Travelogue

We cover when it's ok to eat with your hands (steak, never; bacon, always), as well as how to navigate all the different utensils, how picky you're allowed to be, and our overall pet peeves. (Don't use flash photography. Just don't.)

Every September, knuckles from Maine to Venezuela whiten with the approach of storm season, that 3-month window when the wide stretch of the Atlantic between Dakar and Antigua threatens to fling spirals of torrential rain and wind at our eastern coasts. In this episode, we give you tips on staying safe and protecting your vacation in hurricane zones, including how to choose a low-risk island and what to do when things go wrong. We'll revisit the classics, and update you on Puerto Rico, St. Barth's, St. Maarten, and other spots that were hit hard during last year's season. And we'll tell you, as we've told you many times before, why it's so important to go—not just for them, but for you.

Historical sites, the best dive bars, and (of course) the Green Monstah: We cover it all.

Because we actually planned in advance this year...

The tried, tested, and new.

Your squeeze-the-most-outta-those-precious-18-summers playbook to family travel.

Wait. What's that? You still haven't been to Sydney? What the "bloody hell" are you waiting for? Actually, it's all good. Because on this week's episode, our editors who know, love, and, in some cases, have lived in Australia's biggest city tell you exactly what you need to know for your first trip down there. We unpack everything, from why you should not be put off by the long flight over to the neighborhoods to hit, day trips to take, and beaches to spend entire days on. And then, well, there's the food...

Spoiler alert: none of them are vegetables.

Do you take a bath? Raid the mini-bar? Work in the lobby? Get your towels replaced every day? Use the hotel safe? As usual, our editors have lots of opinions, and duke it out over hotel do's and don'ts in this week's episode.

It seems fair to say Tony Bourdain changed travel even more than he changed food. He may not have *invented* what we now call “experiential” or “immersive” travel, but it *was* how he rolled, and he did it so completely, so consistently, and on such massive stages that it’s become the default mode of travel for an entire generation, leading to a wholesale reshaping of the industry. So in this week’s pod we take a look at how his work, from *Kitchen Confidential* through *Cook’s Tour* and *No Reservations* all the way to *Parts Unknown*, laid down not just a way of looking at the world, but of moving through it.

In this week's episode, we handed the hosting reins over to contributing media editor Mark Ellwood to answer some complicated questions: Is LGBTQ+ travel political just because it's LGBTQ+ travel? Does spending your money as an LGBTQ+ traveler mean you're encouraging anti-queer policies? The answers? That's complicated, too.

Here at the Traveler office, we may disagree on a few things, but Barcelona isn’t one of them. What’s not to love? The capital of Catalonia is at once a late-night party town and a destination for those seeking time-traveling tranquility; a place where you can be eating Michelin-starred tapas one minute and listening to live jazz on the rooftop of a Gaudí masterpiece the next.

There are some things that are just too damn big to fit into our little brains: The scale of the universe, the size of a T-Rex, the amount of plastic in our oceans. To wrap our heads around it, we need to resort to analogies, comparisons, or shrink the problem down into something comprehensible—so how's this? The equivalent of an entire NYC garbage truck full of plastic enters our oceans every minute, and by 2050, there will be more plastic in the sea than fish. Or this: There are 500 times more pieces of plastic on earth than there are stars in our galaxy. But despite the problem being so immense, sometimes we don't notice it until it washes up on our favorite beach, or gets into our favorite food (yep, there are probably microplastics in that tuna you're eating). This week on the Travelogue podcast, we try our best to understand the magnitude of plastic's hold on our ocean ecosystems—and talk about what you can do to end it.

Air travel this summer is going to be nuts: Some 246.1 million passengers will fly on U.S. airlines between June 1 and August 31—an average of about 2.68 million passengers per day, according to the recent forecast from Airlines for America (A4A), a trade group that represents the largest airlines in the U.S. Put more simply? That security line—and the one at your regular airport Auntie Anne's—is going to be longer than usual. Here's what you can do to minimize the stress of handling the summer rush.

Each year, we vet hundreds (hundreds!) of hotel openings around the world to produce our annual selection of the best of the new: the Hot List. We're not gonna lie, it's a sweet gig. But there's a lot more to the process than simply dialing room service, testing the fluffiness of bathrobes, and hoping the bartender in the (fabulous) lobby bar remembers that we like our Old Fashioneds with *one* piece of ice. On this week's podcast we unpack just what goes into the year-long process of creating the final list. And in the process, we ask ourselves how the meaning of "great," when it comes to hotels, may be changing.