No Blackout Dates

You’ve heard of solo travel, adventure travel, and even revenge travel. But what about surprise travel? This week’s guest Lillian Rafton is here to enlighten us all on the new trend in travel – traveling to a mystery destination, potentially even somewhere you’ve never heard of. Lillian’s business Pack Up and Go sets up travelers – from solo to larger groups – with surprise destinations based on their interests and desired level of leisure. Are you an outdoorsy traveler? You might find yourself en route to a mountain town in Colorado. Into museums? DC, here you come. Into random shenanigans and off-the-road attractions? Welcome to Joplin, Missouri.

Lillian’s guests receive a postcard in the mail containing their destination – and they’re not allowed to read it until the day they head to the airport. Included are hotel reservations, itinerary suggestions, and one dinner reservation – the rest is as much a mystery as the destination. Traveling with Pack Up and Go is a true test of your self-control and discipline. Think you can hang?

To say that Airbnb has revolutionized the process of booking – and enjoying – travel accommodations would be an understatement. Where else can you book a forest treehouse, a high-rise apartment with a rooftop pool, and a houseboat on the ocean, all in the same place? Airbnb just launched the biggest updates to its platform in a decade, and Catherine Powell, the company’s Global Head of Hosting, is here to tell us all about it. Going forward, you don’t even have to know where you want to travel in order to book a stay, with new “Categories” breaking properties down into niche lists. There’s even the mind-blowing, if rather ambiguous, “OMG!” category, which features everything from a home that looks like a snake to a Kellogg Doolittle house in Joshua Tree that resembles a giant mushroom.

Touring in a rock band is one of the most fantasized about – and widely misunderstood – lifestyles in the modern world. While everyone thinks it's all backstage parties and endless excess, the reality is far more down to Earth, though no less interesting. Dan Aid is here to set the record straight on tour life, having been around the globe with the punk rock band Authority Zero and toured with other acts as well.

Mother’s Day is coming up. For the No Blackout Dates crew, this is a holiday where we celebrate the brave and courageous mothers in our lives. The day is more personal for Monet Hambrick, however – a traveling mother of two who has spent the bulk of the past decade gallivanting across the globe with her family in tow. She’s written a children’s book about her travels and runs the popular blog The Traveling Child to offer advice (and commiseration) to all the aspiring vagabond families out there. Monet joins the show to talk family travel, and if you plan to hit the road with kids – soon or down the line – it’s time to listen to the established expert.

To make a living traveling the world, you have to get down to the essentials. Photographer and global explorer Chris Burkard joins No Blackout Dates to discuss how, exactly, he manages to do that. Chris shares insight on everything from what makes a good story to how he packs for expeditions. One constant theme through all of this? Risk management. Through his commercial and travel-based work, including an admittedly large collection of “really bad” photos, Chris has honed in on what it takes to plan and execute extremely dangerous assignments. By taking balanced risks and remaining focused on getting the right shots, he’s progressed his work into one of the world’s most celebrated portfolios of adventure photography. He’s compiled some of the best of that portfolio into his new book, “Wayward.”

Molly Duane has one of the most important jobs in two industries – she’s a nurse, for one, and a traveling nurse at that, easily catapulting her to the top of the list of who should rightfully get that final standby seat on any packed flight. Her work has taken her from her home in Salt Lake City to rural Montana, Houston’s concrete jungle, and elsewhere around the country on three-to-nine month stints. Molly joins the show today to school Tim and Eben on what it’s like to actually have a job with purpose.

Molly elaborates on how – and why – she goes about choosing the locations where she wants to post up for a few months (the availability of nearby hikes plays a big role). She talks about why it's so hard to find friends and partners when you’re in an out of town so often, why rural nurses are among the nation’s most hardworking professionals, and how travel nursing is a great way to find yourself trying out new activities.

In 2021, the city of Amsterdam announced it would move its sex workers out of the famed Red Light District in the heart of the city. Visitors have long ventured to the Red Light District, some to hire a sex worker and others out of sheer curiosity. This curiosity is part of why the city made the decision to relocate its sex workers – the women had become the subject of gawking and verbal abuse. Still, the decision has prompted confusion among travelers.

So we figured we’d go straight to the source. No Blackout Dates welcomes Mary, a veteran Amsterdam sex worker, to the show to discuss the move and how it will impact both the women being moved, and those who patronize them. Mary also sheds light on what life is like as a sex worker, and offers a firm rebuttal to any who cast doubt on the legitimacy of her line of work. Behind those red lights is a world shrouded in mystery, fantasy, and rumor, but the reality is that Mary and her colleagues are a beacon call for sexual satisfaction that for many, would go unanswered if it weren’t for their efforts.

Sebastian Modak is living the dream. As the 52 Places Traveler for The New York Times in 2019, he visited 52 places around the globe in a single year – and turned around a dispatch about each of them. A “third culture kid” who grew up as a vagabond between the US, Hong Kong, Australia, Indonesia, and elsewhere, Sebastian is accustomed to picking up and moving on to the next place. Now, as editor-at-large for Lonely Planet, he continues to make this lifestyle his full-time gig.

On today’s show, Sebastian and Tim shoot the breeze about travel trends, over-tourism, and how random, unplanned experiences often pan out to be the best way to learn about a new place. The two cover how identity plays into the travel experience, and Sebastian explains that when traveling long-term and away from a loved one, being open to, and accepting of, the inevitable emotions that arise align the way is the best way to handle loneliness. Fortunately for us, he also offers advice on how to do so.

AJ Kinney coins a new phrase for us on today’s pod. The “orbiting spouse” is someone who moves somewhere because their partner got a sweet job offer – and ends up loving it so much that they full-on expatriate. AJ and his wife moved to Grand Cayman from Minnesota, a sharp lifestyle change from hunting and camping to fishing and fruity cocktails. AJ joins the pod to discuss expat life during Covid and after, what it’s like to live somewhere totally different than everything you’re used to, and how the biggest fish he ever caught didn’t actually qualify as a catch – and we’re sure it’s totally not a myth.

“Gatekeeping” is an unfortunate but common practice in outdoor-centric communities. Comedian Ivy Le is joining us today to discuss how this issue can be addressed. Ivy hosts the podcast FOGO: Fear of Going Outside, one of Spotify’s most popular new podcasts, documenting Ivy’s experience as an avid indoorswoman venturing (reluctantly) into outdoor adventure. Eben and Ivy rebrand camping as “voluntary homelessness” and hiking as simply “walking,” while Tim defends the merits of voluntary homelessness and walking. We also expose the outdoors community as more judgmental than you might think, and learn why some indigenous peoples don’t feel comfortable hiking their own ancestral land.