The best parts were never on the itinerary.

WNDR WNDR is our travel notebook, kept on Instagram and YouTube.

The two of us have been travelling together for close to thirty years. Since before we were married, we’ve gone abroad several times a year. When we were younger, it was snow almost every weekend. One of us snowboarded down the hard way, pretending to be a backcountry rider. The other skied, grew up in Hokkaido, and passed him on the slope without much effort. Then came golf, and then dinners worth driving across Japan for. Those we keep in L2E.

The trips we remember most are rarely the ones we planned.

India, 1998. We asked a taxi driver, half joking, if one of us could drive. He said yes. Just as we pulled away, he stopped us and said we hadn’t checked the brakes, and that not checking the brakes on a car you’ve never driven is how people die. He was right. They weren’t brakes as we knew them. We drove on anyway, carefully. The same trip, one of us stood right next to a bear. Its owner seemed to think that was normal.

Morocco, and then the Sahara, by camel, to a camp you can’t reach any other way. That night the stars were so many and so bright that they felt frightening, as if they might actually fall.

St. Petersburg, 2018. We went to the Hermitage, looked at the famous paintings, and walked straight past the one that would end up mattering most to us. Or so we thought for years. It turned out the painting had never been there at all. It was in Hamburg. In October 2026 a work trip took us to Germany for three weeks, one weekend opened up, and we finally stood in front of it.

Once, we took a golf iron into a desert. Just because.

Some things we plan very seriously. We had Egypt booked once, our first time, and had to cancel when one of us left for Mars for a while. Next year is the rematch. To get the hotel status for that trip, we spent sixteen nights in hotels in our own country. When two airlines merge, we collect the things that carry both names, before they disappear. We travel with one grey suitcase that’s easy to spot on any carousel, and one old soft case whose wheels we swapped for orange rollerblade wheels. It carries a spare bolt and a spanner, just in case.

The notebook is kept by the one of us who actually plans the trips. The other one mostly decides what kind of notebook it should be, and drives.

We travel a lot, in Japan and abroad. When a friend asks where to go, this is what we point to. Think of it as a shared folder.