Unpacked by Afar | Travel Smarter, More Responsibly

For the past several decades, writer and editor Lavinia Spalding has championed women's travel writing. She's helmed seven editions of the Best Women's Travel Writing—the celebrated Traveler's Tales anthology—including the latest, released on June 9th.

Over the years, she's read hundreds of submissions a year from women around the world and distilled them into one essential collection. So host Aislyn Greene sits down with Lavinia to talk about what two decades of editing these stories has taught her about how women explore the world, and why amplifying those voices matters more than ever right now.

THIS WEEK’S GUEST

Lavinia Spalding is the author of Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Keeping Traveler , seven-time series editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing, and co-author of With a Measure of Grace, This Immeasurable Place, and two editions of the Frommer’s EasyGuide to New Orleans. She has been teaching for more than 30 years and leads writing workshops online and around the world. She lives with her family in New Orleans. Watch her TEDx talk here, and subscribe to her Substack newsletter for updates and essays.

IN THIS EPISODE

CHAPTERS

00:00:00 Young, Fearless, and Filled With Wonder

LINKS & RESOURCES

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Buffalo, New York might be the greatest architecture city you've never heard of. In the fourth and final episode of our Unpacked by Afar series, we explore how this Rust Belt city became one of the richest showcases of American architecture anywhere in the country.

Host Aislyn Greene tours Buffalo with Ed Howard, a docent and guide with Explore Buffalo. Ed shares that Buffalo was one of the wealthiest cities in America and drew the biggest names in architecture to build here. Stand on a single downtown corner and you can see work by the architects behind the Flatiron Building, the Twin Towers, and the first true skyscraper.

Buffalo is also one of only two American cities with major works by the "holy trinity" of American architecture, Louis Sullivan, H.H. Richardson, and Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Martin House is here. Then come the surprises: the industrial grain elevators that inspired modernist masters, and the Frederick Law Olmsted park system that led the man who designed Central Park to call Buffalo the best-planned city in the country.

It's a story of boom, near-ruin, and hard-won revival, a city that nearly lost its treasures and fought to save them. This is cultural travel at its most rewarding, a piece of American travel culture hiding in plain sight. If great architecture is a reason you travel, Buffalo belongs near the top of your list of American travel destinations.

Meet this week's guest

Chapters

00:00 — A Secret Architecture City

03:32 — Five Masters, One Corner

06:40 — The Holy Trinity

11:05 — Saving the Landmarks

17:00 — Grain and Grass

Where to go to explore Buffalo's architecture

This is the fourth and final episode of our Buffalo series. New here? Go back for Buffalo's food scene, its neighborhoods, and its Black history. And follow Unpacked, a travel podcast from Afar, for more unique travel experiences around the world.

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For 185 years, some of the most important chapters of American history have unfolded on a few blocks of Buffalo's East Side. In the third episode of our four-part Unpacked by Afar series, we walk the Michigan Street African American Heritage Corridor, the beating heart of Buffalo Black history, with the man who has made preserving it his life's work.

Executive director Terry Alford grew up on these streets and is now leading their revival. He guides host Aislyn Greene through 185 years of Buffalo Black history: a church that was one of the last stops on the Underground Railroad, the home where the Niagara Movement was born, the club where jazz greats jammed until dawn because they weren't allowed to sleep in the hotels they had just played, and the radio station that became the megaphone of the Civil Rights movement.

Then he shares how urban renewal nearly erased it all, and how he is fighting to bring it back, guided by the Ghanaian principle of Sankofa: move forward, but never forget where you came from.

This is cultural travel at its most moving, a piece of American travel culture far too few people know. It is also one of the most powerful travel stories we have told, and a lesson in responsible travel: how to visit a place and honor the people whose stories made it. If Buffalo Black history is not yet on your list of American travel destinations, this episode, and this corridor, will change that.

Meet this week's guest

Chapters

Where to go to explore Buffalo's Black history

This is episode three of a four-part series. Next week, we explore Buffalo's astonishing architecture, one of the best-kept design secrets in America.

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This is the final stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina, and we’re heading for the trees. In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene laces up for Asheville hiking, and discovers why the oldest mountains on Earth are also some of the most beloved.

On a tour with Hike Bike Kayak Asheville that takes Aislyn and guide David into the Pisgah National Forest, Aislyn learns that Asheville hiking means far more than a simple walk in the woods. These are among the oldest mountains in the world, cloaked in one of the most biodiverse forests in North America, home to thousands of plant species and waterfalls around nearly every bend. David leads her to quiet swimming holes and points out plants that grow nowhere else on Earth.

She stands beneath Looking Glass Falls and hears how a single valley packs in world-class rock climbing, fly fishing on the Davidson River, and a 60-foot natural water slide called Sliding Rock.

Zoom out, and the scale is staggering. The Great Smoky Mountains and the Blue Ridge Parkway are among the most visited places in the entire national park system, and Mount Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi, rises just up the road. It helps explain why so many people who come here for Asheville hiking end up never wanting to leave, and why the outdoors are one of America’s great travel destinations. It’s a landscape you can dip into for a single afternoon or disappear into for a week.

