R+R

R+R is the travel publication that makes Poppy Wright’s long-held ambition to earn a living through travel writing tangible, while also exposing a cost of turning travel into a job. Its assignments take her to far-flung destinations and give her access to experiences she could not otherwise describe as ordinary vacations. Yet professional travel brings a different cast of people and a different purpose: the chance encounters that once made Poppy feel connected give way to encounters shaped by publicity and the prospect of a write-up.

Work and the promise of travel

Poppy initially approaches social media as a long-term route to making travel her full-time work. R+R eventually gives that ambition a professional form. The assignments send her to cities across the United States as well as destinations farther afield; the surviving list includes Santiago and Easter Island. A later itinerary divides time between Sweden and Norway, four days in each country. These details establish the reach and variety of the work without suggesting that every trip follows one fixed format.

The distinction between travel as a personal pursuit and travel as employment matters to Poppy because the work appears, at first, to deliver what she wanted: movement, new places, and a life organized around travel. In retrospect, she recognizes that the trips changed after she began working for R+R. The issue is not that the destinations cease to be impressive. She recalls going on amazing trips. Rather, the job alters the social conditions of travel: where she once met people without an immediate professional purpose, she now encounters people connected to the business of travel coverage.

Assignments and the performance of leisure

The publication’s work can also overlap with Poppy’s personal plans. When she proposes combining a summer trip with a work trip, she downplays how different the experience will be from the trips she and Alex Nilsen used to take. Part of the appeal is the contrast she imagines: arriving at a resort with their worn T.J. Maxx luggage and being greeted with champagne. The image captures the odd doubleness of the assignment. Poppy and Alex bring the familiar, unpolished traces of their friendship into a setting associated with luxury and professional hospitality, while the trip is no longer simply their own.

That contrast makes R+R’s travel legible as both experience and presentation. Poppy’s work depends on going places, but a work trip also places her inside an environment where hospitality and publicity meet. The champagne welcome is not evidence that every assignment is staged in the same way; it is a particular anticipated moment that lets Poppy see how far this kind of travel differs from earlier journeys. The publication’s professional itinerary can supply access and spectacle, yet it cannot guarantee the sense of closeness she once found while traveling.

The Croatia assignment

In Croatia, an older man named Bernard travels with Poppy and Alex as R+R’s official photographer. His presence makes the professional dimension of the trip concrete: the two friends are accompanied not only by one another but by a photographer connected to the publication. Bernard is a recent widower, a loud talker who wears a fleece vest and often positions himself between them without noticing their exchanged looks. He repeatedly tells them he was five foot six in his prime, though he is shorter than Poppy.

The three visit Dubrovnik’s Old Town, with its high stone walls and winding streets, and the rocky beaches and clear turquoise water of the Adriatic Sea. But the account of the assignment also dwells on the social friction of traveling with Bernard. Poppy has previously traveled with photographers who were fairly independent; Bernard, unused to living alone and eager for company, fills the shared time with questions and stories. He does not notice that Alex’s answers shrink to monosyllables, or that his questions often serve mainly as openings for stories of his own.

The episode shows a practical and emotional consequence of bringing a publication’s photographer into a trip between friends. The scenic itinerary remains, but the company changes its atmosphere. Bernard is not presented as malicious; he is a lonely, talkative traveler whose needs wear Alex down. At the same time, his role as the official photographer marks the trip as professional work, rather than simply another private journey for Poppy and Alex.

What the job changes

Poppy’s clearest assessment of R+R comes when she compares these assignments with her earlier travels. She had loved meeting new people and feeling connected. Growing up in Linfield, she had felt lonely and assumed that leaving would bring her among people more like herself. Travel helped, in part because its encounters were temporary and unburdened by a shared history: chance meetings made it easier for her to open up and to believe that others could love her.

After she gets the R+R job, she says, the trips and the people change. Instead of those incidental connections, she meets chefs and hotel managers who want write-ups. The trips can be amazing and still leave her feeling empty when she returns. Her explanation distinguishes seeing impressive places from feeling connected to people in them. Professional access answers the question of where she can go; it does not answer what she was seeking when she traveled.

This recognition does not establish that Poppy simply rejects travel writing or that she immediately leaves R+R. She considers the possibility of quitting her job and taking her blog seriously again, imagining a return to meeting people she had encountered on earlier travels, but she also recognizes that changing the work alone would not make her happy. R+R therefore occupies an important, complicated place in her story: it fulfills the career goal she pursued while clarifying that travel itself was never a substitute for human connection. The organization’s assignments make the difference visible between being surrounded by places and people as part of a professional transaction and feeling genuinely connected to them.