Nomadic Spirit is a weekly newsletter for travelers who care as much about the why as the where.
In this issue
This week’s Dispatch is about the reasons we give ourselves for not going, and how reasonable every one of them sounds at the time. In A Chosen Place, we go to Bologna, where sixty-two kilometers of covered walkway run through the city, the university has been running since 1088, and the official width of a tagliatella is on file with the Chamber of Commerce. In The Journey, Frank Connelly walks out onto the plain below Kilimanjaro with a Maasai guide carrying a spear, an umbrella, and a mobile phone. Fork First finds a very large clam in Cabo San Lucas. And Further Afield has two travelers who stopped planning, a decade of research on what people regret, and a plate you get to take home.
The Dispatch
Where Travel and Life Intersect
The Trip I Talked Myself Out Of
There was no good reason I couldn’t go. So, naturally, I didn’t.
Photo and buckle from Wesley Groot, Cityboy Forge.
“Available navigator seat if you’re interested.”
The text was from my brother-in-law, Wesley, who runs a Chicago blacksmith shop called Cityboy Forge. He makes intricate belt buckles, one at a time, each for a particular client, and he had a large custom order due at a fly-fishing event out West that wouldn’t be finished in time to ship with any confidence. So, he was driving them himself.
Chicago to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is about 1,400 miles and roughly twenty hours at the wheel. He was leaving Friday and had to deliver by Monday.
I was interested. A road trip west, no itinerary beyond arriving on time, a few days with Wesley, whom I like very much. There was no good reason I couldn’t go.
So, naturally, I didn’t.
How we get to no
It was a holiday weekend, and we had loose plans. Nothing specific.
I had some work I wanted to finish. Some things around the house. The usual list.
Somehow that was enough. One perfectly reasonable objection joined another, and before long I had talked myself out of something I wanted to do. Apparently, I’m not alone.
Researchers have a name for part of it. In a study published this summer in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, psychologists at the University of California, Irvine and the University of British Columbia studied what they call “leisure guilt,” the unease that comes from spending time on leisure when you could be doing something productive. People reported it during about 14 percent of their leisure occasions, and those most prone to it got less out of the leisure they did take.
I know the feeling. For much of our lives, there were good reasons we couldn’t just go. Jobs and kids and school calendars and rationed vacation days, and people expecting us somewhere Monday morning.
Many of us have more control over our time than we used to, yet we still feel obliged to justify how we use it. We make the trip defend itself. Is it worth the money? Can I afford the days? What won’t get done while I’m away?
What we don’t do
A few nights later, we were at dinner with our friends Sean and Jennifer, talking about upcoming trips. Sean said the hard part was never finding somewhere to go.
“We find somewhere we want to go and then find all these reasons to talk ourselves out of it.”
He thought other people had the same problem, and I should write about it. Later that evening, in case I had failed to grasp the significance of what he had come up with, he texted me the idea again.
He was right, and research gets closer to why it stings.
Cornell researchers Emily Rosenzweig and Thomas Gilovich examined the regrets people carry about the things they buy and the experiences they pass up. Across five studies, they found a difference: regrets about material purchases were more likely to involve something people had bought. Regrets about experiences were more likely to involve opportunities they had missed.
One reason, the researchers concluded, is that experiences aren’t interchangeable.
That part stuck with me. I can make that drive another time. Wesley and I can take another road trip. There will be other invitations.
But there won’t be that one.
There are good reasons to say no. Money, health, family, work. This is not an argument for ignoring them.
But sometimes we just have things to do. And there will always be things to do.
So maybe the question to ask next time is simple. What is actually stopping me? Not what would be inconvenient, or what might have to wait, or what I could get done instead.
What is actually stopping me?
I said no for reasons that seemed sensible at the time. That is usually how saying no works. Life simply continues.
But somewhere that Friday, an SUV headed west with a load of handmade belt buckles, and the navigator seat was empty.
Next time.
by Paul M. Rand, founder and editor of Nomadic Spirit
A Chosen Place
Destinations worth traveling to and understanding once you arrive
A portico off Piazza Maggiore, Bologna.
Bologna, Italy
The Italy you come back for
At some point in traveling, returning to a country you know can be more interesting than adding another to the list.
