Where normal rules don’t apply.
I think I was born with a little bit of wanderlust.
Long before I knew what the word meant, I loved the idea of going somewhere.
I moved around quite a bit growing up. Michigan. Nevada. Florida. Across the country and back again. There were long drives, new cities, different schools and plenty of flights back and forth visiting family.
It made the world feel accessible.
I became fascinated with airplanes and airports at a young age. There was something almost magical about walking into a terminal, looking at a departure board and seeing all those cities listed in front of me.
Los Angeles. New York. London. Tokyo.
People were going somewhere.
And I wanted to go too.
I loved flying, obviously. I loved the acceleration down the runway and looking out the window as everything on the ground became smaller before eventually disappearing beneath the clouds.
But I think what I really fell in love with was the possibility of it all. You could wake up in one place and, a few hours later, step off an airplane somewhere completely different.
Different weather. Different food. Different people. A completely different way of life.
I wanted to see it.
Then I Discovered the Rest of the World
My first trip overseas came while I was still in high school, when my dad and I traveled to England and France as part of a school trip.
That’s when international travel really got its hooks into me.
For the first time, I was walking through places I’d previously only seen in books and movies. The buildings were older than my own country. The accents were different. The food was different. People had their own customs, traditions and ways of living.
Even ordinary things became interesting simply because they weren’t my ordinary things.
There was an enormous world out there.
And I wanted more of it.
Not long afterward, my sister joined the Peace Corps in Paraguay and eventually moved to Brazil. Shortly before I left to study abroad in college, I went to visit her.
I loved Brazil immediately.
The beaches, tropical birds, culture, energy and, perhaps most importantly, an almost reckless commitment to carbohydrates.
Brazilians will happily eat rice with beans with pasta and apparently see absolutely nothing wrong with this arrangement.
Nor should they.
Carbs on top of carbs.
Carb heaven.
I had found my people.
But underneath the food and beaches, I was starting to discover something about travel that has stuck with me ever since. The famous landmarks are great. Go see them. Take the picture. But if you really want to experience a place, eat the food, drink what the locals are drinking, talk to people and pay attention to how they live.
Some of the best travel experiences happen around a table.
Australia Finished the Job
While attending the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to study abroad in Australia and Fiji.
Visiting another country is one thing. Spending enough time there to settle in and actually experience everyday life is different.
I loved it.
I loved the culture, meeting new people and trying foods I’d never encountered before.
Which brings me to kangaroo.
Before you judge me, try it.
Kangaroo steak remains one of my favorite meats to this day. It isn’t nearly as gamey as people imagine. Think of something similar to venison without the aggressive bite, incredibly lean and, when it’s cooked properly, tender enough to almost melt in your mouth like a filet mignon.
It’s fantastic.
Travel has a funny way of changing your definition of normal. Something that sounds completely bizarre sitting at home can seem perfectly reasonable when you’re halfway around the world and someone puts a plate in front of you.
Sometimes you discover something profound about another culture.
Sometimes you discover you really enjoy eating kangaroo.
Both are valuable lessons.
So Naturally, I Learned to Fly
Apparently riding around in airplanes wasn’t enough.
At 21, I started flight school. I eventually became a commercial pilot and flight instructor and went to work as a flight instructor for Delta Connection Academy in Florida.
For someone already obsessed with airplanes and travel, it was a pretty incredible way to make a living.
I got paid to fly airplanes.
Some days were spent practicing approaches, navigation and emergency procedures. Other days, my students and I needed to build flight time and somehow found ourselves flying down to the Florida Keys because conch fritters sounded good for lunch.
These were, of course, highly sophisticated aeronautical training missions.
The conch fritters were purely incidental.
Working for Delta also came with flight benefits, which was a particularly dangerous perk to give someone like me. I could fly standby and, assuming there was an empty seat, hop on an airplane and go somewhere.
So I did.
There was something wonderfully addictive about knowing I could look at the flight loads and potentially be hundreds or thousands of miles away later that day.
Unfortunately, the good times didn’t last forever.
When the housing and financial crisis hit, student enrollment fell dramatically. Eventually, I was laid off and forced to pivot into an entirely different career.
My aviation career had ended.
My desire to go somewhere hadn’t.
The Accidental Travel Life
I eventually started a business in the staffing industry. It became highly successful and, although recruiting had absolutely nothing to do with airplanes, it gave me something incredibly valuable.
