Hey Reader,

The past two weeks were the first time we haven't sent you a weekly update in over a year. And to be real...we just didn't want to.

We've been busy living life offline, spending time together, and prepping for Julia to leave the UK (she's doing a couple Workaway exchanges in Italy and Sweden while she waits for her Spouse visa, for those that are new here).

We'd rather take a breather and give ourselves a break from the online world when needed than resent having to show up. We love sharing our travels and working on the blog but sometimes you just need to log off.

Anyway, we're back! And I (Julia) thought this week we'd share some parallels from a book I just finished called All Consuming by Ruby Tandoh. We mentioned this book a couple months ago in a "things we're reading" round up but I finally finished it this week and have some thoughts.

A few of her points that got me thinking about travel:

• One thing Ruby mentions is how we all save a million recipes to try later and then immediately forget about them. Sound familiar? It's basically the 100 restaurants we have pinned in cities we've never visited. We'll get there someday, right? Right?
• She also points out that so much of what we think we want to eat comes down to a successful marketing campaign. Is that any different from the places we add to our travel lists after seeing them all over social media? (Though to be fair, travel marketing has always been marketing.)
• The one that stuck with me most: Ruby writes about how morality gets tangled up with food, the idea of eating the "right" or "authentic" thing. Travelers do the same, obsessing over what counts as "local" vs "authentic." But who gets to decide? If you're there experiencing it, isn't that real by definition? So often it's visitors who want dishes frozen in time while locals have long moved on.

If you can't tell, I really enjoyed the book and recommend it even more now that I've finished it! It's not explicitly a commentary on travel, but the parallel themes are hard to ignore and made me think twice about some of our own habits.

So here's a small challenge, for us as much as anyone: let's be a bit less aspirational and a bit more spontaneous in how we plan travel, and think twice before we add the next trending destination to the list.

This isn't a diss. There's nothing wrong with hearing about a place and wanting to go (we’ve been convinced by the China hype).

But it's worth asking whether we'd actually enjoy it or whether it just looked good on a screen. Food for thought.

Jess & Julia