Italy is a good place to test the theory.
For many travelers, trips to Italy follow a familiar route: Rome, Florence, Venice. Later come Tuscany, the Amalfi Coast, Sicily or Puglia. Bologna tends to come later.
The capital of Emilia-Romagna sits 40 minutes north of Florence by high-speed train. Medieval towers, grand churches, and an enormous central piazza define the city.
A city under cover
What you'll notice right away are the porticoes, covered walkways formed where the upper floors of buildings extend out over the sidewalk on columns. They are everywhere. Bologna was growing in the Middle Ages, and pushing those upper floors over the street added rooms without taking the public space below. By 1288, the city was requiring them. Sixty-two kilometers of porticoes still run through Bologna. UNESCO added 12 stretches of them to the World Heritage List in 2021.
Students are another reason Bologna feels different from the Italian cities travelers know best. The University of Bologna, founded in 1088, is considered the oldest continuously operating university in the Western world, and today it enrolls roughly 97,000 students across its campuses, in a city of about 390,000.
Then there is the food.
Parmigiano-Reggiano, prosciutto di Parma, traditional balsamic vinegar from Modena, and mortadella all come from Emilia-Romagna. Bologna adds tortellini and tagliatelle al ragù, a slow-cooked sauce of meat, vegetables, wine, and a little tomato.
The city takes the last one seriously.
In 1972, the local delegation of the Italian Academy of Cuisine deposited the official dimensions of tagliatelle with Bologna's Chamber of Commerce. Cooked, a tagliatella should measure 8 millimeters across.
To make sure there was no confusion, they cast one in gold.
A decade later, the Academy filed a recipe for ragù alla bolognese in the same office, updated in 2023. The Chamber of Commerce now holds dozens of Bolognese recipes under notarial seal.
None of it has ended the arguments.
The Academy compares a filed recipe to a musical score: the notes may be written down, but the art lies in the performance.
This also explains why spaghetti Bolognese isn't really Bolognese. Here, ragù belongs on tagliatelle.
Bring your own lunch
In an alley off the old market, Osteria del Sole has been pouring wine since 1465 and has never had a kitchen.
The sign above the door says vino. You buy mortadella, cheese and bread from the shops nearby, carry it inside and find a place at one of the long tables. The osteria supplies the wine.
Chiara Spolaore is the third generation of her family behind the bar, and she likes to tell people they don't even wash the glasses with water.
Tourism is growing. In the first half of 2025, international visitors outnumbered Italian visitors to Bologna for the first time.
Plan two things a day. Walk the university quarter, then the market. If you want a morning that ends with a view, one portico runs nearly 2½ miles out of the city and up a hill to the Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca, about an hour on foot.
Spend considerably longer at lunch than you planned.
We want to hear from you
Two ways to be in Nomadic Spirit
Frank’s piece this week (below) is a reader submission. The Journey is open to readers who want to write about a trip that mattered. Personal, specific, in your own voice. Length is flexible. We edit lightly and leave your voice intact.
Fork First: One dish, one place, one reason to go. 200 to 300 words. The test: would you go back for this dish? Would you tell everyone heading to that city to find it? If yes, write it up.
If you are interested in sharing your story with our 21,000+ readers, please write us at [email protected], and we’ll send along submission guidelines.
We read everything that comes in.
The Journey — Voices of the Nomadic Spirit
Stories from travelers changed by where they went.
Lankenua on the walk out from the village, Tanzania. Photograph by Frank Connelly.
The Maasai Land Rover
by Frank Connelly
After meeting a friend who had suffered a stroke, paralysing half of his body, I decided there was little point in putting my own distant travels off, when you never know what tomorrow will bring; so, after climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, I opted to stay a few more days for relaxation, courtesy of the local Maasai.
I was the only guest in the village, so after eating alone, I determined to have an early night, but as my meal ended, my appointed guide Lankenua (meaning ‘lucky’), a thin twenty-something Maasai, appeared and asked me to confirm if a walking safari the following day would be suitable. We agreed through debate that ten kilometres would suit us both, which, having walked the mountain, was not a challenging distance. His grin made me doubt my decision.
