. It was about where to avoid.
Don’t go to Hallstatt. The village has 800 residents and receives 10,000 visitors a day in peak season. Locals have blocked the access tunnel. They’ve built fences to stop tourists from taking selfies. They hold signs reading “tourism yes, mass tourism no.”
This is a new language in travel planning. Not where to go. Where not to go.
What You Actually Lose
The crowds aren’t the only cost.
What changes you is a conversation with someone who is glad you came. Who wants to tell you something about where they live. That doesn’t happen in a place where the locals are exhausted by your presence before you open your mouth.
It doesn’t survive once the relationship between visitor and resident has curdled into something hostile. You cannot know a place whose people are tired of you before you arrive.
And you cannot know it when the famous place has been so thoroughly pre-digested that nothing is left to discover. Millions of prior visits have already decided what it means, what to photograph, what to feel. The viewpoints are mapped. The restaurants reviewed. The right reaction is written in advance. You arrive to find your experience already shaped.
Choosing a famous place is a form of safety. The consensus has already done the work for you.
You have to supply the meaning yourself, without everyone else’s experience to borrow from.
Nomadic Spirits already know this. The place everyone agrees matters is not the same as the place that ends up mattering to you.
That’s how a place becomes yours.
When the Math Breaks
Across Europe, the famous place has scaled past what cities and villages can absorb.
Venice moves roughly 20 million tourists a year through a city of 50,000 residents. Barcelona has seen rents rise 68% over the past decade. Spain welcomed 94 million international tourists in 2024. The country has 48 million people.
Cities are doing what cities do when a problem outgrows them. Tourist taxes. Timed entry systems. Daily visitor caps. Amsterdam has begun limiting cruise ship dockings. Greece has restricted access to some of its most visited sites. These aren’t experiments. They’re attempts to hold something in place.
None of this is the traveler’s fault. A very good idea, repeated too many times in too few places.
The overcrowded destination still has what made it famous. The view, the history, the light at a certain hour. What it struggles to offer is what makes travel matter: a place that feels like itself and people who are glad you came.
The second place still has both.
What to Call It
There's a shift happening in travel without a settled name.
You see it in Skyscanner trend reports and Booking.com surveys. Travel writers are starting to call it "second city" travel, meaning the second- or third-most-visited destination in a region, rather than the obvious one. Verona instead of Rome. Porto instead of Lisbon. Glasgow instead of Edinburgh.
The term is still settling. And it's too narrow. The idea applies well beyond cities.
Call it the second place. Same region, something just as real, and not yet loved into something smaller than itself. The Salzkammergut has more than 70 lakes. Hallstatt sits on one of them. Altaussee and Traunkirchen sit on others, thirty minutes away, without buses, without fences, without signs. The place that isn't performing for you yet.
Choosing it takes confidence. There's comfort in choosing what everyone agrees is worth choosing. The second place asks you to trust your own judgment over the consensus itinerary.
Most travel doesn't ask that of you. This does.
Vienna and Salzburg will have crowds. We'll be in both, and glad to be. The rest of the trip belongs to the second place.
— Paul M. Rand, Founder, Nomadic Spirit
A Chosen Place
Destinations worth traveling for—and understanding once you arrive
Café Frauenhuber, Vienna
Vienna’s oldest café isn’t the famous one. It’s the quiet one.
What a historian’s favorite table reveals about Vienna, and how to find it before you arrive.
When we decided to spend part of this summer in Vienna, a milestone birthday trip we’ve been talking about for years, I started thinking about how to approach the city the right way.
Vienna rewards the obvious things. The Kunsthistorisches Museum. The Staatsoper. The Ringstrasse at dusk.
But if you want to understand the city rather than just see it, there’s no better place to start than a coffeehouse.
Vienna’s café culture isn’t a relic. It’s still the way the city thinks. For two centuries, its coffeehouses have been where ideas were argued, newspapers read, chess played, manuscripts written, and, at least one of them, revolutions quietly planned.
UNESCO added Viennese coffeehouse culture to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2011. The Viennese themselves would consider that overdue.
So I called someone who knows the city well.
The Right Person to Ask
John Boyer and I were colleagues at the University of Chicago for years. We interacted regularly, and once business was done, I always looked forward to what came next.
Boyer served as Dean of the College for 31 years, the longest tenure in the school’s history.
He is also one of the foremost scholars of Habsburg Vienna, the author of several books on the city’s political and cultural history, the recipient of the Austrian State Prize for Modern History, and the writer of the definitive history of the University of Chicago itself.
When the university held its alumni weekend a few years ago, they set up a tent in his honor for two days, with a proper Viennese coffee bar and pastries, and called it Café Vienna.
The man knows the city. More to the point, he loves it. Not as a scholar’s subject but as a place he keeps going back to.
I asked him one question: which coffeehouse means something to you when you’re there?
I expected Café Central. Everyone expects Café Central, the grand vaulted space where Trotsky played chess and Freud argued over coffee, and the whole of turn-of-the-century Vienna seemed to pass through at one point or another. Boyer knows all of that. He’s written about that world.
He sent me to Café Frauenhuber instead.
It’s on Himmelpfortgasse, “Heaven’s Gate Street,” tucked off the main pedestrian drag near Stephansdom. No queue. No TikTok presence.
Boyer has logged more hours in Viennese coffeehouses than most people spend in their own living rooms. He goes to Frauenhuber to sit in one of the plush red booths, drink coffee, and work on manuscripts.
Quiet and dignified, he said.
Why He Goes
The building has been there since the early 1700s. The café has been serving coffee since 1824, the oldest in Vienna, though it doesn’t make much of the claim.
