Everywhere, a podcast hosted by travel writer Daniel Scheffler, looks at travel in a totally different way, providing “travel commandments” that can help any wanderer get the most out of their journey. In this episode, Daniel examines the idea of “luxury.” Is “luxury” a nice hotel, a beautiful car, a Michelin starred restaurant, a pool with thick fluffy towels? Or can “luxury” mean something different? For Daniel, reclaiming the idea of “luxury” is a necessity. “Real luxury isn’t what the travel industry has force-fed us,” he says. “Real luxury is personal...it’s understanding space, time, and freedom. If you can find that...you’ve touched luxury. We travel for those three things.” To truly experience a place, in Daniel’s opinion, travelers should be willing to explore the highs - the nice hotels, the fancy restaurants - as well as the lows - tiny AirBnbs or street food - equally. To participate in that place, instead of just letting it happen to you.
To illustrate this principle, Daniel talks about his trip to Estonia, “the final frontier of unexplored Europe.” He wanted to truly see the country, so he rented a car and took a road trip, with no agenda. “Driving along the Northern coastlines of Estonia with Finland just in the distance across the sea...the smell of briny ocean air mixed with deep scents from pine trees is so unique...I was entranced. It was magic.” He experienced the beer halls Estonia has every few miles, where people stop to eat and enjoy each other. “A few of these respites and you can get totally drunk, overly fed, and with a collection of new friends from all over the country.” There’s no four-star hotels or exotic restaurants there; “you stay in a little cottage...or you rent a tiny house on the lake...a loving family providing home-cooked meals. This is luxury.”
Holly Frey, host of Stuff You Missed In History Class, joins Daniel to talk about one of her most unexpected luxury experiences, when she was at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. She saw his massive, famous painting, the Hallucinogenic Toreador, and “I was very taken with it...I was almost frozen on the spot...what made it feel luxurious is...the docents that are leading tours just keep making sure that they...leave me a little space. They’re just letting me be with that painting...to have my personal interaction. To me, it was a very luxurious hour of my life.”
The truth, Daniel points out, is that any travel is pretty luxurious. “Yeah,” Holly agrees, “if you traveled back to 1760 and you told someone how much you travel in a year, they would think you were a sorcerer.” Thanks to advances in technology, travel is more accessible than it used to be for more people. But in the travel industry, the idea of luxury “can get a bit performative,” Holly says. “Luxury has stopped being about acquiring a lot of things, it's much more about a bespoke experience that is yours and yours alone.” Daniel agrees, saying, “that ties in with my whole thing about time, space, and freedom...the experience...that's what makes it special, because then you're in love with your life.”
That’s what Daniel wants to convey: that the highs and lows are all necessary to feel that love, to appreciate your own everyday luxuries. “There will be beautiful highs where you're standing watching turtles lay their eggs on a beach somewhere so remote in Costa Rica, and then there'll be the low of driving through Cape Town to downtown and seeing the squatter camps,” he says. “But they’re part of travel. Both those highs and lows need to exist...in order for you to understand the world.”
Join Daniel to hear more about his highs-and-lows travel philosophy, and learn why Italy and France have the best coffee culture but the worst coffee, in this episode of Everywhere.
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