All Over the Place
Homebody's guide to staying put
Description
Geraldine DeRuiter did not set out to become a travel writer. By her own telling, she is the wrong person for the job in almost every measurable way. She gets carsick. She has no sense of direction worth speaking of. She is, with some seriousness, afraid of pigeons. The kind of person who narrates a trek across continents usually arrives with a duffel bag of competence — fluent in three languages, calm in airports, able to read a map upside down. DeRuiter arrived with a phobia of birds and a tendency to throw up on moving objects, and somehow that became the whole point.
Her 2017 book, All Over the Place, tells the story of how a homebody ended up circling the globe more or less by accident. The short version: she had a job, then she didn't, and a husband whose work kept him on planes. The longer version involves her mother, a brain that doesn't always cooperate, and the slow discovery that the people least suited to wandering sometimes have the most honest things to say about it. The book is funny in the way that only genuinely anxious people manage to be funny — out of necessity, as a survival tool.
What makes the book worth reading isn't the itinerary. Plenty of writers have seen more, gone further, suffered more photogenically. DeRuiter's contribution is the opposite of expertise. She is the friend who texts you from a foreign train station to say she's lost again, and somehow that text is the best thing you'll read all week. The places matter less than the person stumbling through them, which turns out to be a sturdier subject than any sunset.
The question we’re asking : What does the world look like through the eyes of someone who would genuinely rather be home with nachos?What we’ll see : How a self-described homebody turned her terrible sense of direction, her motion sickness, and her family into one of the more honest accounts of what travel actually feels like.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The accidental travel writer
DeRuiter is upfront about her unsuitability, and the book leans on it from the first pages. This is not a person who grew up dreaming of distant capitals, collecting passport stamps the way other kids collected trading cards. She liked staying in. She liked the predictable comfort of her own apartment, her own snacks, a world with no surprises in it. The instinct to travel — to deliberately put yourself somewhere confusing and far from your bathroom — struck her as a strange thing to want.
And yet the title of her blog, and then her book, is Everywhereist made flesh: a woman who ended up everywhere precisely because she'd planned to be nowhere in particular. The gap between who she is and what she does is the engine of the whole thing. Most travel writing flatters the reader by suggesting that, with enough courage and the right packing cubes, anyone could do this. DeRuiter does the reverse. She suggests that you can be a wreck, a worrier, a person who cannot find north with a compass and a friend pointing at it, and the trip will still happen to you.
02Chapter 2 — A husband, a layoff, and a one-way habit
The mechanics of how a homebody ends up homeless-by-choice are, in DeRuiter's case, almost mundane. She lost her job. Around the same time, her husband Rand's work began taking him to conferences and meetings scattered across the map, and rather than sit alone in an empty apartment, she started tagging along. The trips were not grand quests. They were the byproduct of someone else's calendar, and she filled the in-between hours by wandering off, getting lost, and writing it all down.
Rand functions in the book as a kind of patient counterweight — the steady one, the one who reads the map and doesn't get queasy on boats. Their marriage is one of the quiet pleasures of the writing. He is not a prop in her adventures so much as the reason the adventures are survivable. There's a tenderness in how she renders him, the way you write about someone you've decided to stop performing for. He gets the jokes about her, and he keeps showing up at the gate with the boarding passes.
03Chapter 3 — Lost, queasy, and afraid of the birds
The physical comedy of the book is real and specific. DeRuiter genuinely gets motion sick — the joke in the brief about tying her shoes is barely an exaggeration of the spirit of it. She gets lost with a thoroughness that would be impressive if it weren't so inconvenient, turning the wrong way out of every station, ending up streets from where she meant to be. And the pigeons. Her fear of birds is not a cute affectation; it's a recurring obstacle in cities that are, inconveniently, full of them.
These aren't framed as charming quirks to be overcome by the final chapter. She does not arrive at some triumphant moment where she conquers her phobias and strides confidently through a piazza. The fear stays. The nausea stays. What changes is her relationship to going anyway, the willingness to be uncomfortable in exchange for being somewhere. That refusal of the redemption arc is part of what makes the book ring true. Real anxiety doesn't get a tidy resolution; you just learn to carry it onto the plane with you.
04Chapter 4 — What we keep when we keep moving
Step back from the individual trips and the book makes a quiet argument about what travel is actually for. It is not, in DeRuiter's hands, about the destinations. She is not collecting wonders or cracking open the secrets of foreign cultures for delivery to her readers. The places are mostly a backdrop against which she becomes briefly, productively disoriented. And disorientation, it turns out, is where the writing lives. You see yourself more clearly when you have no idea where you are.
There's a useful distinction buried in the brief that opens this article: some people are built to unwrap the world and hand it to the rest of us, and some people are built to stay home and eat nachos. The joke conceals a real claim, which is that the second group has been undersold. The anxious, the directionally hopeless, the ones who'd rather be on the couch — when they do travel, they bring back something the naturals can't. They bring back what it feels like to be out of your element, which is most of what travel actually is for most people.
05Conclusion
All Over the Place ends where it more or less began: with a woman who would, given the choice, mostly choose to stay in. The trips happened, the blog became a book, and through all of it DeRuiter never pretends to have become someone braver than she is. The fear, the nausea, the missed turns and the dreaded birds are all still there at the close, accompanied now by a marriage, a body of work, and a family history she's learned to carry rather than escape. The homebody did not become a wanderer. She became a homebody who writes very well about wandering.