Nomadic Spirit is a weekly newsletter for travelers who care as much about the why as the where.
In this issue
The Dispatch looks at why certain travelers keep getting invited in, and what a reader’s evening in a Matera cave suggests about improving the odds. A Chosen Place goes to Traverse City, Michigan, where the cherries and the wine come out of the same stretch of geography, and a 1,200-acre arts campus sits fifteen miles out of town. In The Journey, Leslie Krohn takes her mother and her daughters to Italy to cook and comes home with something else. Further Afield has a man returning to the cave he grew up in, northern Michigan at harvest, and a book about what happens when we talk to strangers.
The Dispatch
Where Travel and Life Intersect
How to Be the Traveler Who Gets Invited In
The cave dwellings of Matera, southern Italy.
How to Be the Traveler Who Gets Invited In
Every new subscriber to Nomadic Spirit gets a welcome note from me. I tell them a little about what we're trying to do here and end with a question:
What's a place that has stayed with you?
I love reading the answers and try to respond to every one. The other day, I heard from Lisa P., a reader in Vermont.
Lisa had traveled to Puglia and Basilicata in May, stopping first in Matera, the ancient city in southern Italy where homes and churches were carved into limestone caves. She loved the city, but that wasn't really what her note was about.
She told me about an elderly man she met there. He invited Lisa and her companions into his cave, where one of his friends joined them. They drank wine and ate a homemade dinner. Later, he walked with them through Matera and told them stories about growing up there.
“I have traveled to many beautiful places,” Lisa wrote, “but my experience in Matera will hold a special place in my heart forever.”
I've read hundreds of answers to my question by now, and Lisa's reminded me of something I've noticed again and again.
I ask people about a place. Very often, they tell me about a person.
Some travelers get lucky
Last week we wrote about traveling like a guest. For most of human history, that came with obligations on both sides, and modern tourism turned most of it into a transaction. Lisa ended up on the old terms. She ate dinner in a cave with two people she had just met.
Certain travelers seem to have a great deal of luck. They get invited into the kitchen. Someone at the next table tells them where to go tomorrow. The guide stays after the tour ends and keeps talking. We call these things serendipity because there is no way to plan them.
After enough years on the road, you notice that some people collect far more of these stories than others. They ask questions and then listen to the answers. Someone mentions a nephew's restaurant, and they remember it an hour later. And they leave enough of the day open that an invitation has somewhere to go.
We underestimate strangers
Nicholas Epley, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has spent years studying what happens when people talk to strangers. I talked with Nick earlier this year about his book A Little More Social. What he keeps finding is that we are wrong about these conversations before we have them.
In his best-known experiment, Chicago commuters were asked either to strike up a conversation or keep to themselves. Beforehand, they expected awkwardness and assumed the other person would rather be left alone. The ones who talked had a better ride.
The same holds on the other side. For all the coverage of residents fed up with visitors, Destination BC's most recent resident survey found that 75 percent of British Columbians take pride in making visitors feel welcome.
What we bring with us
Experienced travelers may have an advantage here. Not everyone our age has it. But by this point, most of us have had decades of practice with people. We've hosted dinners and been guests at them, worked with strangers, raised families, lived next to neighbors, and sat through enough bad conversations to recognize a good one.
People open up once they can tell you're actually listening. And doing something that makes another person feel good has a way of making us feel good too, which is worth remembering the next time someone invites you somewhere you weren't going.
By then, we're no longer counting on the place to entertain us. We know we have something to put into the evening ourselves.
What Lisa couldn't have bought
A customer can buy a beautiful room, a good dinner, a private guide, and a ticket to nearly anything worth seeing. No concierge could have arranged Lisa's evening in Matera.
An elderly man had to invite her in. And she had to say yes.
By Paul M. Rand, Founder and Editor of Nomadic Spirit
A Chosen Place
Destinations worth traveling for, and understanding once you arrive
Cherry country, with a national arts campus fifteen miles out of town.
Traverse City, Michigan
Michigan grows three-quarters of the nation’s tart cherries, the majority within an hour of downtown Traverse City. Most people come for the cherries, the water, and the wineries.
Grand Traverse Bay splits into two arms below town, with the Old Mission Peninsula running up between them. The water is cold and clear. Downtown sits at the foot of the bay, walkable end to end, with a public beach a few blocks off the main street.
Half an hour west is Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, the largest freshwater dune system in the world, with bluffs rising up to 450 feet above Lake Michigan. The drive out follows M-22 along the Leelanau shore through Suttons Bay, Leland, and Glen Arbor.
There are more than forty wineries on the two peninsulas. Both sit on the 45th parallel, and the bay moderates the winters enough for cool-climate grapes to survive them. Riesling is what the region does best.
