Travel in a big way really becomes about the conversation with home and what it could be.

It allows you to see new potential ultimately in new potential about how you can live at home.

You don't have to travel for the rest of your life. Some people will, most people won't.

But travel allows you to reinvent the conversation that you have with your own community in a way that is beneficial for yourself but also for that community.

So traveling the world, especially for an extended period of time, that may feel like a luxury you only dream about or maybe you can only do every few years longer.

But what if there was actually a way to make it happen and way sooner and for less money than you ever imagined?

Or what if there was a way to evoke that sense of wonder and curiosity and discovery that travel brings out of us without even leaving your immediate neighborhood?

Well, it would look like to keep the spirit of the journey or travel alive at home using it to engage with and learn from the community that's right in front of us in new and meaningful ways.

Well, my guest today, Ralph Pots, is a firm believer in the life altering benefits of travel, even if that means heading just a few blocks outside your normal routine and how we can use adventure as a metaphor for life itself.

And I'm excited to dive deeper into his philosophies and stories about life and travel and wonder. And as a travel writer and author, Ralph's adventures, they've taken him across six continents over 60 countries where he's reported from major outlets like National Geographic Traveler in New York or the Guardian, NPR, so many others.

He even spent six weeks traveling around the world without a single piece of luggage once Ralph is perhaps best known for promoting the ethic of independent travel and many of his essays had been selected as notable mentions in the best American essays, the best American non-required reading and the best American travel writing.

And he shared much of his wisdom and travel stories in his books, Vagabonding, an uncommon guide to the art of long term world travel and his newest release, the Vagabond's Way, 366 Meditations on Wanderlust Discovery and the Art of Travel.

In our conversation today, we explore Ralph's experiences and also strategies for doing immersive travel in a meaningful way, uncovering the ways anyone, even those who feel like they can't travel or those who legitimately cannot travel can use this Vagabond mindset.

It's almost like a philosophy of living and exploring and discovering to disrupt their routines at home. And we touch on a few moments of adventuring curiosity that have shaped each of us and inspired us as well.

I'm excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

I'm curious actually what the last couple of years have been like for you because I mean so much of your time for so many years have been spent on the road and living, traveling, writing, reporting.

What has it been like dramatically limited your ability to do that for a pretty serious chunk of time?

Well, I feel like the luckiest guy in the world, I already felt lucky for being able to travel the world before. But during the pandemic, I actually met my wife when nothing was happening before she was my wife.

She was home from Europe and she was on a dating app and I met her and I met my wife and got married to the pandemic. So that's one thing.

I don't think as I wrote my new book, the vagabonds way had I been traveling around, I might not have gone back to these 25 years of travel notes and travel readings that I call on for the vagabonds way it was.

It just fell into my lap by my new book and my wife feels like, I don't know how I earned it, but I will take the luck that that the pandemic gave me.

It is interesting, right? So many people have experienced Alaska, but they are so differently. I have friends who feel like they have just been locked down well physically and emotionally and psychologically concerned for their help and for the well-being and others feel like they've almost been given permission to enter a mode, which is fairly cloistered and just gone deep into creative cave often and generated some incredible work.

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