My Secret to Unlocking a Better Road Trip, According to a Professional Travel Writer

David Amsden is an award-winning travel journalist and author who contributes to outlets such as Travel & Leisure, Rolling Stone, NY Mag, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and more.

When I close my eyes and picture what I most adore about traveling, it is not a specific place or experience that pokes out from the darkness but a feeling. Nervy, electric, addictively intimidating, it comes the moment I arrive somewhere for the first time and have absolutely no idea what to do—only the expansive wonder of possibility. 

If you write about travel for a living, as I’ve been lucky to do for 20 years, you’re invariably interrogated by friends for advice on how best to navigate this moment. How, they want to know, did you end up stumbling into that back alley pop-up bar, or locating the unmarked trail in the forest that led to the crystalline swimming hole? The implication being that some professional voodoo is at work—that a perk of my so-called job, perhaps, is access to a secret hotline that supersedes even the Internet in its all-mighty knowledge. 

“It was a bartender,” I always reply. “He told me about it.”

Or, if not the bartender, the waiter. Or the desk clerk at the hotel. Or the woman on the bench who sat watching her dachshund chase squirrels. The guy at the gas station, the grad student working the rental car counter, the elderly man selling refurbished cast iron pots from his front stoop. Without fail, the most unique and exhilarating moments of my trips have one common denominator: they were sourced not from a screen or search bar, but from talking to someone. From asking questions. From listening. 

Which sounds simple, obviously. And maybe it once was. But screens and search bars, while unquestionably a boon to traveling, have created an echo chamber where we talk less to strangers, ask fewer questions, and barely listen to each other. Equipped with an arsenal of unearned knowledge, we risk forgetting what is actually the best part of travel—namely, that we know nothing about where we’ve just arrived. The bartender, on the other hand, the woman with the dachshund? He lives here. This is her home. Listen to him, learn from her. 

There's a fine art to this kind of listening. Ask someone a typical question (“Hey, what should I do around here?”) and you're ensured a boilerplate response. I live in Los Angeles, for example, and if a random visitor asks me what they should do while in town, the first thing I tell them is to hike to the Hollywood sign (spoiler, I've never hiked to the Hollywood sign). But if that person instead asked what I do when I need a reminder of why I’ve chosen to live in L.A., I might tell him about the strip mall Korean restaurant on Pico Boulevard that serves only BBQ duck or a meadow in Topanga State Park where a family of white-tailed deer gather every evening at sunset.

The key, in other words, is to ask questions that allow someone to talk about themselves, to share with you what any given place—their home—means to them. Here are some of my go-to questions: 

• “If I was your best friend visiting for 2 days, what are the three things you’d plan for us to do?”
• “Where do you go when you need to get away from your daily routine?” 
• “What’s a Friday night look like when you make some mistakes you don’t regret?”

Steal these—or, better yet, put your own spin on them. You’ll sense the moment when someone shifts from trying to give you what they think you want to hear, to actually revealing what they like. In this, you've just been granted an invitation to momentarily cross the threshold from being a mere visitor to forming a more intimate connection to a destination. 

Finally, the last step to listening is actually taking people up on their suggestions. No pulling out your phone and cross-referencing what you’ve been told with other opinions. My rule is simple: Just go. Worst case scenario? Their thing will not be your thing.

Driving through Texas, I once detoured 2 hours to hit up a shack selling beef jerky that a woman told me I’d be a fool not to check out. The jerky was not my thing. But I knew she took her grandkids who lived in Arkansas there and I could imagine them all there chowing down and reconnecting—and all that information, to say nothing of our lively conversation, added new colors and depths to the state for me. Also, the drive was stunning—gravel roads, ranches marked by intricate gates, my first-ever sighting of an armadillo—and that's the first thing that comes into my mind now when I hear the word "Texas."  

I’m lucky, in short, to have listened.