The cherries came first. Growers started the festival in 1925 as the Blessing of the Blossoms to promote the crop, and it now draws half a million people. The orchards it was built around are still producing in the same places.
Interlochen
Fifteen miles southwest of town, in a stand of pines between two lakes, there is a 1,200-acre campus that most visitors to Traverse City never see.
Joseph Maddy opened the National High School Orchestra Camp there in the summer of 1928. By 1930, the Sunday evening concerts were being broadcast on CBS and NBC. In 1962, Interlochen Arts Academy opened on the same grounds, the first arts boarding high school in the country. Roughly one in ten musicians in America’s top orchestras studied there. The alumni list runs from Jessye Norman and Josh Groban to Mike Wallace, and includes Google co-founder Larry Page, who spent two summers there on saxophone and has credited his music training for his impatience with slow computing.
Camp fills the grounds each summer with roughly 3,000 students from every state and more than 40 countries. They audition to get in, and they wear the uniform the camp adopted in 1928, blue corduroy and light blue shirts. You hear practice coming out of the rehearsal halls most of the day.
Established performers come through too. Renée Fleming sang with the World Youth Symphony Orchestra this summer.
Interlochen runs performances year-round, and many of them are free. The schedule includes afternoon student recitals, open rehearsals, faculty concerts, readings, and exhibitions. Ticketed student performances start around ten dollars.
Since 1928, the camp season has closed on the final Sunday of summer with Liszt’s Les Préludes, played by the combined student orchestras and wind symphony with the dance ensemble. It has happened every year but two. Admission is free, and people line up hours ahead.
A darker history
Interlochen was in the national news last month. A lodge on campus had carried Jeffrey Epstein’s name until 2008. He came to camp as a fourteen-year-old bassoonist in 1967 and was a donor from 1990 to 2003. The school took his name off the building after his first conviction and demolished it, a month before publishing an independent investigation into decades of sexual abuse and misconduct at the camp and school.
Two places to walk into
Cherry Republic sits at 154 East Front Street. Bob Sutherland started the company in Glen Arbor in 1989, selling T-shirts out of his car trunk with the motto “Life, Liberty, Beaches and Pie.” The store carries more than 200 cherry products and sets out an almost overwhelming variety of sample bowls of dried cherries, chocolate-covered cherries, sour candy cherries, and salsas. There is a wine tasting room in the back. The Glen Arbor flagship is worth the stop if you are driving to the dunes.
Grand Traverse Pie Company opened on West Front Street in 1996 and turns 30 this summer. Mike and Denise Busley learned to bake from a pie maker in Julian, California, and came home to do it here. Their Cherry Crumb is the signature pie of the Cherry Festival. There is a pie happy hour on weekday afternoons, a slice and a coffee for very little. Buy a whole one before you leave.
When to go
Late August into September is the best stretch here. The bay is usually warmest in September, the crowds have thinned, and harvest runs through the wineries at the same time.
Color peaks between October 5 and 20 in most years.
July is the festival month. Book early and expect company.
What Our Readers Told Us About Themselves, and Us
Nomadic Spirit is six months old. More than seventeen thousand people subscribe now. There are clearly a lot of like-minded nomadic spirits out there.
Three weeks ago, we asked what you thought of it. A hundred and fifty-five of you answered, some at length.
Travel is not something you squeeze in around the edges. It matters to you; you want to make the most of every trip you take, and you want the places you visit to be better off for having been there. We want that too, and the survey told us where we can help.
Some of it was clear right away. You trust friends who have been over every other source, with reviews and the writers you follow behind them. Seven of you said you ask AI. When a destination piece lands, 85 of you start looking into it, and 55 add it to a someday list.
A Chosen Place is the section you look forward to most. We also asked which one you could do without, a question that forces a choice even from readers who like all of them. Fork First drew twenty-five, The Vantage twenty-three, Good Company twenty-two, the closing quote twenty. Several of you said the issues run long. None of that means a section is bad; it only means that, when you had to choose, this is the order you chose.
Who is reading this
You are not reading about travel instead of doing it. Fifty-three of you have already taken small group trips, and twenty-six prefer to go alone. You want to know how a place works and what it is like to walk around in it. Several of you wrote about staying put, months in one town, or five nights somewhere small enough to learn. One described a friend of sixty who has decided he has ten more winters and ten more summers in him and is not waiting around.
You also think about what a visit costs the place. One reader found a rental with everything she wanted, thought about what short-term rentals do to housing there, and booked a hotel instead. Another asked for local operators whose money stays in the area. Nobody asked how to see more in less time.
You want to hear from each other
Asked what you would want from a place where readers talk with each other, seventy-four of you chose recommendations from readers who have been. Only twelve said you would sit it out.
