Erik Gaugerand Notes from the Road

What Is Notes from the Road?

Notes from the Road is my project in experimental travel writing.

By road, by kayak, by seaplane, and most of all on foot, I explore the relationship between city and country in the modern world. The themes I return to most — wilderness, statecraft, ecology, and history — come from moving through landscapes slowly and trying to pay close attention.

Travel writing sometimes gets a bad rap, and for good reason. There’s a version of it that’s all shimmering seas and luxury hotels, disconnected from the truth of a place. But travel writing, freed from relationships with the travel industry, can also be funny, powerful, and personal. It can be skeptical. It can be uncomfortable. At its best, it doesn’t sell anything. It just observes.

Notes from the Road is an independent, unsponsored travelogue rooted in this approach. If a writer is being paid by a hotel, destination, or travel region to write something nice, that isn’t travel writing — it’s advertorial copy. The name comes from my love of improvised music, especially the Grateful Dead and Phish, and from the idea that travel, like writing and music, often works best when it's improvised.

What Are Online Travelogues?

There’s a wide gap between destination reviews and true travel writing.

An online travelogue is a form of nonfiction narrative — personal, observational, rooted in experience — that draws from the oldest traditions of travel literature. It’s not a guidebook, not a list of top attractions, and certainly not a paid placement. Travelogues are stories: about people, politics, history, maps, animals, architecture, and the collisions between them.

Over the years, travel blogging has become a marketing engine for hotels and tourism boards, and Notes from the Road has long pushed back against that model. It’s a travelogue in the truest sense: one person’s account of wandering through the world, asking questions, and trying to understand it.

Start Here

If you’re new to Notes from the Road, here are the places to begin:

• The Citrus Kingdom — Through Sicily’s citrus groves, from Palermo’s hidden courtyards to the volcano oranges of Mount Etna.
• Turrialba Volcano and the Infrastructure of Everything — In the cloud forest of a Costa Rican volcano, looking at the living systems beneath the world.
• The Pupfish Wars of Death Valley — As Lake Manly rises again, so does the old fight over water, extinction and a one-inch fish at Devils Hole.
• The Owyhee Puzzle — A native artifact on the Owyhee River, and what it reveals about Oregon’s ancient history.
• The Marrakech Orangerie — Notes on the color orange in one of North Africa’s most entrancing cities.
• Tikehau in the Tuamotus — A ringworld in the South Pacific: its stories, its wildlife and its future.
• The Places Between — The essay that won Terra Incognita’s Travel Blogger of the Year.

And a few classics from the archive:

• Forgotten Guerrillas of La Guajira — An edge-of-the-map journey through Colombia’s desert peninsula.
• The Sauvie Island Saucer — A mystery on the riverbanks of Oregon.
• Reading Paria Canyon — Sandstone, water, and books.
• Habana Vieja — In search of an elusive beautiful creature in Cuba’s capital.

Origins of Notes from the Road

I launched Notes from the Road in September 1999, in my early twenties, when blending writing, sketching, and photography into a hand-coded travel journal felt like uncharted territory. The internet was quiet then — no social platforms, just raw HTML and curiosity.

The project began as a way to stay in touch with friends while I moved between cities. Living in Los Angeles, often broke, I’d skip sushi dinners I couldn’t afford and drive east into the desert with little more than $36 and a sketchbook. Out there, I found something the city couldn’t offer: strange landscapes, forgotten towns, and old roads.

Those early trips taught me that exploration doesn’t require distance, only attention. That idea became the foundation of Notes from the Road, and it still guides the work today.

Over the decades, I’ve returned to many of the same places, watching them shift and evolve with time. Cities change. Landscapes weather. Fights over land and water drag on. A travelogue written over more than twenty-five years becomes more than a record of motion. It becomes a story of transformation and memory.

This project has taken me through the West Indies, the Pacific, and deep into the American backcountry. I’ve shattered bones in the field. I met the woman who would become my wife. My son now joins me on many trips.

What began as a personal experiment has become a long record of place. Its recurring subjects — yuccas and butterflies, birds and borderlands — all come from the same habit: paying attention.

Field Projects

Beyond individual travelogues, Notes from the Road includes long-form explorations that build and update over time.

• Chili Peppers of the World — An illustrated guide to 176 chili peppers from around the world.
• Alley Cats of the World — A gallery of stray and feral cats from my travels.
• Doors and Windows — A photo series about the most beautiful doors and windows of the world.
• Yucca Species of the World — My sketches of every species on Earth.
• Hot Sauces of the World — My sketches of hot sauces from around the world.
• Cactus Species of the United States — My sketches of all cactus species from the United States and its territories.

