About
Some Great Place is our slow-travel story, rooted in living local across twelve countries over thirteen months, from February 2026 through March 2027.
We stay slowly in each place, with many of our primary stays lasting about a month. A week can give you a useful impression. A month gives you something different: a grocery routine, a preferred café, a bus route, a walking pattern, a sense of which streets change after dark, and the details that never survive a three-day itinerary.
That is the heart of this site. We want to understand what daily life feels like once first impressions settle and routine begins.
Some Great Place is the record of that approach: where we stayed, what we ate, what things cost, what gave each place its shape, and what it took to make somewhere unfamiliar feel, for a time, like home.
What we cover
We write about slow travel, daily life, local culture, history, food, faith, work, costs, and the practical realities of living in a place for weeks at a time.
That includes neighborhoods, markets, churches, museums, architecture, public spaces, restaurants, groceries, transit, apartment realities, walkability, safety, and the small decisions that shape a week of actually living somewhere new.
The famous sites matter, too. A cathedral, fortress, museum, national park, ruin, or monument can tell you something essential about a place. We try to place those cultural anchors within the daily life, landscape, and history around them, giving them the context they deserve.
We also share the numbers when they are useful: rent, groceries, cafés, restaurants, local transportation, utilities, entrance fees, and the tradeoffs behind each stay. Long-term travel is easier to romanticize when the receipts are hidden.
How we travel
Our route follows a practical rhythm shaped by climate, visa limits, cost, safety, walkability, seasonality, and the realities of sustaining everyday life while moving. Some stops are chosen for beauty, some for affordability, some for history, some for timing, and some because they make the larger journey more sustainable.
Our style sits between backpacking and luxury travel: small, comfortable apartments, longer-stay discounts, walkable neighborhoods, local groceries, public transportation where practical, and enough structure to make extended travel sustainable.
We stay long enough to see what changes when a place stops being something we visit and becomes something we live in. Familiarity begins to replace novelty. The useful details become clearer. So do the tradeoffs.
What you’ll find here
The site includes travel essays, long-stay reflections, cost breakdowns, photo stories, cultural reporting, and practical observations from the places where we spend time.
Destination pages bring each stay together. They identify the neighborhood, cost level, walkability, transportation, workability, cultural depth, principal strengths, and limitations of each base. The accompanying dispatches preserve the individual experiences, traditions, landscapes, and encounters that gave the stay its shape.
Field Notes cover the broader journey: the American places that preceded it, the process of leaving Reno, the practical work behind long-term travel, and the experiences that continue to influence how we move through the world.
Start with the destinations for a concise assessment of each place, then explore the related dispatches for the fuller story.
The journey
The international chapter runs from February 2026 through March 2027, across twelve countries and a route stretching from the Atlantic and North Africa through Southern Europe, the Balkans, the Adriatic, and the eastern Mediterranean before returning west to Spain.
Along the way, Some Great Place documents both month-long home bases and the shorter stops that connect them. Destination pages and dispatches are added as we reach each place, creating a growing record of the journey as it unfolds.
The earlier Field Notes archive includes selected pieces from Reno, the American West, national parks, backpacking trips, and the practical preparation that made the longer journey possible.
The international chapter closes in March 2027, when we return to the United States and settle in Durham, North Carolina. Some Great Place continues from there, at a different pace.