About Lee Rosen

I'm Lee Rosen. My doctor went on a guided tour of Italy last year. She said she likes a guide in uncertain places, and I made some quip about control being an illusion. But I meant it. Eleven years ago my wife Lisa and I gave up having a home, and we've been living in other people's places ever since: hotels, Airbnbs, pensions, boats, the occasional glamping tent. 120-plus countries, no guide, everything we own in our bags.

It works because I default to trusting people. Day to day, nearly everyone you meet is on your team: you want to sell a croissant, I want to eat one. We're natural partners in this endeavor. Most of the world runs on that arrangement, and it has carried us through places that make other people want a guide.

Lisa is drawn to ruins and war history. Iraq and Syria were her calls. I chase the obscure and the infamous: the Minsk apartment where Lee Harvey Oswald lived, the Moscow airport where Edward Snowden was stuck in the transit zone, the Panama City office where Mossack Fonseca kept the Panama Papers, the Tupperware museum in Orlando. We both love the nature spots; watching tigers in India is my favorite day of the last decade, and baby anything is irresistible. Lisa writes about this life every week at her Substack.

People are one thing; paperwork is another. I spent thirty years as a lawyer before this, and the habit of reading what I'm signing never went away. This life generates a lot to read: travel insurance policies, visa rules, foreign rental contracts, health coverage that may or may not cross a border with you, laws you didn't know applied to you until they did. This site is where I put what I find: the gap between what a policy markets and what its contract delivers, and whatever else eleven years of this teaches that a guidebook can't.

Some of it will be useful to you and some won't. Either way, it's what I'm paying attention to.

We post our itinerary if you want to see where we'll be. Email me if we're crossing paths.