My name is Tyler Cowen, and I’m a travel addict. Over the last 40 years I’ve visited more than 100 countries. I spend, on average, 160 days on the road. I have lived in a tiny Mexican village without shops, have been to Haiti five times, and once got caught up in a gunfight in Rio.
Which is another way of saying: I’m not your typical vacation guide. As an economist, I’ve never been much of one for spouting conventional wisdom, and as a traveler, I generally take the same approach. I’m always on the hunt for the places, the art, the food that most tourists overlook—and because I’ve spent so much of my life traveling, I know where to find them. To be a Tyler Cowen-style traveler, you have to be a little more adventurous than your fellow tourist. Maybe this is the summer when you decide you’re ready for that. In which case, come along as I share with you a handful of my favorite vacation tips.
Perform Triage on the Museums
My wife and I visited Musée d’Orsay last week, the converted train station in Paris that houses many of the world’s best Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings. Sounds great, right?
Well, the size of the museum and its most popular rooms has not grown. But the number of visitors has. So when you enter one of those rooms—those with the van Gogh paintings, for instance—you see the backs of people’s heads more than the art. You can wait patiently and then push through the crowd, to reach the position where people see the back of your head, but by that point looking at the art is not very satisfying.