About
About Erik Gauger
and Notes from the Road
A travelogue drawn from the borderlands
and back corners of the world.
I'm Erik Gauger — a writer, illustrator, photographer, and lifelong explorer of the backroads. I live in the Pacific Northwest, but I’ve called Minnesota, Los Angeles, and Bremen, Germany home.
I earned a dual degree in Economics and Advertising from Pepperdine University and have been self-employed as an independent media consultant since 2003.
I’m also a color-grapheme synesthete — meaning I involuntarily associate letters and numbers with colors. This neurological trait informs how I think about travel narratives and photography.
Notes from the Road is my life’s work. It’s followed me through continents, close calls, and the broken bones of backcountry travel. It’s the record of one person’s attempt to understand the world by moving through it slowly. Contact Me
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. 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. Notes from the Road has long pushed back against that model. 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.
This site is, and always has been, independent and unsponsored. It’s a travelogue in the truest sense: one person’s account of wandering through the world, asking questions, and trying to understand a complex world.
Start Here
If you're new to Notes from the Road, here are a few places to begin:
- The Guerillas La Guajira — An edge-of-the-map journey through Colombia's desert peninsula.
- The Sauvie Island Saucer — A mystery on the riverbanks of Oregon.
- The Marrakech Orangerie — Notes on the color oraneg in one of North Africa's most entrancing cities.
- 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 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, old roads, and stories that seemed to materialize out of silence.
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 25 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-form meditation on place. Many of the recurring themes — yuccas and butterflies, birds and borderlands — are part of that same belief: that curiosity is a discipline, and attention is a form of respect.
Field Projects
Beyond individual travelogues, Notes from the Road includes long-form explorations that build and update over time.
- 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
I also maintain evolving life lists of:
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
Film Era
For most of the site's existence, I photographed exclusively with a Toyo 4x5 large-format field camera. It's slow, bulky, and expensive to operate — but the results are stunning. I shot with only two lenses:
- 75mm Schneider
- 120mm Nikkor
I metered exposures with a handheld spot meter and carried everything in a dry sack and a lightweight Gitzo tripod with a Manfrotto head.
Digital Transition
Since 2022, I've transitioned fully to digital. My current setup includes:
Camera Body
- Canon EOS R5
Lenses
- Canon RF 100mm f/2.8L Macro — for intimate field detail.
- Canon RF 100-500mm f/4.5–7.1L IS USM — for long-range landscape and wildlife work.
- Canon RF 28-70mm f/2L — fast, sharp, and versatile. My best lens.
- Canon RF 15-35mm f/2.8L IS USM — for architecture, landscapes, and tight spaces.
- Canon TS-E 17mm f/4L Tilt-Shift — for landscapes and structures.
Accessories
- Really Right Stuff TVC-34L tripod + BH-55 head
- Canon Macro Twin Lite MT-26EX-RT
- Ikelite 50DL housing and 8" dome for underwater photography
- Atlas Athlete pack for rugged carry
- Kokopelli Rogue Lite packraft for aquatic access
- DJI Avata I drone for low-altitude video
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, influence public discourse, and bring international attention to the role of foreign capital in reshaping fragile island environments. That work has had ripple effects across Commonwealth nations, influencing how governments evaluate transparency, conservation obligations, and development rights, including policy precedents in places like Jamaica.
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.
Contact Me
In the Press
Here's what critics, publications, and fellow travelers have said about Erik Gauger's Notes from the Road:
"Be Inspired!" – Lonely Planet
"Unexpected frontier of the travel blogosphere" – Boston Globe
"Sumptuous Site" – Time Magazine
"The Best Looking Blog We've Seen" – Forbes Magazine
"Best of the Travel Blogs" – National Geographic Traveller
"Stands out for Hard Journalism" – Lowell Thomas Awards (2012)
"Beautiful, edge to edge." – Apple.com (Craig Federighi, iPhone X keynote)
"Detailed hand drawings and sumptuous photographic images" – Washington Post
"Photos worthy of National Geographic… the best-looking travel blog we had seen." – Forbes Magazine
"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)
"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
"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