An independent field journal
Travel methods that prove themselves, one field test at a time.
My Travel Innovations treats trip planning as a craft you can practice, measure, and steadily improve. Evan Merrick builds one method at a time in Boise, runs it on a real outing, and publishes the result with the flaws left in.
- 12 trials logged
- 2 sections
- Updated monthly
Fresh from the log
- 2026-07-01 The Saturday Market Metric: Reading a City Before Nine Waypoints
- 2026-06-17 Reading the Weather Window Before a Day Trip Workbench
- 2026-06-03 One Hour After Opening: A Museum Timing Rule on Trial Waypoints
- 2026-05-20 One List, Three Clocks: Rebuilding My Departure Checklist Workbench
- 2026-05-06 The Quiet Hours of a Small Airport, Logged by Hand Waypoints
- 2026-04-23 The paper backup protocol: what I print before every trip Workbench
Workbench
Workbench is the home lab of this journal. It covers everything you can build before a trip ever leaves the driveway: offline map stacks, two-pass itineraries, cable audits, paper backup protocols, and checklist rebuilds that survive contact with an actual packing night. Each write-up begins with a plain question, walks through the build in numbered steps, and closes with a verdict you can act on. Nothing reaches the page until it has been assembled, torn down, and assembled again at least once, because a method you cannot rebuild from its own instructions is not finished yet.
The point of the bench is repeatability. A method that works once, on one lucky morning, is a story rather than a tool, so every Workbench trial records the exact steps, the time each step took, and the failure points that surfaced along the way. Timings come from a stopwatch rather than from memory, and gear lists come from a scale rather than from a guess. When a build falls short of its own goal, the write-up says so in plain words, because a recorded failure is still a result you can use.
Waypoints
Waypoints takes the bench outdoors. These entries are field checks run in specific places, most of them in Idaho and the states next door: a greenbelt loop walked against a stopwatch, a high desert day trip planned entirely on paper, a weekend built around a gap in a rail schedule, a quiet morning spent watching how a small airport actually moves. The places are real, the clocks are real, and the notes come straight from a pocket notebook that rides in the same jacket on every outing.
A method that looks tidy at a desk often bends the moment weather, closures, or plain fatigue enters the picture. Waypoints exists to find those bends early, in low-stakes settings close to home, so the fix is ready before a longer trip depends on it. Read these entries as location reports with a method under the hood, not as destination guides. They will not tell you where to eat, but they will show you how a place behaves when you ask it to keep a schedule.
Why this journal
Most travel advice arrives as a list: ten tips, seven habits, five things you should never pack. Lists are easy to publish because nobody ever has to run them, and almost nobody checks the results afterward. This journal took the opposite bargain when it launched. Every entry begins as a question, becomes a written procedure, and then rides along on a real outing where it can fail in front of a notebook. Some methods come home stronger, and some come home in pieces, and both kinds get published, because a documented dead end can save you an evening of your own.
The structure behind the journal is deliberately narrow. Each trial gets one question, one build at the bench, a fixed number of field days, and a verdict that has to pick a side. That shape keeps the writing honest, since it leaves no room for the vague hedging that fills so many travel pages. It also keeps the entries useful long after publication. A dated procedure with timings and conditions can be rerun, checked, and revised by anyone, while a mood piece about wanderlust cannot. You will find numbers in nearly every entry: minutes on a platform, grams in a pouch, steps in a sequence, days between revisions.
Independence is the other load-bearing wall. My Travel Innovations LLC is a small Idaho company, and this journal is the only thing it makes. The site sells no tours, books no rooms, issues no tickets, and takes no payments of any kind. No carrier, rail operator, or reservation platform has any relationship with it, and none of them sees an entry before you do. When a verdict says a method failed, that verdict cost nothing and pleased nobody, which is exactly why it can be trusted. The full company record, from state registration to office hours, sits in plain view on the About page.
Here is what to expect if you stay a while. A new trial lands roughly every few weeks, split between the two sections, and older entries pick up revision notes whenever a later trip changes the call. The writing stays plain throughout: what was tried, what happened, what changed as a result. If you want a starting point, open the current trial above, browse the Workbench and Waypoints logs, or read the FAQ for the ground rules. And if a monthly summary suits you better than checking back, the Release Notes letter below covers everything in one short email.
How a trial works
- Frame one question. Every trial starts with a single sentence that names the problem and the situation where it appears. A vague goal like travel smarter cannot be tested, so it never makes the cut here. A narrow question, like whether a paper backup can replace a dead phone for one full day, absolutely can. Framing usually takes longer than building, and that is by design.
- Build the method at the bench. Evan drafts the method as a written procedure with numbered steps, expected timings, and the gear it depends on. Then he runs it at home under mild pressure: a timed pack, a simulated early morning, a full walk-through of the sequence. Anything that stumbles indoors gets fixed before it is allowed outside, because field days are too scarce to spend on known weaknesses.
- Run it in the field. The method rides along on a real outing for a set number of field days, anywhere from a single morning to a full weekend. Everything goes into the pocket notebook: minutes, misses, weather, detours, and every moment the plan and the day disagreed with each other. Nothing gets cleaned up afterward, since the mess is the data.
- Publish the verdict. Each write-up closes with a plain call: adopted, adopted with notes, revised and retested, or shelved. The reasoning sits right beside the verdict, along with the conditions that could change it later. When a future trip contradicts an old call, the entry receives a dated revision note instead of a quiet edit, so the record stays honest.
Release Notes, once a month
One short letter each month lists the newest trials, revisions to earlier methods, and what is headed for the bench next. There are no daily digests and no filler, and you can step off the list whenever you like.