The No. 1 Rule For a Successful Road Trip, According to the ‘Amateur Traveler’

25.09.2024 - 14:44 / matadornetwork.com

Chris Christensen has run the travel blog and podcast Amateur Traveler since 2005. His podcast alone has more than 900 episodes. He’s clearly not an amateur in the sense that he’s new to travel or unpaid for his work, but he is an amateur when you consider the root of the word.

Amateur, Christensen explains on the Matador Network podcast No Fixed Address: The World’s Most Extraordinary People, comes from the same Latin root as amore, meaning love. “And so amateur is to do something for the love of it,” he tells Michael Motamedi and Vanessa Salas.

This “amateur” approach has led to a life full of engaging travel stories that he shares far and wide.

Christensen traveled around the United States growing up. The only other international country he’d been to by the time he graduated college was Canada (he watched the moon landing on a tiny television at a campsite in British Columbia). “It certainly made me love national parks, love traveling, love a good road trip,” Christensen says. Once his kids were older, he started going abroad.

A traveler’s life wasn’t always in the cards. Christensen worked as a software programmer for 42 years, and he initially was going to do a podcast about tech (“I am a nerd by vocation,” he explains). He also did a religious podcast for a year.

Then, “we had some friends over for Memorial Day and all the best stories were travel stories,” Christensen says. “So I said that’s it. I’m starting a podcast. It’s going to be about travel.”

He was traveling four weeks a year at that point, because that’s how much vacation he had, and was putting out more than 40 podcasts a year. He started inviting friend new and old to share their travel stories as well — from Reno to Afghanistan. Other than a few exceptions, each episode is about someone who truly loved a place they visited and had an experience to share.

The goal? That “I’ve helped you use your vacation time well and pick out a destination that is worth your time. It doesn’t matter as much whether it’s my favorite destination or not. It matters whether you’re going to enjoy it.”

Photo: Chris Chistensen

Along the way, he’s learned a few important tips. Top of mind relates to road trips. “What is your number one rule for a road trip? Go with people you like,” Christensen says. “Nothing else matters.”

He also suggests that people set a quest on their trips. That can be seeing a number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in a region, or going to every ballpark in a country. Micro quests, like finding the best mofongo in Puerto Rico, can also help make travel more fulfilling. One of Christensen’s personal quests is that when he dies, he wants the number of countries he’s visited to be higher than the number of years he lived.

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