Compass Dispatch: Holiday Travel and our Year in Review
The first year of By Their Own Compass was amazing and we're already looking forward to sharing more travelers' tales with you in 2026
Experienced travellers approach the holiday season with the same mix of amusement and trepidation that serious drinkers regard New Year’s Eve and St Patrick’s Day: We’re glad to see so many people engaged in our favourite pursuit but bemoan the fact that our preferred haunts, whether airports or the local pub, have become overrun with amateurs making amateurish mistakes. Overpacking. Underplanning. Stuffing batteries inside exotic fruit (that Aunt Ida will love since she’s never been to Palau) wrapped in aluminium foil stashed at the bottom of a carry-on rolling bag. All of it having the same effect on the queues at airport security as Aunt Ida’s candied Christmas pudding tends to have on one’s alimentary canal.
Fortunately, your correspondents are skipping air travel this year. One of your correspondents is making the homeward-for-the-holidays journey on the M2. Your other correspondent lives on a beach in Thailand and is waiting for the circus to fly his way starting on Boxing Day. But just because we are not partaking in holiday voyages doesn’t mean travel is far from our minds as the year comes to a close.
The idea for By Their Own Compass began when Jeremiah, our resident historian, contacted Sarah, our resident travel expert, with an idea to combine their interests into a podcast. There are travel podcasts. There are history podcasts. There were not, so far as we could tell through a half-hearted Google search, any podcasts that combined the two. Starting in October, we began releasing episodes.
Our first episode featured the 14th-century traveller Ibn Battuta. The Moroccan saint of wanderlust turned what should have been a post-adolescent gap year trip to Mecca into a 30-year masterpiece of vagabonding and remote work opportunities. So vast was his itinerary that this initial episode only focused on three years of Ibn Battuta’s epic adventures, and the episode still ran to nearly three-quarters of an hour. We will definitely be revisiting Ibn Battuta again soon. There are so many stories to tell.
Our second episode returned Sarah and Jeremiah to China, where both lived for many years, to follow in the boisterous footsteps of Emily “Mickey” Hahn. Mickey was an American journalist who arrived in Shanghai in 1935. Over the next decade, she travelled throughout wartime China, writing biographies of some of China’s most famous women, meeting (and bedding) some of the most interesting men on the China coast, and writing about her adventures every step of the way. Mickey is another subject that demands a follow-up episode. High on our list of future Emily Hahn episodes is the two years she spent living in Africa, a sojourn that ended with an 800-mile hike across the continent. (Be sure also to check out our Emily Hahn bonus episode, a conversation between Sarah and Tina Kanagaratnam about how to find “Mickey’s Shanghai” in today’s China)
Finally, we just released our holiday episode, a By Their Own Compass Christmas Cracker, featuring some of travel’s most famous fiascoes. From bankrupting Scotland to insulting Chinese emperors to the world’s longest one-star review, you’ll want to listen to our holiday gift for you.
Your correspondents are taking a bit of a holiday break, but we will be back with our next episode on 8 January featuring Sacagawea, one of the most famous women in American history. A 16-year-old mother who accompanied the expedition of Lewis and Clark across the Louisiana Purchase between 1804 and 1806. She didn’t sign up for the journey, but without her it’s quite possible that neither Lewis nor Clark would have made it to the Pacific Ocean.
That’s all for now. Lunch is ready and the gin and tonics won’t drink themselves.
Happy Holidays,
By Their Own Compass
P.S. If you get a chance, head over to Apple Podcasts, give us a follow, and a nice review. It’s the best holiday gift the podcast team could receive!
*No matter what Cousin Eddie says.