Who I am
A friend asked me to plan her honeymoon. That is when this became a business.
Since university I have been the one who plans, starting with our annual reunion. It is a puzzle I still enjoy: somewhere new every year, reachable on Friday evening flights from Bristol, London, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Paris, Luxembourg and Budapest, everyone home by Sunday night. Six cities so far. Then the ski tours, the weekends away, the hikes, the trips my girlfriend and I take. Route, objectives, difficulty, logistics, gear.
Then a friend asked me to plan a trip I was not going on, for the two most important weeks of her life. Fieldnote Society started shortly after. The friends group still walks most of what I write, which is why Society is in the name.
What I look for
The best part of a trip is never on the itinerary.
Three of my best travel moments started as something I paid for: a guide, a driver, a farm tour. Each turned into something private, because it was just us rather than a group, and the person on the other side stopped performing and started showing us their place.
Indonesia
A guide who took the two of us through the rice fields of his home village, no other tourists in sight, telling us how the island had changed in his lifetime.
Rajasthan
A driver who spent the day taking us around in his old jeep, steering half out of the door, then drove us home himself at the end of it.
Costa Rica
A coffee plantation tour that turned into the owner telling us his family's history on that land.
I plan for that on purpose: the local guide over the coach tour, one driver for the day over a string of taxis, and enough room in the day for the conversation to run on.
I keep notes from all of it, photos and short films included. That habit is where the name comes from.
How the days are built
An itinerary that schedules every hour is not thorough. It is just brittle.
How I work
I plan trips the way I plan projects, because that is my day job.
I am an IT product and project manager. My working week is complex, multi-step work planned against hard deadlines, tangled dependencies and things that will go wrong. Sequencing, contingency, and knowing which single point of failure ruins everything downstream. That is not a travel skill I picked up along the way. It is the skill. Travel is where I enjoy applying it.
The other half of that job is working out what someone actually needs, which is rarely what they first asked for. People come to me with a country and a fortnight. What they mean is a particular kind of tiredness at the end of each day, a tolerance for discomfort, a pace. Most of our first call is spent finding that.
It is also why I can plan a place I have not personally stood in. Being somewhere once tells you what it felt like. It does not tell you whether the bus still runs on Sundays in October, or what happens to the route if the pass is snowed in. That comes from research, cross-checked against primary sources, local operators, and people who were there this season rather than last decade.
In practice
- Reading the timetables rather than assuming the connection exists
- Working out which parts of what others wrote about a route are still true
- Assessing difficulty honestly against who is actually walking it
- Separating the gear that matters from the gear that does not
- Setting each day's objective and putting it on a map before anyone leaves
The record
Seven countries lived in, and the routes I have walked.
Every one of them was a choice. All seven taught me the unglamorous half of travel.
Once, all the way round
Budapest, Seattle, Hawaii, Fiji, Samoa, Australia, Indonesia, Budapest. Two months of the Pacific leg by sea.
What I can plan from experience
On foot
Long-distance routes walked end to end: Kungsleden and Padjelantaleden, Peaks of the Balkans, the Trans Caucasian Trail through Svaneti, the Isle of Skye.
On rock and ice
Trained on an alpine club course in trad and multipitch climbing. Kazbek (5,054m) and Elbrus (5,645m).
Under water
Dived Egypt, Fiji, Australia, Indonesia (Nusa Penida and Lombok), Costa Rica and Croatia as an advanced diver. Around fifty bull sharks in a single dive in Fiji.
On skis
Skiing since I was three, across Austria, Italy and France, on piste and touring.
I will tell you if this is not for you.
If you want everything booked and paid for on your behalf, you want a tour operator, and I will say so.
If you want a resort and a pool, there are people who do that better than me.
If you want every hour accounted for, I am the wrong planner. I spend your money making the logistics hold, then leave you room to decide the rest.
What I am good at is the trip you would plan yourself, if you had another forty hours and had already been there.
Start here