Sylvia Chen

In 1989, my husband George and I drove from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, in a Toyota Camry with 114,000 miles on it and a road atlas that we had bought at a gas station in Boise because we had left ours at home. It took us eleven days. We stopped at every historical marker. We ate at diners where the waitress called us “hon” and at one restaurant in South Dakota where the menu was written on a chalkboard and the only vegetable was corn. George kept a notebook of every motel we slept in. I kept a notebook of every conversation we had with a stranger. His notebook was twelve pages. Mine was forty-one. This tells you everything you need to know about the difference between us, and it tells you everything you need to know about how I travel.

I was born in San Francisco in 1956. My parents, James and May Chen, ran a hardware store in the Richmond District for thirty-two years. My father had come from Guangzhou in 1949. My mother was born in San Francisco, the daughter of immigrants from Taishan. They did not travel. They worked. The store was open six days a week and my father spent the seventh doing the books. The farthest we went as a family was Lake Tahoe, once, in 1964, and my mother said it was very beautiful and she was ready to go home.

I left San Francisco for the University of Oregon in 1974 because it was far enough away to feel like an adventure and close enough to come home if the adventure did not work out. I studied journalism because I liked asking questions and because the alternative was accounting, which my father preferred. I graduated in 1978 and took a job at the Eugene Register-Guard, covering city hall for two years before realizing that what I actually wanted to write about was every place that was not city hall.

I became a travel writer the way most people become travel writers, which is to say I started writing about the places I went and someone eventually paid me for it. I freelanced for Sunset Magazine through most of the 1980s. In 1991, I was hired as the travel editor at the San Jose Mercury News, where I spent twelve years assigning stories, editing copy, and writing a weekly column about where to go and what to do when you get there. I covered forty-seven countries during those years, from Iceland to New Zealand, from a houseboat in Kashmir to a fishing village in Hokkaido. I have been to all fifty states. I have slept in hotels that cost four hundred dollars a night and in motels that cost thirty-nine dollars a night and I can tell you with certainty that the quality of sleep depends more on how far you walked that day than on the thread count of the sheets.

George and I married in 1983. He was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard for twenty-eight years, a quiet man who liked maps and schedules and who planned every trip with the precision of a military campaign, which complemented my approach of planning nothing and seeing what happened. We traveled well together because we had divided the labor honestly: he got us there, and I noticed what was there once we arrived. He retired in 2011. We spent seven years traveling together full-time, which is a sentence that sounds romantic and was, in fact, romantic, as long as you account for the argument in the rental car in Scotland about whether to take the A9 or the coastal road. We took the coastal road. I was right.

George passed away in 2022 from a stroke, quickly and without warning, in our kitchen in Ashland, Oregon, on a Tuesday morning. We were married thirty-nine years. I traveled alone for the first time in October of that year, to Savannah, because he had always wanted to go and we had never gotten around to it. The light in Savannah in October is different from anywhere else I have been. I sat on a bench in one of the squares and wrote in my notebook for an hour. It was the first time since George died that I felt like myself.

I have two daughters. Emily is a marine biologist in Monterey. Grace teaches fourth grade in Portland. They both inherited my restlessness and their father’s gift for navigation, which means they get where they are going and notice everything along the way.

I write about travel the way most people over sixty-five actually travel: by car, with stops, with a thermos of coffee and a willingness to pull over when something looks interesting. I write about national parks and small towns and the view from a highway overlook at six in the morning when nobody else has stopped yet. I write about river cruises and road trips and the particular pleasure of arriving somewhere you have never been and knowing immediately that you will come back. I do not write about airports or influencer hotels or experiences that require you to be twenty-eight. I write about the world as it looks to someone who has been moving through it for seventy years and is not finished.