Trust the Vibes

Simcha
18 hours ago
7 min read

Remember that old word from the 1960s . . . vibes?

You don't hear it used as much anymore, at least not the way people used to mean it. Someone had good vibes. A place had weird vibes. A room felt off. A person felt easy to be around. We all knew what was meant, even if no one could fully explain it.

For the purposes of this blog, I am bringing that word back. Because the more Carla and I travel, the more I have come to believe that the vibe of a place may be one of the most important factors in whether or not we enjoy being there. Maybe even the most important one.

And by vibes, I simply mean this: how a place feels.

Not the practical facts. Not the list of attractions. Not whether the old town is beautiful, the restaurants are good, or the views are impressive. I mean that harder-to-explain layer underneath all of that. The emotional atmosphere of a place. The feeling in the air. The energy you pick up as you walk its streets, sit in its cafes, or spend a few days in its company. It is not always logical or easy to define. But it is real, and it matters.

Of course, vibes are subjective. Two people can be traveling side by side, seeing the same streets, meeting the same people, and eating in the same restaurants, and still come away with very different feelings about a place. That is part of what makes this so interesting. Vibes are not objective truth. They are simply the way we connect, or do not connect, with a place.

Said a little more esoterically, it is about how your energy meets the energy of a place.

We all understand this in relationships. Most of us know what it feels like to be drawn to someone in a way that is difficult to explain. There is a resonance there. A sense of clicking. A feeling that your energy somehow connects with theirs in a natural and meaningful way. And sometimes it can seem a little strange that not everyone sees in that person what you see. But of course they don’t. Because that connection is not about logic alone. It is about the vibe.

Places can be the same way. You can walk into a town or city and feel immediately at ease, even before you understand why. Or you can arrive somewhere that is undeniably beautiful, yet something in you never quite settles. You cannot necessarily explain it. The place may be lovely. The architecture may be wonderful. The setting may be spectacular. And still, the vibe just does not feel right for you.

Carla and I have definitely had this experience. There have been times when I have fallen in love with a place and she has felt much less taken by it. And the reverse has happened too. She has loved a place that, for me, felt a little flat. That said, considering how many places we have traveled to, it is remarkable how often we are on the same page.

And all of this, in many ways, is why my blog has become what it has become. There are countless travel blogs out there, and many of them do a wonderful job of telling you everything you could possibly want to know about a place: where to stay, what to eat, the best neighborhoods, the must-see sights, the best day trips. These blogs are useful, generous, and often incredibly well done. They provide a real service for people planning a trip.

But that has never really been the blog I wanted to write. It just does not interest me nearly as much. I am grateful those blogs exist, because they free me up to write about the thing that interests me most, which is not just what a place offers, but how it feels.

My blog is about the vibe. It is about trying to name the undertones of a place. The emotional weather. The feel beneath the facts. The thing that may not show up in photos or lists, but that may matter enormously once you are actually there.

Now, I am under no illusion that my read on a place is the final word. It is not. It is one person’s experience, and a deeply subjective one at that. But that is also all any of us really have. When I write about how a place felt to me and why, I am not trying to hand down a verdict. I am simply offering a point of connection, a starting place, a human response.

And sometimes those vibes can surprise us.

One of my favorite examples is Málaga, Spain. In planning our first of several trips to Andalusia, we left Málaga off the itinerary. We had done our research. We had watched the videos, looked at the photos, and read what people had to say. And while it all seemed perfectly nice, it did not strike us as the most beautiful or compelling place in southern Spain. We just weren't clicking with it.

Yet we kept hearing about how great it was, so the next time we went to southern Spain, we stayed in Malaga for a full month. Our research had not been wrong. There are certainly places in Andalusia that are more obviously beautiful. Málaga is also bigger than the kind of place we would usually choose for that long a stay. And yet it felt fantastic to be there. The whole of it felt greater than the sum of its parts. That was exactly how I described it in the blog at the time. It had a wonderful vibe. And the longer we stayed the more we loved being there.

The opposite happened for us in Nerja, Spain. On paper, Nerja seemed almost perfect. In photos, it looked idyllic. Beautiful coastline. Charming old town. The kind of place we assumed we would love. We were excited to get there. But almost as soon as we arrived, both Carla and I knew we didn’t like it.

Yes, it was beautiful. Yes, it had charm. But the vibe felt a little off to us. The longer we stayed, the more it seemed, at least to us, to have a kind of country-club feel for the over-sixty-five crowd, and I say that as someone who is well past sixty-five myself. I am not claiming that is what Nerja is. I am simply saying that is how it felt to us. And once that feeling set in, we could not shake it. We ended up shortening our stay and moving on.

That experience has stayed with me because it is such a clear reminder that vibes are powerful. Beauty and history alone are not always enough. A place can look wonderful, have compelling sites, and still not feel right.

And so, if there is one thing I would say from all of this, it is this: trust the vibes. Which is really just another way of saying trust your feelings. Trust your heart. Trust your gut.

Do your research, of course. Read what people say. Look at the photos. Make your plans. All of that is useful. But understand that no amount of research can tell you exactly how you will feel in a place until you are actually there.

And if you travel enough, you will almost certainly be surprised in both directions. Some places will be far better than they seemed on paper. Others will be less so. That is not failure. That is part of the experience.

Travel can seem, at first, like an outward experience. We are constantly taking in what is out there: new streets, new architecture, new food, new languages, new landscapes, new rhythms of life. Our senses are alive. Our eyes are busy. Our attention is pulled outward toward everything unfamiliar and new. And of course that is part of the joy of it.

But travel is also, in a deeper way, an inner experience, because everything we see out there lands somewhere within us. In our heart. In our spirit. In our feelings. In the quiet and often wordless place where we respond to what the world is offering us.

That is why two people can walk through the same town and come away with such different experiences. It is not only about what they saw, but about how what they saw landed within them.

I think what keeps calling us back to travel is not just the outer experience, but what it becomes within us. It is the way a place touches us. The way it opens something in us, calms us, excites us, unsettles us, or changes us. We travel for what we see, yes. But we keep returning because of what travel stirs and shapes inside us.

That is why I have come to trust vibes so much. Travel teaches us to pay attention to our inner life. It teaches us to notice what opens us and what closes us. What feels alive to us. What feels flat. What feels welcoming. What feels off. And the more we travel, the more we begin to understand that these inner responses are not small or secondary. They are often the deepest part of the experience.

The outer journey matters. But so does the inner one. And sometimes the inner one is the part that lasts. In the end, the vibe of a place may tell us more than anything else.

And if that sounds a little old-fashioned, or a little 1960s, I am fine with that. Some words are worth bringing back.