Right now, all of this runs in one direction. You write to us, we write back, and nobody else hears any of it. The reader who knows which trips leave the afternoons free is the only one who knows. One of you asked for a searchable database of where other readers had been and what was worth it, which is close to what we have been sketching. We will have more to say this fall.
You also want us to do more vetting: candid assessments of tour operators, local guides not found through a booking site, and small-group trips that leave room in the day. A few asked whether being a reader might come with better terms from the companies we point you toward. We are working on all of it, some sooner than the rest.
What we are working on
We heard you on the single supplement, on safety for people traveling alone, and on saying more about when to go.
One reader asked us not to get too popular, on the grounds that the places we write about will fill up.
We will do our best.
The Journey — Voices of the Nomadic Spirit
Stories from travelers who have been changed by where they went.
Three generations making tortellini, Ciociaria
Three generations went to Italy to make pasta.
We came home with something else.
When I was in my mid-twenties, my family took one of our typical fishing vacations to northern Ontario. Our station wagon carried my parents, my three siblings, and, on one particular trip, my 88-year-old grandmother. Getting to Smoky Lake meant hours in the car, then an exhilarating 15-minute floatplane ride over pristine, island-dotted water. Each day, we dropped our lines, pulled up fresh bass, and headed to shore for lunch, where we ate our catch between slices of Wonder Bread and bacon. I remember the food, yes. But what I really remember is watching my grandmother hoist herself into the seaplane, clamber in and out of the boats, climb over rocks to sit down for lunch, and take a “walk in the woods” before heading out for more fishing. I remember thinking: When I’m 88, I want to be like Grandma. That thought has stayed with me throughout my life.
I have been blessed with a mother who is as devoted to travel and experiences as I am. We call her Gigi, and for years she has been on a mission to take a trip with each of her grandchildren as they graduate from high school. We discussed possible trips for my own daughters for so long that my oldest was eight years out of high school by the time we finally landed on cooking in Italy.
Our weeklong adventure was anchored by our shared love of food. We made pasta, biscotti, and pizza. We visited olive mills, wineries, prosciutto producers, and water buffalo farms. We also wandered through history, from an ancient acropolis to the crypt of St. Benedict in the Abbey of Montecassino.
But the question I kept coming back to was simple: What would my daughters take away from a week in Italy with their grandmother? My oldest remembered the moment we arrived at our hotel overlooking the countryside of Ciociaria. “Wow,” she said. “Gigi is in the motherland.” My youngest remembered that Gigi really wanted a gelato, but wasn’t up for the walk, so she ran out to get it, happily eating the drips from Gigi’s cone on the way back.
I will remember how the trip brought out the best in my children. They helped Gigi navigate uneven stones and long stairways. They made space for each other’s interests. And my mother got something rare, too. Not just a short visit, but the chance to see them in motion, pursuing what they love.
That, to me, is the gift of multigenerational travel. With a shared interest as an anchor, a flexible itinerary, realistic plans for mobility, and enough unstructured time for people to wander toward what delights them, a trip can become more than memorable.
I still want to be like my grandmother and my mother when I near 90. I have decades to get there, and I plan to spend them making trips that give the people I love what this one gave us: discovery, wonder, and connection.
Leslie Krohn lives in Naperville, Illinois, and enjoys nothing more than seeing new places through the eyes of locals.
Further Afield
Reading worth your time.
How Matera Went From Ancient Civilization to Slum to a Hidden Gem
Smithsonian
Tony Perrottet’s 2014 report follows a seventy-eight-year-old man back into the cave quarter he left in 1956 and had not entered since, though he had been living half a mile away. He finds the well he fell down into as a boy, then the house where three of his brothers died in infancy.
The Power of Strangers
Joe Keohane, Random House
Keohane spent several years reporting on why we avoid people we do not know and what happens when we stop. Half the book is the research, including the commuter studies behind this week’s Dispatch. The other half is the history of hospitality and what a stranger was once owed.
Cherry season is a reason to travel
Food & Wine
Late summer is harvest in northern Michigan, and this piece follows the crop through the orchards, farm stands, wineries, and restaurants that have built themselves around it. Worth reading if you are still deciding when to go.
Northern Michigan is having a food and wine moment
Eater
For years, people came north for the lakes, the dunes, and the cherries. This is about the chefs, growers, and winemakers who have given them a reason to come for dinner, most of them around Traverse City and the two peninsulas.
A remarkable arts experiment in the Michigan woods
Interlochen Center for the Arts
On June 24, 1928, 115 students arrived on a strip of land between two lakes for the first season of the National High School Orchestra Camp. The institution’s own history covers the national radio broadcasts that began in 1930, the boarding school that opened in 1962, and the summer festival that grew out of a Van Cliburn benefit concert in 1961.
