How Two Years of Phone-Free Travel Rewired the Way I See the World

Update: 2026-04-09

Description

What if the secret to a great trip was leaving your phone in airplane mode — forever? Journalist Lisa Abend has been doing exactly that, arriving in cities she's never researched, GPS turned off, without a hotel reservation or itinerary of any kind. The result isn't chaos; it's the kind of travel that actually surprises you. In this episode, Lisa makes a compelling case for leaving the phone out of the travel process.

Meet this week's guest

Lisa Abend is a Copenhagen-based journalist and former Time magazine correspondent who covers food, culture, and travel across Europe. She is the creator of The Unplugged Traveler, a Substack newsletter in which she visits a new European city each month without internet access, a booked hotel, or a plan, and writes about what she finds.

In this episode

How social media and over-researched itineraries have stripped travel of serendipity, and what Lisa is doing about it

The step-by-step logistics of arriving in a foreign city with no hotel, no map, and no plan — and why it's less stressful than it sounds

A birthday coincidence on a Cotswolds hiking trail that felt like the universe intervening

Why "second cities" — not capitals — are the ideal places to try unplugged travel for the first time

How nearly two dozen phone-free trips have changed the way Lisa navigates daily life

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:00 Backpacking Before the Internet
00:04:30 What the Internet Took From Travel
00:09:30 The Unplugged Traveler Newsletter
00:13:00 How to Choose a Destination
00:15:30 Arriving With No Hotel Booked
00:20:00 A Cotswolds Birthday Surprise
00:27:00 Finding Food Without the Lists
00:32:00 Travel as Meditation
00:35:30 Tips for Going Unplugged