Travel surface: pictures and videos from places I go

The Field Atlas covers the curriculum side of the body's domain (where I plan to go). The bucket list covers the headline objectives (sky, sea, mountains, machines). Neither captures the actual visual record of where I have already been.

Closest existing analog is /food. A wall of images, each labelled with where it is and nothing more. The story stays off the page; this is the looking, not the writing about the looking.

What it is

A new top-level surface at /travel (or /places, name to settle). Lives under the Living menu group beside Food, the Field Atlas, and The List. Renders as a tiled gallery: images sized for impact, short videos inline, every tile carries a single line of geography (city, country) and nothing else.

Open questions

1. Static vs vault-backed. /food ships a hardcoded FOOD_ITEMS array because the gallery is small and rarely changes. Travel will grow continuously. Vault-backed (travel/<slug>.md per place, images embedded from R2) keeps the editing path consistent with Library, Living, Notebook. Lean: vault-backed.

2. Video. Native <video> from R2 covers the short-clip case cleanly and matches the editorial register. YouTube or Vimeo embeds bring third-party chrome that doesn't fit. Lean: R2-hosted, native element only, hard cap on clip length so the page stays light.

3. Organisation axis. By country, by trip, by year, or by terrain (city, mountain, coast, desert)? Pick one ordering and commit. By trip is honest; by country is searchable; by terrain is the most editorial. Lean: by trip, with country and terrain available as filters.

4. R2 storage cost. Travel media is heavy. Need an upload + compression pipeline (same idea as the hero portrait pipeline already in memory/hero-image-pipeline.md). One sweep of rclone per trip rather than per-file.

Edges

Same publishing constraints as the Field Atlas:

• No live location broadcasting (the typewriter's location pulse is current state; travel is past tense).
• No family detail.
• One sentence of context per tile, max.

The accountability is incidental here; this surface is closer to the food gallery's logic. The record matters because the body carrying it is temporary.

Next steps if this becomes Building

1. Settle the route name (/travel vs /places).
2. Migration for a travel_entries table (slug, title, location, country, terrain, captured_at, media JSON, body).
3. Vault parser entry for travel/<slug>.md.
4. Tile component with image / video variants.
5. Filter row (country, terrain, year).
6. Compression + upload pipeline doc.
7. Seed the first trip (whichever felt most rewarding to look back on).