Walk through a life,
not a checklist.

Dear Traveler,

Before Maria and I ever walked through Paris together, she gave me a book. Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I read it with a pencil in my hand and underlined every café, apartment, bookshop, garden, bridge, and street address I could find. I did not know yet what I was going to do with those marks. I only knew I wanted to see the places.

Then we went to Paris, and the underlines became a route. I took her to Hemingway's small rooms on the Left Bank, to the spot where Sylvia Beach kept her bookshop, through the Luxembourg Garden, past the cafés of Montparnasse, and along the Seine. Somewhere in the middle of that day the city stopped being scenery. We were standing inside a story, and the story was different because we were in it.

That day is where Footsteps comes from.

I built this because I was tired of visiting a city by opening a map, sorting by rating, and walking to whichever restaurant had the most stars. That is a way to eat well. It is not a way to meet a place. Cities are made of people who lived, worked, argued, fell in love, and wrote at particular tables on particular streets. I wanted a way to walk through that life instead of past it.

So this is my gift to you. Take the book, take the city, take someone you love, and go stand where it happened.

Start where we started. Hemingway's Paris is the first journey in Footsteps. You can follow it in the order of the book, in the order of his life, or as a route arranged for walking. Bring a pencil.