Freedom.
I could largely control my own schedule. I could work remotely. And that meant I could travel.
So travel almost became a sport for my family and me.
Where haven’t we been?
What’s over there?
What should we eat?
And what is that weird thing on the menu everyone else seems afraid to order?
My wife and I have been together for nearly 20 years, and she has joined me on adventures all over the world. Our beautiful twin daughters have grown up traveling with us too.
Some of the greatest memories of my life have happened with the three of them thousands of miles from home.
We’ve seen spectacular places and eaten incredible meals. We’ve gotten lost, changed plans, stumbled into places we never intended to find and undoubtedly made some questionable decisions along the way.
I’ve learned that the trips you remember most aren’t necessarily the ones where everything went according to plan.
Sometimes the disaster becomes the story everyone is still telling ten years later.
A Family Scattered Around the World
My sister eventually made her way from South America to England, where she now lives with my beautiful niece.
Having family on the other side of the Atlantic gives me a pretty convenient excuse to travel, and I visit whenever I can—although never quite as often as I’d like.
Of course, sometimes I get tired of visiting England.
There are only so many English breakfasts one man can eat.
So every now and then, I’ll suggest a slight change of venue. Instead of me coming to England, why don’t we meet in Italy? Or Portugal? Somewhere warm, beautiful, with great food and preferably a cold beer nearby.
It’s still a family visit.
We’ve simply improved the venue.
So Why Start This Now?
After years of traveling and sharing pictures and stories, friends and family have asked me the same question more times than I can remember:
Why don’t you start a travel blog?
I’ve thought about it.
I’ve talked about it.
I’ve probably talked myself out of it a dozen times.
Eventually, you have to stop talking about the trip and book the damn ticket.
So here we are.
Welcome to The Airport Republic
I don’t want this to become another perfectly curated travel website where every beach is empty, every hotel room is immaculate and every meal is described as life-changing.
That’s not travel.
Travel is messy.
Flights get canceled. Hotels occasionally look considerably better online. You get lost. You order things you can’t pronounce. You misunderstand people. You end up somewhere you never intended to be.
Sometimes you find an incredible little restaurant you’ll remember for the rest of your life.
Other times you pay $27 for a terrible sandwich at an airport because you’ve been awake for 19 hours and have completely lost control of your decision-making abilities.
That’s travel too.
And I want to write about all of it.
There will be useful information here—destinations, airport intel, places worth staying, foods worth trying and mistakes I’ve already made so perhaps you don’t have to.
But I also want to tell stories.
The funny ones. The embarrassing ones. The ones that went completely sideways. And occasionally, the ones about a place or a person that changed the way I look at the world.
Because that’s what travel has always been about for me.
Not collecting countries.
Experiencing them.
This Is More Than a Blog
I don’t want The Airport Republic to simply be my travel blog.
I want it to become a community.
A slightly unconventional little country for travelers, aviation geeks, food lovers, beach bums, beer drinkers, adventure seekers and anyone else who still feels something when they walk into an airport and look at a departure board.
You don’t need to have visited 50 countries. You don’t need to fly first class or stay in five-star hotels.
You just need to be curious about what’s out there.
Around here, we’re all citizens.
And our founding principle is pretty simple:
Normal rules don’t apply.
Think about it.
The moment you walk into an airport, society quietly agrees to suspend a surprising number of its normal expectations.
Sleeping on the floor? Acceptable.
Eating dinner at 5:00 in the morning? Nobody cares.
Walking around in sweatpants with a pillow strapped around your neck? Welcome aboard.
And then there’s the most sacred of all airport traditions.
The morning beer.
Anywhere else, ordering a beer at 7:00 a.m. might generate a few concerned looks. At an airport, nobody even notices.
Maybe you’re flying to Europe. Maybe you just landed from Asia. Maybe your internal clock thinks it’s 9:00 at night.
Or maybe you just want a beer.
We don’t judge.
This is The Airport Republic.
Have the beer.
Your flight is boarding.
So grab your passport, bring your appetite and come see the world with me. We’ll eat some incredible food, drink a few beers, learn a few things and probably make some questionable decisions along the way.
Hopefully, we’ll come home understanding this strange, beautiful planet—and the people living on it—just a little better than when we left.
The border is officially open.
Welcome to The Airport Republic.
Blake Lawson
Airport Republic
Citizen #1
