ost people love to travel. My wife and
I are not those people. Not after kids.
Here’s what traveling looks like with a
four-year-old and a one-year-old: haul-
ing them, their luggage, our luggage
(which is somehow smaller than theirs),
and ourselves into a cab and through an
airport so we can distract them for several hours on the
plane before trudging through another airport and in-
to another cab so we can carry out the same parenting
duties in a different city.
This past spring, however, my wife, Sally, and I went
to Miami for four days on our first vacation without our
daughters. The flight alone felt like a holiday. By the
time we checked into our beachside hotel, we’d nearly
forgotten we were parents. Turns out travel is amazing!
But the act of traveling—even when child-free—is
a pain in the ass. It’s not, as they say, about the journey,
not when economy seating is involved. So we devoted
the first ten pages of this issue to all the tips and tricks
for how to look and feel your best when you’re in tran-
sit purgatory, from the clothes to wear to the products18 November 2019_Esquire
to put on your face to the way to fold your blazer so it
doesn’t wrinkle. Plus, we let you in on an excellent hack
to ensure solid rest on an airplane. I’ll never look so sal-
low in Magic City again.
By the second day, my thoughts had turned to how I
may not have many more opportunities to visit again,
because Miami is sinking into the ocean. Though if you
want to see firsthand how climate change is already
bad and getting worse, you don’t even need to go to the
coasts, as longtime Esquire contributor and daily poli-
tics writer Charles P. Pierce demonstrates on page 92;
you can go to Traverse City, Michigan, where lakeside
beaches are disappearing, parking lots are underwater,
and cherry trees are succumbing to fungus—all at least
partly due to climate change. From this perch on north-
ern Lake Michigan, Pierce argues that 2020 marks the
first presidential election at the end of the world. In fact,
for that matter, you don’t even need to leave your living
room: Starting this fall, you can watch Apple TV+’s See,starring this month’s cover star, Jason Momoa, and set
four hundred years in the future, when humankind has
nearly wiped itself from the planet. Rachel Syme went
to the set of the show, in Vancouver, to see how Momoa
is enjoying the trappings of fame—while wrestling with
his own place in the Hollywood hierarchy (page 62).
By day three, the coconut-oil sheen of Miami Beach
left Sally and me wanting something a little more...
cerebral. Inspiring, even. We could’ve used novelist
Tommy Orange’s profile (page 96) of an extraordinary
Lakota teenager, born and raised in Oakland—just like
Orange—who’s breaking the cycle of pain the men in
his family have suffered for generations. And we glad-
ly would’ve taken Esquire editor Kevin Sintumuang’s
check-in (page 86) with Kiwi actor and filmmaker Taika
Waititi, who directed that Thor movie everyone liked
and whose hard-earned success is like the opposite of
a cautionary tale. Or we could’ve taken inspiration for
how to fund our next trip from the characters in David
Hill’s dispatch (page 72) from the Hoboken train sta-
tion, where enterprising out-of-staters flock to take part
in New Jersey’s vibrant sports-betting culture.
By our fourth and final day in south Florida, we missed
our daughters enough to come home. (That, and we had
a return flight to catch.) Our joyful homecoming was
the perfect ending to our kid-free getaway. After put-
ting our daughters to bed that night, we immediately
started planning our next trip. Disney World, probably.—Michael SEBASTIAN
photograph: Aaron RichterM
this Way InWHILE TRAVEL IS AMAZING,
THE ACT OF TRAVELING CAN BE A PAIN
IN THE ASS. IT’S NOT, AS THEY
SAY, ABOUT THE JOURNEY, NOT WHEN
ECONOMY SEATING IS INVOLVED.A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
WHAT A TRIP