Wandering Jon

Looking Back at 20 Years of Travel

June 8, 2026 by Jon Brown Leave a Comment

Long ago I started keeping a list of the countries I’d visited in Evernote, and later Notion, because otherwise the whole thing started to get fuzzy.

Twenty years of travel sounds like a long time, and I suppose it is, but in my head it still feels like a handful of chapters. Backpacking Europe in 1996. Falling hard for Thailand in 2007. Indonesia, Japan, Romania, Nepal, Bhutan. A lot of return trips to places that felt easy to return to, and a few places I mostly remember as airports, train stations, and that odd liminal feeling of being somewhere, but not really being there.

So I had AI take those notes, scan my emails from the last 20 years, and make a map for me.

Countries Visited

Visited countries are colored by first recorded visit period. Transit-only countries use a gray crosshatch.

Open the full map

The thing I like about seeing it this way is that it’s honest in a way memory isn’t. The map makes the repeat visits obvious. I’ve quite literally lost track of how many times I’ve been to Thailand, and for how long in total. I think I’ll ask AI to calculate that next and add a “total days in country” layer to the map.

I desperately want to go new places. At the same time, I really love Thailand, Spain, and Italy, and always want to return to them. The map makes that tension obvious too.

It also makes the gaps obvious. Africa is still blank. South America is still blank.

I’m not much interested in country counting as a sport. Long ago, when I thought about buying a boat, I was fond of saying “I want to sail about the world” rather than “I want to sail around the world.” A subtle difference, because the trophy for circumnavigating didn’t interest me at all, while seeing as many places as I could along the way absolutely did.

That still hasn’t happened, but I treat travel the same way. Yes, I want to go to every country, but not because visiting every country is itself noteworthy. At this point hundreds of people have visited every country on earth. That’s an amazing feat, but I’m more interested in the best stories they have than their country count. I’m interested in the amazing people they’ve met and the unexpected delights they’ve experienced.

I digress, but I’m still on a quest to get people to stop asking “What’s the best place/experience/whatever you’ve had?” To me, that’s like asking someone who their favorite child is. A better question is, “Tell me something amazing no one else has asked you about yet.”

And for goodness’ sake, stop answering questions with, “Everything was great except for this one horrible thing I’ll now tell you about.” That’s not what anyone asked, and it’s definitely not what anyone wants to hear about.

Here’s to the next twenty years, or at least to the next place worth returning to.

Noise Canceling Headphones Are a Must Have for Nomads

November 8, 2019 by Jon Brown Leave a Comment

Silence is golden. On planes, in cafes, in coworking offices, everywhere.

Long ago frequent flyers started fawning all over the Bose Quiet Comfort 35s. They were the first popular ear phones with Active Noise Cancelation (ANC). ANC means that the electronics listen to the background noise and then generate a canceling sound wave pattern. The effect is magic. This is in contract to passive noise cancelation, or more accurately noise isolation. You typically get noise isolation from “big cans” the muffle outside noise, or from air tight ear bud tips (rubber/foam).

I took one look at the Bose QC35s and my take away was simple:

#1 I don’t have room for those beasts in my travel gear.

#2 They’re way to expensive.

First, who wants to carry around a case with big old ear cans in them? I certainly don’t have room in my pockets, nor my carry on, nor my roller bag for the space those would take up.

Second, I’m looking at headphones that are for casual listening, heck mostly for video and phone calls, and I’m looking to attenuate background noises. I’ve never been looking for headphones because I’m an audiophile listening to some obscure experimental Brian Eno album.

If you want to read from someone that cares WAY more about headphones in general, check out my friend Chris Lema’s blog on the topic here: https://bestheadphones.blog/

Me, I just want quiet with a good mic and reasonable sound quality.

That’s not to say I don’t care at all about sound quality. One of the other reasons I pooh-poohed the Bose headphones is I’ve never found Bose audio quality to be good. I did go through an audiophile phase long ago building home theater speakers from parts and stuffing ridiculous amounts of audio gear in a car long gone. One of my take aways from that time long ago was Bose products always being heavily marketed low quality products made to sound reasonably good. They are just like cheap TVs that could be made to look “good” by cranking of the contrast and saturation in store. I digress.