It all adds up to a rich piece of cultural travel and a fitting finale to our guide: a reminder that in Asheville, the wild is never far away. Whether you want a gentle waterfall stroll or a hard climb to a summit view, the trailheads are closer than you think, and the payoff is some of the most beautiful country in the eastern United States. Consider it your guide to where to go and what to know.

Unpacked by Afar is a travel podcast that unpacks one destination at a time. That’s the end of our Asheville audio guide, so catch up on the whole series in the feed.

CHAPTERS

00:00:00 Older Than the Atlantic

GUESTS | David Teafatiller of Hike Bike Kayak Asheville, our hiking guide

PLACES WE VISITED

MORE FROM AFAR

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This is the fourth stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina, and it may be the tastiest one yet. In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene digs into Asheville food, and the surprising reason this mountain city punches so far above its weight at the table.

Aislyn joins a walking food tour with Sita of Eating Asheville, eating her way through a town where farm to table isn’t a slogan but a fact of geography. Along the way she:

It’s a scene built on tight relationships between kitchens and the farms a few ridges away, where the rice on your plate might have been grown just up the road, and where a devastating hurricane the year before only deepened the sense that these restaurants belong to their community.

But great Asheville food is also a question of who gets to make it, and whose history gets remembered. In a segment on the region’s Black foodways, Aislyn talks with two of the city’s most celebrated chefs, Ashleigh Shanti of Good Hot Fish and Rakim Gaines of Capella on 9, about Affrilachian cooking, representation behind the stove, and the stories layered into every plate. Their conversation is a reminder that a food town’s story has to include the people history has too often left off the menu.

It all adds up to a rich piece of cultural travel and a portrait of one of the best small food towns in the country. Whatever you come hungry for, consider this your guide to where to go and what to know.

Unpacked by Afar is a travel podcast that unpacks one destination at a time, with a real love of food and travel. This Asheville audio guide has one more episode to go, so look for it in the feed.

CHAPTERS

00:00 A Real Food Town

GUESTS

PLACES WE VISITED

MORE FROM AFAR

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This is the third stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina, and it takes us just outside the city to the small mountain town of Black Mountain, North Carolina. In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene goes looking for the creative soul of the region, and finds it everywhere: in the galleries, in the glass studios, and above all in the music scene.

It all adds up to a rich piece of cultural travel: the story of why a tiny mountain town became one of the most quietly influential creative places in America, one of the South’s most surprising travel destinations, and why the Asheville music scene still draws people to these hills. Consider it your guide to where to go and what to know.

Unpacked by Afar is a travel podcast that unpacks one destination at a time. This Asheville audio guide continues, so look for the rest of the series waiting in the feed.

CHAPTERS

(00:00) Welcome to Black Mountain

(01:30) Breakfast at Cousins Cuban and a walk through town

(04:00) Playing with fire at the North Carolina Glass Center

(06:30) The quartz that made a glass capital

(11:00) Dinner at Hell or High Water

(13:30) A restaurant named for the storm

(17:00) Inside the White Horse listening room

(19:00) The nearly lost blues of these mountains

(22:00) A benefit concert, and why the music survives

(27:00) The creative soul of Black Mountain

GUESTS

PLACES WE VISITED

MORE FROM AFAR

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This is the second stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina, and it reaches back a lot further than you might expect. In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene unpacks the long, strange story of Asheville wellness, and why doctors have been sending patients to these mountains for more than a century and a half.

To understand where Asheville wellness began, Aislyn talks with David Freedman, an infectious disease physician and travel medicine expert who retired to the city. He explains the era of climatotherapy, when clean mountain air and a just-right altitude were prescribed for the respiratory illnesses of the Industrial Revolution, and for the deadliest disease of the 19th century, tuberculosis. It’s a history written into the architecture itself, from buildings angled toward the prevailing wind to the once-ubiquitous sleeping porch, and even into the phrase “health resort,” which Asheville helped invent.

Then Aislyn brings the story to the present, where Asheville wellness has grown into one of the most diverse scenes in the country. She heads into the Asheville Salt Cave and Spa, surrounded by 30 tons of ancient Himalayan salt, and hears from owner Jodie Appel about the surprising family story that started it all. She also sits in on a sound bath with sound therapist Kristin Hillegas, and gathers the full, wonderfully weird range of what you can try here, from hydrotherapy and aura photography to a practitioner known as the Breath Nurse.

It all adds up to a rich piece of cultural travel and a portrait of a place locals call the Happy City. Whatever draws you to these mountains, it’s a reminder that the best travel experiences often start with simply feeling better, and that knowing where to go can be its own kind of medicine.

Unpacked by Afar is a travel podcast that unpacks one destination at a time. This Asheville audio guide continues across three more episodes, so look for the rest of the series waiting in the feed.

