The backstory.

Each trip we take becomes a numbered edition: a private travel magazine made for one recipient, one itinerary, a fixed start and end. Not a guide to a place (the places have too many guides already) but a record of our days there. Instead of a camera roll and a folder of confirmation emails, the trip ends with a cover, a table of contents, and an opinion.

How it started

Olga plans our trips, and she's very good at it. She plans with Claude, too, and for our honeymoon on Oahu she had an idea: present the itinerary as a travel magazine instead of a spreadsheet of dates, in the spirit of the Wallpaper* City Guides, Monocle's travel series, and Cereal's city editions. The first version was a single static HTML file.

Knut moved that file into Sanity so the guide would be easier to keep up to date and could grow new features. Every place, day, and recommendation is now its own structured document, which is what makes the rest work: the maps draw themselves, the itinerary links to the entries, a built-in travel agent answers questions about the trip, and the transport icons know whether a hop is a walk, a bike ride, or a drive.

Looking back

After the trip we sat down and talked through what we actually did, out loud, and that conversation was folded back into the edition as the "Looking back" notes on entries and days. Some places earned their stars. At least one got a firm "skip it."

The house rules

Editions are released when a trip ends. Forthcoming trips show up on the front page, destination and all, but the dates, the day-by-day, and the map stay locked until we're home.

Under development

This is a live side project that gets rebuilt between trips, sometimes mid-trip. Expect rough edges and moved furniture.

A lot of the content is updated through the Sanity MCP server: we tell Claude what changed, and it patches the documents directly. This page included.

Get in touch

If an edition was useful to you, or you have questions about how any of this works, write to us: knutmelvaer@gmail.com and olgalevchik@gmail.com.