My cousins will never let me live down a day in New York when I made them schlep from the Lower East Side to the Upper East Side, on foot, to a diner supposedly revered for its cheesecake which, as it turned out, was a rubbery, extortionately priced doorstop with strong notes of fridge.
So it doesn’t take much to buy into the more-is-more mentality, looking to emulate the endless highlights reels on social media and believing you really can’t go to [insert city] without visiting [insert viral food spot].
Some of the most memorable travel experiences I’ve had have been completely spontaneous: life-altering bún chả on a roadside in Hanoi, knock-your-socks-off Thai (both in spice and spectacularity) in a suburban strip mall in Los Angeles and a tagine for the ages at a random rooftop deep in the medina of Fez, Morocco.
Hot, hangry and hungover – a diabolical combination – we’re our own kind of ancient ruins, skulking aimlessly in what feels like a black hole: an area nowhere near any of the 50-odd places I’ve saved on Google Maps for our four-day stay.
Coming to in the air-con after inhaling that self-made panino – almost certainly inferior to those sold at the countless eateries we bypassed along the way – it gets me thinking: is the never-ending quest to better my holiday actually making it worse?.