Life Lists

Road Trip Music

The name of this site comes from improvised music, and I keep annotated lists of my favorite jams:

• Grateful Dead Jams
• Phish Jams
• Jerry Garcia Band Jams

The Regions

Notes from the Road is organized into eleven regions:

• Neotropics
• West Indies
• Cascadia
• Desert Southwest
• Desert Mexico
• Great Basin
• Europa
• Dry World
• Oceania
• Laurentia
• Tigerlands

Sketching and Visual Style

Many stories on Notes from the Road are illustrated with travel drawings I complete after a journey, using gouache, watercolor, and Copic markers. These aren't the fast, spontaneous sketches I make in the field — those go in my Moleskines. Instead, these are deliberate, hand-rendered illustrations based on my photography, created to slow down and interpret place with attention to detail.

My Equipment

Guana Cay and Environmental Writing

One of the longest-running and most consequential sections of the site is the Guana Cay Blog. It documents the environmental battle between the residents of Great Guana Cay, a small island in the Bahamas, and a foreign megadevelopment project backed by Discovery Land Company.

My reporting and commentary helped expose development abuses, shape public discussion in the Bahamas, and draw international attention to the role of foreign capital in reshaping fragile island environments. The fight traveled, too. Guana Cay was later cited in Jamaica, and when residents of Barbuda faced Discovery Land Company over their own island, I helped prepare their team for what to expect.

The late travel blogging pioneer Happy Hotelier once described Notes from the Road as “an anti-development blog disguised as a travelogue.” I took that as a compliment.

How This Site Is Built

Notes from the Road is entirely hand-coded, which gives me the freedom to fine-tune each page, whether it’s how a sketch displays on mobile or how metadata supports search. That level of control allows the site to evolve slowly and intentionally, without the clutter of templates or third-party platforms.

Much of the site’s responsive HTML and CSS is built with the help of my brother, Hans Gauger, whose quiet technical support keeps this sprawling travelogue running smoothly.

Find Me Elsewhere

The official accounts of Erik Gauger and Notes from the Road. Anything else using my name is someone else.

• SubstackThe Newsletter
• Instagram@erikgauger
• Instagram · Sketches@roadsketch
• Threads@erikgauger
• X@erikgauger
• Bluesky@notesfromtheroad.com
• Mastodon@Notesfromtheroad@mastodon.art
• Pinteresterikgauger
• LinkedInnotesfromtheroad
• FacebookNotes from the Road
• RSSEvery new story
• WikidataQ141614543

In the Press

Here's what critics, publications, and fellow travelers have said about Erik Gauger's Notes from the Road:

• Take a look at the web. It just looks beautiful edge to edge on this display.Apple, iPhone X keynote, 2017
• Unexpected frontier of the travel blogosphereThe Boston Globe, 2008
• Sumptuous SiteTime Magazine, 2005
• Photos worthy of National Geographic… the best-looking travel blog we had seen.Forbes Magazine
• Best of the Travel BlogsNational Geographic Traveller
• For his great visual field guide to the chili peppers of the world, Erik Gauger hand-drew 176 peppers from India, South America, Korea, Thailand, Africa, and seemingly every other place on the Earth.Jason Kottke, kottke.org, 2026
• Be Inspired!Lonely Planet
• What you find when you read and follow Notes from the Road is funny, powerful and personal travel stories from all over the world.A Little Adrift, alittleadrift.com
• Gauger’s writing ranges from witty to heartbreaking with none of the mundane itinerary recounts that plague so similar attempts.Rolf Potts, Vagablogging
• Detailed hand drawings and sumptuous photographic imagesWashington Post
• Drop dead gorgeous, thanks to Gauger’s prowess with his old school 4×5Rolf Potts, Vagablogging
• Travel blogger Erik Gauger goes activist in a development battle — coral reef vs. golf course — in the Bahamas.Judges, SATW Foundation Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards, 2012
• Erik Gauger’s ‘personal project in experimental travel writing’ that is sumptuous in its photography and graphic design and true in its mission.Terrain.org
• One of GoNOMAD’s favorite websites, which is known for its extraordinary landscape photographs.GoNOMAD
• A story about finding your own road, rather than chasing a destination.Terra Incognita, Travel Blogger of the Year 2020 — Judges’ Choice, for “The Places Between”
• Beautiful photography, incredible illustrations, and killer long-form writing on quirky topicsKeith, NomadFlag, 2020
• You won’t find many ‘10 best pubs in Prague’ here.Keith, NomadFlag, 2020
• Travel stories that are personal, powerful, and funny at the same time.Pete Rojwongsuriya, BucketListly Blog
• Known for travel writing that blends cultural reflection, photography, and thoughtful exploration.Kunal Chouhan, Vocal Media
• The Best Looking Blog We’ve SeenForbes Magazine
• Stands out for Hard JournalismLowell Thomas Awards, 2012
• This is one of the longest-running travel blogs on the internet.Let’s Roam
• His photography and writing are some of the best I’ve seen online from an independent travel blog.Center for Smart Tourism
• His photography was, is and has always been Top NotchPat Bonish, Every Mile a Memory, 2013
• Notes from the Road is my project in the unvarnished, messy truth of travel, told by a regular guy.Going Places (Lane is Going Places)
• Do you like gorgeous photography and unconventional travel writing?Sixt.com

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