But I was trying to be prudent and wanted to take advantage of the Pacific Northwest’s gorgeous weather this time of year. So I ultimately decided on a four-day trip to Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands.

I really can’t stress enough the beauty of these islands. They are only a 90-minute drive north from Seattle, and then an hour or so ferry ride. But they might as well be 20 hours from the nearest big city, because they are so unspoiled, and once you are there, it feels like you are practically alone.

Notice I say feels like you are alone once you’re there. Because you wouldn’t know it from the ferry lines in Anacortes, the town where you catch the boats. For a 3:45 pm ferry leaving on a Friday, we got there two hours beforehand, and cars stretched for miles waiting to get on. We ended up with a standby ticket, and were told we might make that ferry. Oh, and the boat was an hour behind schedule. At 5 pm, we were one of the last cars on.

But then — we were whisked away. And I quickly forgot about the wait. Because it really is that beautiful.

I ultimately chose the island of Orcas because it reminds me of Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island, where my family used to vacation when I was a kid. Orcas’ main town of Eastsound is in the middle of the island, and two decent size mountains — Turtleback Mountain and Mount Constitution — are on either end of the island’s horseshoe shape. Orcas has a great mixture of endless coastlines, mountain hikes, small villages, and is the home of talented artisans.

We decided to stay on the far end of the island at a place called Doe Bay Resort & Retreat. I was a tad reluctant to book here because I’m not into resorts, and I’m not into retreats. I find resorts boring and expensive and usually suck everything that I like about travel out of a destination. I stayed at the famous Rosario Resort on Orcas once, and meh. The accommodations were tired, the food was marginal and I wanted out.

But Doe Bay! Doe Bay is not a resort. And it’s not a retreat. At first I thought it might feel a tad hippie dippy for me, but it wasn’t. It’s whatever you want it to be. You can camp. Or you can car camp. Or you can stay in a yurt. Or a small cabin. Or a house. It was clean, unpretentious and the grounds were  immaculate. The staff was friendly and helpful. There’s a sauna and plunge pools, beach access, and they have a spectacular restaurant.

We camped in a spot overlooking the water, and had this for dinner:

I loved the juxtaposition of a tent and sleeping bags coupled with a delicious meal. Oh — and the whole experience was reasonably priced, too.

Yay for Doe Bay!

We were chatting during our trip, and I asked her, “Is there any place on the planet you don’t want to visit?”

She said, “Antarctica.”

I was surprised. Now, I know that kind of adventure might not be for everyone, but she’s very outdoorsy and likes to push herself physically. But when it came to the South Pole, she told me that it just didn’t interest her.

I’m dying to go, as I’ve heard the wildlife is unprecedented and the landscape is completely pristine. Mountains are impossible to fathom due to their massive scale. In my desire for full disclosure, my significant other has been there (hence these amazing photos). He said it was unlike anywhere he’s ever been.

Sign me up.

Maybe I’m not game for exploring everywhere. There are obvious no-no’s: Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. And maybe not Saudi Arabia since a friend once told me that Riyadh is quite possibly the sketchiest place he’s ever been.

But besides war torn areas, I can’t really think of any place I don’t want to go.

I love going somewhere new, and the more off the beaten track the better. I remember once landing in Odessa, Ukraine in December. It was snowing, and the Cyrillic alphabet covered the airport, making it impossible to form language assumptions. My tax driver wore a fur hat and coat and we negotiated the fare and my destination with a calculator and hand signals.

My desire to go anywhere probably stems from my childhood dream of being a foreign correspondent, and my obsession with interesting over happy.

Is it reckless and absurd to say I’d go to North Korea? Perhaps. I don’t really care. It’s new. It’s totally foreign. And it challenges me.

But based on today’s review of Nowhere, the qualifications seem to be:

• An Andy-Spade-like preoccupation with pencil-scribbled notebooks
• Courier font
• An aversion to using paragraph breaks, or in other ways admitting you’re publishing on the web
• A feeling in every piece that, yes, the writer truly thinks he (or she) is Ernest Hemingway reincarnated

Don’t get me wrong. I love a blog with a point of view, particularly one that’s grumpy. But their mission statement is all kinds of annoying, and should have been left to bake in the oven before being trumpeted by the Times:

You can still get lost on this planet, but it’s getting harder. Travel has been confused with tourism. Travel writing with brochure copy. Adventure with novelty. Tour buses clog the road, guides lurk in the most remote backwaters and Ten Awesome Things To Do articles have been written by people like me about every destination within a day’s drive of an airport. But you can still disappear, if only in your mind.