What it does make something of, on a plaque outside, is this: in November 1788, Mozart performed in this room. Beethoven premiered a quintet here in April 1797.
Mozart’s last known public appearance was just a few streets away, but this room knew him, too. The first performance of his Requiem, a benefit concert for his widow, took place here two years after his death.
There is, the café notes with some understatement, no other restaurant in the world that can claim to have hosted musical performances by both Mozart and Beethoven.
None of that is why Boyer goes. He goes because it’s quiet. Because the booths are comfortable. Because he can think there.
That’s what stayed with me after his note. Vienna has no shortage of places loud with history.
Frauenhuber is a place where history is present but not loud, and the people who come regularly prefer it that way. The café earned a reputation for stillness going back to the 19th century, when retired military officers came to play chess in peace.
We’ll be there in a few months. I already know where we’ll sit.
Good Company
People, publications, and projects—worth your attention.
The Unretirees
Matt and Dawn left the US to live in Portugal. Now they help others figure out whether doing the same might make sense for them — in Portugal, Spain, and across Europe. The Unretirees is honest about the tradeoffs, practical about the details, and never tries to sell you on a life you haven't chosen yet. If you've wondered what it would take to plant a flag somewhere else, start at theunretirees.com.
The Journey — Voices of the Nomadic Spirit
Stories from travelers who have learned that the journey matters as much as the destination. If you have one worth sharing, please write to [email protected] for submission guidelines
My Father’s Pork Tenderloin Never Had a Chance
At a tonkatsu counter in Tokyo, a southern Indiana childhood pulls up a seat.
By Joyce Winnecke
We arrived at the tonkatsu restaurant just after the Tokyo lunch rush, settling in at the counter with cups of warm sake.
Topping my list of reasons to love Tokyo is the concept of specialty restaurants – where every speck of energy is spent on just one dish or cooking method. A tempura restaurant makes tempura and only tempura. Some exist solely for udon noodles, or for freshwater eel – it’s quite a long list.
Tonkatsu is a deep-fried pork cutlet. A restaurant opening its doors every day to serve only that thrilled me. This is why we travel, I thought.
A Hoosier Qualification
Not to brag, but I’ve had my share of fried pork. I’m from southern Indiana, where the breaded pork tenderloin sandwich is revered in certain diners and taverns.
The pork is pounded thin, fried, then served on a bun. The meat extends beyond the bread – sometimes ridiculously so. My father taught me early to add mustard and pickles, as we do with fried bologna sandwiches, and, I suppose, in honor of our German heritage.
Front Row
Family culinary history was at the front of my mind as I drank in details of this tonkatsu kitchen from my front-row perch.
A chef with a long, slim blade sliced two thick pork loin steaks, dredged them in flour, and ran them through an egg wash before transferring them to a tray of panko breadcrumbs. (I probably do not need to say that these were fresh breadcrumbs.) With his whole hands, he patted, turned, and patted some more until they were thickly covered.
Using long wooden chopsticks, he lowered the cutlets into a huge vat of bubbling oil, a mix of sesame and cottonseed. He turned the pieces once and then again before holding each for the oil to drip away and allowing them to rest atop a metal grate.
With some ceremony, the chef reached over the counter to set the sliced cutlets before us.
We were advised to enjoy the first hottest bites with just a sprinkling of Andean mountain salt. The panko coating was light and crispy, the pork moist and delicious. There were radishes, pickles, rice, miso soup, and a dipping sauce (think Worcestershire).
I’m still talking about our Tokyo tonkatsu experience. This was not my father’s fried pork tenderloin – though I know he would still be talking about it, too.
By the way, legislation to make breaded pork tenderloin the official sandwich of the Hoosier state was introduced in the Indiana legislature in January. It didn’t pass, but I have not given up hope.
Further Afield
Ideas, research, and stories shaping the future of intentional travel
1. Fodor’s No List 2026
Each year, Fodor’s names the destinations where tourism has outpaced what the place can absorb. This year: Glacier National Park, Montmartre, the Canary Islands, and five others. Venice and Barcelona were deliberately left off. Not because they’ve recovered, but to make room for places that haven’t yet made headlines for the wrong reasons. Read it as a record of where the relationship between visitor and place has already broken down.
2. The Second Place, by the Numbers
New data from GetYourGuide finds 38% of travelers are now choosing destination dupes, less-crowded alternatives that deliver the real thing. Among American travelers, the number is 45%. The term is newer than the behavior. People have been doing this for years. The data is just catching up.
3. The Gen X Retirees Are Not Slowing Down
New retirees, a group that now includes the oldest members of Gen X, are taking longer, more ambitious trips than any previous generation of retirees, according to The Future Laboratory’s Future Forecast 2026 report. Nearly 25% have traveled for a year or would seriously consider it. The industry built a product for people who wanted comfort and predictability. That’s not who showed up.
4. The Second City Has a Name Now
Agoda’s 2026 Travel Outlook Report finds that searches for secondary destinations across Asia are growing 15% faster than searches for traditional tourism hubs. Secondary cities now account for 34% of all accommodation searches on the platform. The pattern is the same everywhere: Valencia over Barcelona, Porto over Lisbon, Lyon over Paris. The behavior the Dispatch describes now has its own booking data.
5. Going Back, Better
Nostalgia travel is the most talked-about trend of 2026, and most of the conversation focuses on younger travelers recreating childhood trips. The better story is older: Intrepid Travel calls them victory lap travelers, people who visited a place young, on a budget, moving fast, and are now going back slower, with more comfort, and a different eye. The destination is the same. The traveler isn’t.
"Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going."
— Paul Theroux
