Come on! Let's Take A Jaunt
A new type of travel publication looking at American travel
Travel is in my blood.
Ever since I was a young boy, our family used to set out to explore local destinations just for the pure joy of it.
There didn’t have to be a destination on our journey. Instead, the journey was always the destination.
Image: One of the most famous roads in all the Midwest is almost the perfect essence of a jaunt, Hwy. 42 curves in a way that seems to beckon drivers to continue following until it reaches the shores of Green Bay, where a ferry shuttles vehicles to Washington Island.
In fact, one time we took a drive from Southern Wisconsin to the Northwestern corner of Indiana on a random weekend. We ended up eating at a Shakey’s Pizza Buffet in Merrillville, Indiana and then we turned around and headed home. Today, I recall the trip partially because of the nostalgic pangs of hunger I yearn for Shakey’s and their famous mojo potatoes, but also because it symbolized much of my youth exploring backroads and small towns across much of the Upper Midwest. There’s something unforgettable to me about how much of the countryside I’ve seen unfold out my window and how deeply that visual narrative has impacted my life.
In college, my love of travel led me to walk into my college newspaper office and ask for a job writing. As a features editor, my weekly column, “Travels with Taylor” featured local destinations college students could afford to visit during their time at school. During my junior year, the events of September 11 forever changed my outlook. For days after, college classes were impacted or flat out canceled. Life seemed to come to a standstill. I recall after a few weeks, a friend and I wanted desperately to hit the road and escape this new reality for a while. We jumped in our car and drove through the countryside of Indiana south to Nashville and visited Mammoth Caves. There was just something about connecting with regional places that helped us get through an unpredictable and challenging time.
There are a lot of parallels to the last year. The pandemic has essentially shut down travel across the globe. Sept. 11 crippled travel for a long time. This summer there appeared to be a glimmer of hope that some travelers could escape their homes for the open road. Converted vans and campers dotted the freeways and I predict in the next year, we’ll see the resurgence of the American road trip. After more than a year of the pandemic shutting down life, people will first want to venture out, close to home and then regionally before they return to international travel. There will be a newly reignited passion for rediscovering places close to us on weekend trips, more so than ever before.
Legacy of the Jaunt
We called these weekend excursions, “jaunts” as a way to describe how we strung together a series of backroads and county trunk highways that became our exploration of local places. These jaunts became the best way to teach me about geography and place. As I grew older, I was able to recall cities across the Midwest, big and small, often remembering interesting historical facts and off-the-beaten-path places, filed away in my memory to share with family or friends in case their travels ever took them to the same place.
The concept of the “jaunt” has a surprisingly deep history. It first appeared in the late 1600s as a “sort of pleasure trip” and as the concept of “wandering here and there for pleasure.” In the 17th Century, it was used as a term to describe a short journey by horse—one that was just far away enough for the horse to complete.
In more contemporary times, Nebraska has hosted an annual rummage-palooza called the Junk Jaunt, which strings together garage sales on a 350-mile journey of backroads and byways. It’s almost the perfect illustration of the goal of this newsletter. To shine a light on the segments of our country’s backroads while putting a face and a place to the name of some of our most undiscovered ‘burgs and villages.
Local Discovery Is A Problem
Long before we could research travel on our mobile devices or on the internet, I leafed through guidebooks published by the Automobile Association of America (AAA). The softcover books were gold mines of local discovery, covering cities and places and highlighting the best museums, restaurants, and local lodging for each.
While the internet has solved many of our core challenges with discovery and travel research, it’s also created a host of new ones. We’re always online, connected to WiFi, holding mobile devices, and attached to technology. The streams on these devices create an almost impenetrable noise which is difficult to fight to find positive or meaningful recommendations for local travel. It’s not unusual for it to take hours to find local travel tips and destinations.
