UNRESERVED PRAISE

Today's travel luxury is the freedom to have no plans and no bookings. Here's to enjoying the journey, trying your luck and stumbling on a new favourite place

- YOLANDA EDWARDS

When my husband tells our origin story – the first weekend we went away together – it always begins with how I proposed we go to Palm Springs for the weekend. Even though he couldn’t afford it, he had just received a new credit card with a $5,000 limit, and called his travel agent, Jimmy at Altour Travel, to see if he could find him a flight. Jimmy’s ‘You met a girl’ line is always a part of it, complete with an American-Italian accent (think Tony Soprano). Not to turn this into a ‘remember the good old days’ story, but back then, you talked to people, and they helped you with a task you wouldn’t have been able to do on your own. You wanted to go to a restaurant for dinner, you called and made a booking.

I first learned about scarcity bookings in high school, when my mother wanted to book us a campsite at Yosemite. She had to call around six months from the day we wanted to arrive to reserve it; this seemed very stressful to me then, and even now.

We recently moved to the Upper East Side, which is a more old-school New York neighbourhood. It’s so refreshing to see Italian and French restaurants that nobody has ever heard of, cafés that aren't part of a chain, and even several culty Japanese restaurants. Perhaps more exciting is that we can usually walk in, or call up while having cocktails at home to see if they have a table in, say, an hour, and they do. After 20 years of living in a different part of the city, where we would have our reservations planned out, or just suffer through mediocre neighbourhood dining, this was an epiphany.