Along the way I found a brand called TaoTronics (Made by Sun Valley Tek who also makes the brand HooToo of my favorite battery powered travel router, and RavPower batteries) who made corded ANC ear buds. The price was right at under $50. The first model I had used an inline AA battery to power the noise cancelation. Later they built in a rechargeable LiOn battery, still corded.

The iPhone’s lost their mic jack 🙁

Thankfully soon after TaoTronics released these, the TaoTronics TT-BH042. I like those a lot, they worked well on planes, didn’t take up too much space. At only $50, I bought a dozen that year and gave them out as gifts to 9seeds staff and a couple clients. If you only have $50 they’re still the ANC earbuds I’d recommend for most travelers.

Somewhere along the way AirPods came out, at $180. I swore I’d never spend that much money on headphones. After hearing from dozens of trusted friends just how awesome they were and being mildly frustrated by bluetooth pairing between my phone, my iPad and my Mac, I bought a pair.

With a day I was in love with my AirPods. They paired seamlessly, they had perfect battery life (I always return them to the case every time I remove them from my head). They ONLY problem was the lack of noise cancelation, heck they barely provided any noise isolation.

I loved them so much that when version 2 came out, I bought them within minuted of them being released. I figured I’d hand down the older ones (only 18 months old) to Elena. She liked them but they never fit her ears well. They fit me perfectly, but they fell out of her ears and never quite pointed correctly into her ear canal. She wanted the PowerBeats Pro.

So I did what too many tech savvy husbands do, I waited a month and bought her the AirPods Pro instead.

Good news, she loves them and they fit great.

Bad news, they are legitimately better at noise cancelation then my TaoTronics TT-BH042. Are they $200 better? No, probably not if evaluating the noise cancelation alone, but add the wireless charging battery case, and the easy connection jumping between devices and they sure as heck are. 50/50 odds on me making it all the way to Christmas without buying them for myself.

Do you speak English?

May 22, 2018 by Jon Brown 2 Comments

“We’re going to Romania!” we said to the server at the cafe we frequent in Idyllwild. Her response was along the lines of “Oh, I’d be so scared traveling places they don’t speak English!”

She’s not alone in that feeling. I’ve heard that same sentiment from dozens, if not hundreds, of fellow English speakers in America. As I wrote here, Two Reasons not to be afraid of traveling outside the English speaking world, which talks about just how hard it is for most travelers these days to actually find a place no one speaks a least little English, one really doesn’t need worry.

Here in Romania that is as true as anywhere. One Uber driver explained that, “no problem here, speaking English is every Romanian’s second hobby”. Which after 2 weeks here I can say seems to be the case, but it leaves this odd questioning hanging before me.

Once upon a time in Hungary

In 1996 I made my first tour around Europe, backpacker style through 8 countries in a month. The least English speaking place of any of those was Budapest, Hungary where it was legitimately common to walk into shop and have no one that spoke any English.

The primary second language at the time was Russian, as were most of the tourists. Funny how those go hand and hand. Back then what I did find however was that everyone my own age (24) and younger spoke some to a lot of English, whereas nearly everyone over 30 didn’t. The youngins were eager to practice and quite often some random under 30 person in the shop or on the street would lend a hand (or tongue?), whether need or not. Honestly, you can still handle most basic needs nonverbally.

Bucharest is not Budapest, nor is it still 1996

I was expecting Bucharest, Romania to be a bit more like Budapest, Hungary at least as far as language was concerned. However, 20 years later everyone, and I mean everyone in Bucharest seems to speak English. Most even do so not just at a rudimentary level, but fluently.

English fluency is so common here it seems almost odd after a while to start a conversation with “Do you speak English?”. The tipping point for me I think was when the stock boy at a local market answered my question on where to find something obscure fluently with “Oh, sure cornstarch is over here, there are two kinds this is the coarse kind, but this over here fine kind which I think is what you want.”

In 2 weeks here and I can’t recall a single interaction where I didn’t consider the other party fluent or nearly so. This isn’t purely tourist facing businesses, but then isn’t talking to general laborers either.

How do you start a conversation?

I’m at the point here that I simultaneously assume everyone does, while also feeling awful about just “assuming everyone does”…

I’d really love to hear in the comments how you all navigate this?