Expecting my guide at 8:40 the following morning, I was unfazed when he eventually arrived at 9:30; time doesn’t mean a lot in Tanzania.
Dressed in standard Maasai dress, Lankenua offered me, in clear English, a small bottle of water, but having explained the principle of the camelback I carried, he slipped the bottle into the folds of his red chequered shaku. As well as a spear, made from a steel reinforcing bar hammered to a point at one end, he carried a gaily coloured umbrella, which he assured me was for my comfort and shade, and a mobile phone. On his feet, as with all other camp staff, he wore cut pieces of motorcycle tyre held on by beaded thongs. The tyres, he joked, allowed him to steal cattle and not leave footprints.
Setting off at a brisk pace, which, fit as I am, I struggled to maintain, we dropped down the two hundred or so metres to the valley floor, before setting off through the low-level and sharply pointed acacia bushes and numerous goats and cows.
For more than an hour, we walked onto the plain in the morning sun with no real sign of wildlife when his phone rang. Moving the brolly to his spear-carrying hand, he continued walking as he conversed with his superior back at the Lodge. It was a surreal moment. His supervisor’s call confirmed that no lions had been seen nearby. Oh good.
We came upon many carcasses of animals killed by the drought of the previous year, their bodies dotting the landscape where life had left them but given other starving animals a bony meal.
I spotted a gazelle some 500 metres away, and as it sped off across our front, some wildebeests came into view and we watched them grazing, ever watchful for predators, which might have made a good photograph.
Five kilometres out, with the temperature in the seventies, we sat to rest close to a six-foot high termite mound, whilst we scanned the horizon in all directions. I felt energised, especially when my companion spotted ostriches.
In view of the snow on Kilimanjaro, we talked of global warming, his up-and-coming marriage, and his first lion hunt, before eventually setting off to circle back towards our camp. Some zebras allowed us to walk amongst them, before finally we spied a lone giraffe.
There were no other animals on our return route until we encountered some seven-year-old herding boys with their cattle, goats and donkeys; the Maasai land rover.
Lankenua suggested a ‘5 star’ rating on TripAdvisor.
Frank Connelly is a Nomadic Spirit reader in the Scottish Borders. He spent 23 years in the Royal Marines, and since Tanzania has spent a month in the United States and Canada, a month touring the Stans, and a month in South America.
Further Afield
Reading worth your time.
The one change that worked: I stopped planning holidays and found the joy in travel
The Guardian
Joe Pinner used to research every restaurant and fill Google Maps with saved places, planning his vacations down to the day. Then he went to Barcelona in March and deliberately stopped. What he found was more uncertainty, a few wrong turns and considerably more fun. “Without realising, I’d turned travelling into admin.”
Paris, on two days’ notice
Travel + Leisure
Writing at the end of last year, travel writer Tom Vanderbilt describes himself as an almost pathological planner. Then, on a Sunday night, his family decided to go to Paris. On Tuesday. They booked flights and a hotel and left most of the rest alone. What followed makes a good case for occasionally going before you have had time to overthink it.
What will you regret?
The Washington Post
DJ DiDonna has spent nearly a decade studying people who take sabbaticals, and wrote about it this July. One lesson keeps surfacing: over time, we tend to regret the things we didn’t do more than the things we did. His research helps explain why saying no can feel safer in the moment, even when it may be the decision we are more likely to question later.
Bologna’s other great obsession
The Guardian
Every summer, Bologna turns itself into an enormous movie theater for Il Cinema Ritrovato, a festival devoted to films that have been restored, rediscovered or simply forgotten. This piece ran in June as the festival marked its fortieth year, filling Piazza Maggiore and eight cinemas across the city for nine days. It is another side of Bologna that has little to do with pasta.
A plate worth bringing home
Smithsonian Magazine
Since 1964, a group of Italian restaurants has offered diners an unusual souvenir. Order a restaurant’s designated regional dish, and you can leave with a hand-painted ceramic plate commemorating the meal. The Piatti del Buon Ricordo, or “Plates of Good Memories,” were created to encourage Italians to travel their own country through its regional cooking, and as this August piece reports, 111 restaurants still participate.
The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.
Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, translated by C. D. N. Costa
