Notes from the Road is my personal project in experimental travel writing. It is a travel photography blog about subjective travel; the kind of real world of random things and real people.
By road, by kayak, by seaplane and most of all on foot, I try to tackle the themes of city and country in the modern world. Travel writing sometimes gets a bad rap, because of 'The azure sea was undulating and the hotel was fabulous.' But travel writing can be funny, powerful and personal. Every non-fiction writer has that capacity to exaggerate; his experiences happen far away from the reader. But travel writing implies honesty and research. And that's why Notes from the Road is my project in the unvarnished, messy truth of travel, told by a regular guy.
I am a self-employed father based in the Pacific Northwest. I sketch Notes from the Road stories on the road, with only one or two edits afterwords. I travel on tight budgets, often to what I call ordinary places. We can fly ourselves off to exotic destinations, but one of my hopes is to show you that the pleasures of travel exists even with a stroll through your neighborhood.
I started this project in December 1999 to humor and entertain my friends. Since I have moved about from place to place throughout my life, I needed a way to keep in touch with my friends. I grew up with a few unusual and useless hobbies - underwater photography, plant and animal identification, and an interest in history, archaeology and maps. This site puts those useless skills to work.
I believe that travel writing is the most wide open non-fiction template on Earth - and affords its readers and writers the chance to dance through an amazing breadth of subjects. I don't choose my subjects; I just travel, and the subject matter finds me.
Although the photographs I use are mostly blank landscape canvasses, travel is always about people, and I try to capture real people in their environment; their stories tell travel the best. I write this website to humor, entertain, and come up with a set of ideas about the places I visit for my readers to think about. I believe that my readers are the coolest people in the world. I'd like you to be one of my readers to. Write me a note, and join my newsletter or my Facebook page.
or my RSS feed.
I don't use a blogging platform. I create Notes from the Road by hand. For this reason, Notes from the Road doesn't always look like a blog, and that's frustrating to people who like blogs to look like blogs. But, we don't really care about that. What I think you really want to know is, what are the organic tools I use to create the site?
This part is really fun, because this is frustrating to people who write about photography. I primarily photograph the site with a large- format field camera, built by Toyo. This is an old-style traditional print film camera, which can be compared to photographing with a 500 megapixel digital camera. Because of the expense of the lenses associated with this format, I have only two lenses.
Large format photography, to the dismay of many, continues to yield superior results and control than their digital counterparts. My lenses consist of a 75mm Schneider and a Nikon 120mm. I meter with a handheld spot meter and always photograph with low-speed, low-grain film. My system is housed in a water resistant dry sack in a day pack.
My second camera is a digital Canon. I use this camera exclusively for telephoto, macro and super-wide angle images.
I use a lightweight mountaineer tripod by Gitzo with a very stable tripod head, made by Manfrotto. An additional arm bracket allows me to mount an umbrella over my camera.
Moleskine Travel Journal
Roam is where I organize my moleskine travel journals, which I have been using as travel organizers, field guides and sketchbooks since I began traveling for Notes from the Road.
Handpainted Travel Maps
Roam is where I organize my travel maps, which I paint
to go along with the stories, so you can get a sense of the region I am traveling in.
Travel Organization Roam is where I write about travel organization ideas, like how I resolve some of my backpack weight problems, or carrying a longboard skateboard to the Caribbean.
Roam is my online travel journal, where I talk about science and travel, art and travel, and show you some pictures I took along the way.
I draw the maps for this site with a Micron .005 pen, watercolors, Pantone pens, acrylics and pastel chalk crayons on bristol paper.
While on the road, I carry a small Moleskine travel journal, and a small, waterproof watercolor palette that folds together like a book. Inside this palette is a handful of brushes and Micron .005 pens. My moleskine journal contains every piece of information I need to travel, from phone numbers to relevant maps to confirmation codes. I compress any information I need into this tiny journal.
The Guana Cay Blog is where I write about an ongoing fight between a foreign golf course megadevelopment, and the residents of a small Bahamian Island. The Guana Cay Blog also looks at similar issues in the West Indies, and how locals fail or succeed in defending their culture and environment.
My travel blogging friend, the Happy Hotelier, once noted that Notes from the Road wasn't a travel blog, but rather an anti-development blog, because it included information about the Guana Cay conflict.
This is a new kind of thinking on the web and in travel writing. In the history of travel writing, the genre has been wildly independent. Travel bloggers did not exist to serve the travel industry, but rather to write about the world from their own perspective. Travel writers and travel bloggers should, rather, feel compelled to look at the far-flung destinations they visit as having little voice outside of through the travel writers who visit them.
Probably. But since I shoot with a large format camera, which takes about 15 minutes of work for each image, I don't get too many people images. But also, remember this. I write about people, and Notes from the Road is primarily a site about travel writing. I want you to imagine the people I write about. Landscape travel images are empty palettes; they should lend better to philosophical travel writing than the more immediate and specific imagery of human activity.
About Notes from the Road The Notes from the Road story, about Erik Gauger, his equipment and approach.
Best Travel Sites A list of travel websites, science websites, outdoor websites, adventure websites, art and photography websites that have maintained an independent and unique spirit.
Reviews Reviews, press clippings, criticism and more of Notes from the Road.
Bird List
A collection of birds I have identified while on the road. I always keep an eye out for new birds and this is one of the greatest pleasures of travel.
Count: 925
Fish List A collection of fish species I've counted in the wild over the course of my life.
Count: 151
Mammal List
A collection of every mammal I have positively identified over the course of my life.
Count: 78
Reptiles & Amphibians List A collection of reptiles and amphibians I have managed to identify positively.
Count: 55
Butterflies List A collection of butterflies I have managed to identify.
Count: 54
Seashore Creatures List Tidepooling and snorkeling is one of the greatest joys of independent travel. This is my collection of seashore creatures I have identified during my Notes from the Road years.
Count: 67
I started this project in December 1999 to humor and entertain my friends. Since I have moved about from place to place throughout my life, I needed a way to keep in touch with my friends. I grew up with a few unusual and useless hobbies - underwater photography, plant and animal identification, and an interest in history, archaeology and maps. This site puts those useless skills to work.
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