There’s no reason for this journal. No hidden agenda here. Nowhere is a place between places, an imagined depot for stories from the road. We collect found experiences through writing, art, video and sound then illustrate them with objects brought back from the field.

Novelty is a bad thing. Okay–we’ll have to just disagree on that point.

Travel is for the truly pure at heart, unlike the–sniff!–tourists. Sure. Maybe you’re a local. We’ll just disagree about that, too.

But here’s a hint: If you want to sound like you’re not a tourist, it’s probably not smart to refer to the places you’re visiting–the places people live–as “the field.”

And by the way, they’d like you to support their art through this PayPal link. It’s the topper on the fail cake. “There’s no reason for this journal…” except we’d like to ask you to pay us for it. With PayPal, the online-payment tool favored by eBayers with ceramic-kitten collections to sell.

I don’t blame them, though. I blame the New York Times for elevating them. Times editors, isn’t there anything halfway between puff pieces about cruise ships and rambling, pretentious travel writing? If so, could you please point us towards it?

Also, you just know these Nowhere fellows are totally Neo Lumberjacks, right?

As a former writer for a Guidebook Company That Shall Not Be Named, I’m partial to thoughtful essays about why we travel. Guidebook work is about facts and trends, neither of which lend themselves to any reflection whatsoever.

Yesterday I picked up the amazing new McSweeney’s, made in newspaper form. Coincidentally, I had already bookmarked this blog post from Jonah Lehrer on the cognitive inner workings behind why we travel, which is part of McSweeney’s No. 33.

“Why do we travel? It’s not the flying I mind–I will always be awed by the physics that get a fat metal bird into the upper troposphere. The rest of the journey, however, can feel like a tedious lesson in the ills of modernity, from the predawn x-ray screening to the sad airport malls peddling crappy souvenirs. It’s globalization in a nutshell, and it sucks…

But most travel isn’t non-negotiable. (In 2008, only 30 percent of trips over fifty miles were done for business.) Instead, we travel because we want to, because the annoyances of the airport are outweighed by the visceral thrill of being someplace new. Because work is stressful and our blood pressure is too high and we need a vacation. Because home is boring. Because the flights were on sale. Because Paris is Paris…

The larger lesson, though, is that our thoughts are shackled by the familiar. The brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded away for efficiency; we think in literal prose, not symbolist poetry. A bit of distance, however, helps loosen the chains of cognition, making it easier to see something new in the old; the mundane is grasped from a slightly more abstract perspective.”

This rings true for me. I travel to seek novelty, to feel my newelty-meter increase because of stimulus I’ve never encountered before.

For more on a similar line of thought, I highly recommend Alain de Botton’s book, The Art of Travel. Here’s a favorite passage:

“Of all modes of transport, the train is perhaps the best aid to thought. The views have none of the potential monotony of those on a ship or plane, moving quickly enough for us not to get exasperated but slowly enough to allow us to identify objects. They offer us brief, inspiring glimpses into private domains, letting us see a woman at the precise moment when she takes a cup from a shelf in her kitchen, then carrying us on to a patio where a man is sleeping and then to a park where a child is catching a ball thrown by a figure we cannot see…

At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves–that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas important to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.”

Happy Monday, and may you–like me–enjoy spending today dreaming of your next big trip.

Which is how we get to this building:

N Building from Alexander Reeder on Vimeo.

Tokyo is on my top three list of places to go to next, and this kind of innovation is part of the reason why. According to Buzz-Beast’s helpful summary: looking at the building through the app can “display up to date shop information, interactive advertisements and even display the tweets that are coming out of the building.”

Crazy, but kind of awesome.

If you combine an obsession with cities with the idea of having it all to yourself, you get amazing “empty L.A.” shots by Matt Logue, like this one:

It’s a crazy photo manip (according to a profile in the L.A. Times), but I can’t decide if taking the people out makes it seem like the sequel to I Am Legend, or the best version of L.A. ever. Jury’s still out.

Evidently, empty city photography is kind of a thing, but it’s new to me. Which is why I’m also flipping through Tokyo Nobody’s site (which somehow is less compelling to me than an empty L.A).

It can’t help but remind me of another urban-obsessed artist that I love, and who I included in my manifesto about why I’m doing this site:

Some days I really wish the city was like that for real. Only some of the time, mind you, but every now and then.

(Tip of the nib to Booooooom for the Matt Logue story and more empty L.A. shots here, and to the New York Times for the Hopper visual and interesting back-story on Hopper as a person.)