I’m George Mandrovny, and for fifteen years I’ve built products used by millions of people, which is a polite way of saying I’ve spent fifteen years discovering new and humbling ways for things to break in front of an audience. I have a wife, two sons, and an enthusiasm for travel that is apparently surprising in a travel blogger, as though the rest of them are in it for the airport sandwiches.
Long before any of this was a website, I was the friend who over-prepared. The one who turned up knowing why the cathedral leaned, which valley hid the good road, what the thing you were looking at had survived to still be standing there. My friends were patient about this. Then, alarmingly, they started to find it useful, and asked me to plan their trips, and then their friends asked, and I posted a few articles online to make it stop, and the articles did unreasonably well, and somewhere in there the off-switch broke and here we are.
Here is the part I actually lose sleep over. When you cannot work out how to get where you are going, it stops mattering, instantly and completely, how beautiful the sunset is. Wedge yourself into the wrong train with your bags on your knees and your soul slowly leaving your body, and the view out the window can do nothing for you, nothing at all. That miserable gap, between landing somewhere and actually enjoying it, is the thing this blog exists to close. The trains, the bookings, the small idiot decisions that quietly save or sink an entire day.
But I am not made entirely of timetables. I love architecture and mountains and waterfalls with an intensity my family finds mildly concerning, the beauty people labored over and the beauty that just happened, and I will happily drag you to both. Including the ones nobody thinks to photograph, which are usually the good ones.
A word on how this runs, because you’d be right to wonder. I use AI to proofread, to wrestle a clumsy sentence into shape, and to keep schedules and brochure times current across a great many pages without me losing my mind one PDF at a time. What I do not do is make things up. Every claim here has been checked. Nothing is here to fill space.
I don’t live in Europe anymore, which changes nothing, because I keep flying back. The list of places I haven’t figured out yet is long, faintly embarrassing, and the single best reason I can think of to keep going.
And if you’ve read all the way down here, thank you, sincerely. The least I can do in return is be useful.