I Tried Gen Z’s Favorite New Way To Travel—And I Get The Hype
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Overview
I’m one of those people who wants to see the entire world. No flight is too long, no climate is off limits, and yes, I’m still manifesting a trip to Antarctica one day. There are really only two things standing between me and the ever-growing list of destinations in my Notes app: limited PTO and an unfortunately not-unlimited travel budget.
So when I heard about the way Gen Z is squeezing more travel into both, I was intrigued.
Airbnb calls it “lore-tripping”: skipping the obvious vacation destinations in favor of smaller, under-the-radar towns with interesting histories, local legend, and the kind of attractions you probably won’t find replicated in 15 other cities. And apparently, Gen Z is onto something. Airbnb surveyed a group of Gen Z travelers and found that 90% of them are interested in visiting small towns and under-the-radar destinations this fall, drawn by cheaper trips, local culture, and the thrill of finding somewhere that feels still undiscovered.
Best Places To Lore-Trip This Fall:
– Hot Springs, Arizona
– Helen, Georgia
– Point Pleasant, West Virginia
– Twentynine Palms, California
– Rapid City, South Dakota
– Williams, Arizona
– Wildwood, New Jersey
– Gibsonton, Florida
– Leavenworth, Washington
– Bemidji, Minnesota
Instead of automatically booking Paris, Miami, or another destination everyone on your Instagram feed has already visited, the idea is essentially to be the first in your group chat to discover somewhere new.
To chart my own new travel path, Airbnb invited me to spend a weekend lore-tripping in Twentynine Palms, California, a desert town just outside Joshua Tree National Park that is having a moment of its own. According to Airbnb, searches for Twentynine Palms among Gen Z travelers are up more than 50% this fall.
I went into the weekend thinking I was testing a here-today-gone-tomorrow travel trend, but I came back home wondering why I don’t take trips like this more often.
Getting Off The Grid — Literally
The beginning of the drive was familiar. Having made the trip from Los Angeles to Palm Springs for Coachella more times than I’d like to count, I recognized the seemingly endless rows of wind turbines almost immediately. But instead of stopping there, we kept going farther into the California desert, past mountains and those wonderfully strange sculptural Joshua trees until my husband and I reached our home for the weekend in Twentynine Palms.
We arrived at Casa Del Desierto just after sunset, which, admittedly, made my first introduction to lore-tripping slightly eerie. The house sits in the desert with few neighbors and very little artificial light around it. After living in cities for most of my adult life, I’m accustomed to streetlights, headlights, apartment windows, and the general glow of other human beings being nearby. Out here? Darkness. Desert. Silence.
By the next morning, the unfamiliar lull had become my favorite part.
I woke up before dawn and went outside to sit by the fire pit as the sun came up. The sky slowly turned this almost unbelievable orange-creamsicle shade that looked more like a painting than something happening directly in front of me. I meditated for a while and, for once, managed not to think about the frankly offensive number of unread emails waiting in my inbox. Of course I took pictures. I am still me. But eventually I put my phone down and just sat there.
That became an unexpected theme of the weekend. Lore-tripping made me want to disconnect in the best possible way and to just recharge with nature as the plug.
Details
Now don’t get me wrong, the house definitely helped.
One of the advantages of choosing somewhere less obvious is that your accommodations can become part of the reason you take the trip rather than simply the place where you sleep between activities. Casa Del Desierto was spacious and peaceful, with the kind of indoor-outdoor setup that makes you actually want to stay put. There was a huge bathtub, his-and-hers showers, and the aforementioned fire pit, which quickly became our default spot whenever we had nowhere else to be.
And, because this is Refinery29, I should also mention: There were approximately a million places to take a good outfit photo.
My husband may have summed up the appeal better than I could. He described the desert’s energy as “infectious,” with an eccentric, earthy feeling unlike anywhere else. He loved how quiet it was, and told me he could see himself returning to Joshua Tree anytime he needed to clear his mind.
The stillness even followed him into his workouts. He went running outside, and without the usual soundtrack of traffic, sirens, and people rushing past him, exercise felt surprisingly meditative. My husband described running through the desert as making him feel closer to God: “It’s just me and nature,” he explained when he came back home.
I understood exactly what he meant.
The best part of the trip was finding places I wasn’t looking for. There’s a particular thrill to traveling somewhere famous. You finally see the monument, eat the thing, stand in the spot you’ve seen hundreds of times online. But there’s another kind of pleasure in arriving somewhere with almost no preconceived ideas about what you’re supposed to do.
That’s where lore-tripping really clicked for me.
A short drive from our Airbnb was Más o Menos, which may genuinely be one of the coolest coffee shops I’ve ever visited. I ordered a strawberry-banana matcha while a DJ played Lauryn Hill classics mixed with a ton of other feel-good sounds. And the coffee shop transforms into a 21-and-over hangout at night.
Then there was Kitchen in the Desert. This is one of those places that people should be driving from miles and miles away just to sit at chef Everton Gordon’s table. I have a habit when I travel: Once I find food I love, I will shamelessly go back rather than gambling on somewhere new. So yes, during a weekend-long trip, we ate there twice. The menu was fresh, unexpected, and exactly the kind of discovery that makes you immediately start recommending a place to friends.
None of it felt like we were working through a checklist of Things You Must Do In Twentynine Palms. We were just … there. Exploring. And maybe that’s the real luxury of going somewhere that isn’t overloaded with must-see landmarks.
So would I lore-trip again? Absolutely. I’m not suddenly giving up on Paris (or Antarctica, I’m still coming for you). But this trip changed the way I think about what actually qualifies as a vacation.
There’s a tendency to save our PTO and travel budgets for the big trips: the expensive flights, famous cities, packed itineraries, and destinations that require months of planning. Lore-tripping makes a convincing argument for the spaces in between. A weekend somewhere unexpected can still give you the feeling I’m usually chasing halfway around the world: discovery.
And apparently, I’m not alone. Airbnb says 60% of surveyed travelers are planning a weekend getaway this fall, and its data shows that more weekend trips happened during fall than any other season in 2025.
For travelers trying to see more of the world without unlimited money or vacation days, perhaps the answer isn’t always figuring out how to go farther. That random town you always drive past might be the getaway you never knew you needed.
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Originally published at www.refinery29.com.