Reviews have clouded perspectives even more. Yelp, for many, has lost its provenance for showcasing and discovering cool spots. TripAdvisor’s inexplicable algorithm makes surfacing reviews really challenging. Interestingly, Google Reviews is an experience deeply connected to location and place with their map platform. Quietly, reviews of places and the burgeoning community behind-the-scenes on Google has created a ton of interesting local insights worth discovering. One of the most unique stories in recent memory is about a man in New Mexico who created a mysterious Google review of a UFO in Los Angeles. The Reply All podcast tracked him down and discovered he was a prolific local reviewer.
💡Pro Tip: If you are planning a "jaunt” you can create an itinerary of places you want to visit in Google Maps and easily share it with a family member, friend, or the world at large.
Bringing Local Travel Back to the Forefront
Today, I crave the feeling of movement beneath me. The sound of tires whirring across the concrete. The sight of the open road ahead of me. The curiosity of seeing what’s around the next turn in the road. When it’s safe to travel, my wife and daughter love nothing more than hitting the road for a weekend of discovery.
I miss the days when there were media entities dedicated to talking travel. I have wonderful memories listening to Diana Nyad host “The Savvy Traveler” and could get lost in the stories of her guests and the locales they visited. On an international scale, I’d be remiss not to mention Anthony Bourdain and his profound impact on bringing a local lens on people, places, and food—connecting the culinary world to the rest of us.
I hope that this newsletter gets people to discover their love of local travel and to get them excited about the future of travel by studying its past, meeting interesting characters, and understanding the implications of the future.
Goals of The Jaunt
Today, platforms like Substack are connecting readers to high-quality editorial content and democratizing the ownership of media entities. My ultimate goal with The Jaunt is not just simply to write about travel as a hobby. I want this idea to blossom into its own media company. And in doing so, I’ll have the freedom and flexibility to write all the articles that I wish I could discover and read online.
The core areas of interest will be simple: Discover American travel through the lens of the past, present, and future. I’ll cover travel history, explore the current state of travel, and look at how technology is impacting the future.
Here are just a sampling of the goals I will be tackling with this newsletter:
To be the voice of American regional travel through the people and places that make them unique.
It’s incredibly challenging to put together an itinerary of how to explore regional and small-town American places. It’s my goal to bring focus to these places and shine a light on regional American travel.
I’ve always been a master at finding local places to send family and friends to. A trip for me is not complete until I walk into a place and say, “Wow, this feels like a place a local would hang out at!” I want you folks to test me and I’ll be finding new ways to share places you’ll love visiting.
To curate the best of American travel reportage and bring them to light in our newsletter. There are so many great writers and media entities covering regional destinations, people, and places the likes of local magazines (Garden & Gun, Southern Living, Bitter Southerner, Roads & Kingdoms, Texas Monthly, 5280, and many others) and I’ll help bring these to a broader audience by sharing them. From these stories, I’ll add my own perspective and context. Much like The Profile does for people, I hope to do for travel.
To rediscover historic and vintage topics about American travel and bring them to new audiences. The days of beautiful neon luring in weary travels to motels off Route 66 are long gone. But, there are plenty of folks out there looking to preserve that history and in many cases, salvage it all together. We’ll be meeting lots of those along our journey.
Through unique features and topics, I’ll be exploring American travel in a way that is not available to readers today. One of my favorites to unveil is a concept we’re calling “American Dart Toss” where I’ll throw a dart at a map and where the dart lands, I’ll call up random people and businesses to stitch together a story, discover local favorites, and patch together interesting profiles of American cities and neighborhoods.
Profile authors and books that have a connection to American travel. I’ll interview the authors and feature the discussions in audio/podcast form and as newsletter posts.
Come Join Me!
I cannot wait to take you on this exciting journey. I look forward to hearing your comments, feedback, and story ideas. If you live in an interesting place that you want to feature, please reach out to me on Twitter. My DMs are always open.
I look forward to our Jaunt together!
Sincerely,
— Taylor Pipes, Founder of The Jaunt