GUESTS

PLACES WE VISITED

CHAPTERS

(00:00) A century-old prescription: go to the mountains

(01:40) A sound bath to begin

(02:10) Meet David Freedman and the science of climatotherapy

(03:40) Fresh air, altitude, and the architecture of breathing

(07:50) Tuberculosis and the “Robber of Youth”

(09:20) John Dickson’s “cure” and the birth of the “health resort”

(11:10) From sanitariums to a modern wellness scene

(11:20) Inside the Asheville Salt Cave

(13:00) Jodi Appell on salt, her father, and opening the spa

(17:00) A sound bath, up close

(19:00) Why Asheville calls itself the “Happy City”

(20:45) People still come here to feel better

MORE FROM AFAR

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Welcome to the first stop on our five-part audio guide to Asheville, North Carolina. And where better to start than at the beginning? In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene sets out on foot to trace Asheville history from the ground up, and to answer a simple question: How did a remote, hard-to-reach valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains become one of the most creative small cities in America?

Aislyn’s first guide reveals the deep Asheville history hiding in plain sight downtown. There are the ancient mountains and rivers, the Cherokee crossroads that predated the city by thousands of years, the rowdy cattle-drive era that gave the town its early reputation, and the arrival of the railroad in 1880, which brought the Vanderbilts, the Groves, and the money that built landmarks like the Grove Arcade.

From there, Aislyn drives out to the Biltmore Estate, America’s largest privately owned home, to meet Chase Pickering, a fifth-generation member of the Vanderbilt family. He shares what it was like to grow up on the estate, and why stewardship and sustainability still shape the property today.

But no honest telling of Asheville history is complete without the Black community that helped build the city, including Biltmore itself. Aislyn rides through the historically Black neighborhoods of Eagle Street and Burton Street with DeWayne Barton of Hood Huggers, meets community elder Clifford Cotton, grandson of the pioneering entrepreneur E.W. Pearson, and hears a song from Asheville artist Virtuous.

It all adds up to a rich piece of cultural travel and the story of how Asheville became Asheville: a place ringed by mountains where people have both passed through and put down deep roots. Consider this your starting point for planning Asheville travel, and your first look at one of the South’s most distinctive travel destinations. It’s also your reminder that the best trips start with knowing where to go and why a place is the way it is.

Unpacked by Afar is a travel podcast that unpacks one destination at a time. This Asheville audio guide continues across four more episodes, so look for the rest of the series waiting in the feed.

GUESTS

PLACES WE VISITED//WHERE WE STAYED

CHAPTERS

(00:00) Welcome to Asheville

(01:05) The oldest mountains in the world

(02:40) A Cherokee crossroads and the “Las Vegas” of the 1800s

(05:00) Inside the Grove Arcade

(10:40) The Vanderbilts and the Biltmore Estate

(12:10) Chase Pickering on five generations at Biltmore

(17:50) The Black community that built Asheville

(19:00) Riding with Hood Huggers through Burton Street

(21:40) E.W. Pearson’s legacy and the Royal Giants

(24:40) The Peace Gardens Sculpture Park

(27:15) How Asheville became Asheville

MORE FROM AFAR

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Buffalo, New York has called itself the City of Good Neighbors since 1940, and in 2023 Reader's Digest even voted it the nicest city in America. But is it true? In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, host Aislyn Greene turns a Buffalo travel story into a bigger question: what does it actually take to turn a stranger into a neighbor?

We begin 150 years ago, on the East Side patch that grew into the second-largest Polish community in the world and the birthplace of Dyngus Day, one of the most joyful traditions in American travel culture. Then we follow that same ground to today, where newcomers from Burma, Congo, Iraq, and Afghanistan are remaking the city block by block. This is cultural travel at its richest: the refugee resettlement workers who set up a family's home before they arrive, the volunteers who knock on the door, and one man's first snow-covered year going from guest to Buffalonian.

If you love travel stories about the people who make a place, this Buffalo travel episode is a love letter to the city's neighborhoods and the neighbors rebuilding them. It's also a reminder that the most meaningful, responsible travel often means slowing down to notice who actually lives somewhere.

Where to go to explore Buffalo

Chapters

00:00 — Dyngus Day

02:00 — City of Good Neighbors

06:00 — Building Polonia

14:00 — A New Wave

22:00 — From Guest to Buffalonian

Follow Unpacked by Afar for more on where to go next, and let this be your guide to a side of Buffalo travel most visitors never see.

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Everybody knows Buffalo, New York, for the chicken wing. Fewer people know the real story behind the wing—or the full story of Buffalo's food scene, which is grounded in tradition and full of innovation.

In the first episode of our four-part Unpacked by Afar series on Buffalo, we start where you should always start: at the table. Host Aislyn Greene digs into a food scene that has quietly become one of the most surprising in America, shaped by waves of immigrants and refugees, a fiercely independent streak, and chefs who don't need anyone's permission to be great.

Meet this week's guests

Topics covered

Where to go to explore Buffalo's food scene

Chapters

00:00 — More Than Wings

04:00 — A Changing Food Scene

09:00 — Ambition and Affordability

15:00 — The True Inventor

21:00 — Michelin and Beyond

This is episode one of a four-part series that includes travel tips to help you explore Buffalo. Next week, we walk the neighborhoods of the self-described "City of Good Neighbors."

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