Episode Details

Did your horse throw ya, buddy?

We investigate what we hope to achieve by literary travel . . . and why our packing cannot prepare us for it!

While the global tourism industry spends billions to shape our eager expectations, what is it that we’re actually so anxious to see? And whatever it is, how likely are we to find it? In this first of two parts, we ask if what we pack in anticipation is to better guarantee our success or to ward us from disappointment. As an example, we read an excerpt from Isabella Bird’s 1879 travelogue, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. And we hear from philosopher/critics Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger along the way. Will we find an answer? Maybe not, but we will be better prepared to understand the questions.

Episode 7.03 –

Packing Lists Pt. 1: Dreams and Dirt

Readings & Resources:

• Bird, Isabella L. A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. 1879.
• Montgomery, L. M. The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career. 1917.

• Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. 1999. 
• MacLeod, Nicola E. Literary Fiction Tourism: Understanding the Practice of Fiction-Inspired Travel, 2024.

Glossary:

The Broken Tool (Zuhandenheit): Martin Heidegger’s term explaining how we remain unconscious of our protective equipment and infrastructure—our constructed “World”—until the moment it fails us, forcing a sudden encounter with raw nature, or the “Earth.”

The Comfort Trap: A psychological defense mechanism in which a reader or traveler seeks “comfort,” “tidiness,” or “closure” to avoid intellectual or moral discomfort. We passively accept a safe, frictionless experience—or a text’s status quo—specifically to avoid confronting nuance or complication in a situation and one’s own possible complicity in it.

Listener’s Guide Reflection Questions

1. When you look at the very bottom of your daily commuter bag or travel pack, what do you discover that you find most intolerable?
2. Consider the physical metaphor of a “portable fortress.” How accurate is this to describe your approach to travel?
3. In tracking the transition from a 19th-century carpetbag to a modern multi-compartment backpack, what has changed in our definition of what an adventure is supposed to feel like?
4. Think about when some gear or device failed you. How did you respond: the “stripped gear in the brain?” Or did you see the physical earth more clearly? Why?
5. In our travel behavior and packing lists, who are we performing for?

Skeptical Pilgrim Challenges: 

• The Grand Tour – PDF
• Packing Lists – PDF

Complete Resources: 

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