A NEWSLETTER FROM Pryority Travel

My wife and I were doing what every couple does at 9pm: firing memes back and forth across the couch while the TV played a show we'll never finish in the background.

 

Then Henna sent over a reel from the Ash London Show, the three of them battling over the greatest key changes in music history. We watched it once. Then again. Then we actually put the phones down, danced around the room, and spent the next hour naming our own and creating a new playlist.

 

You know the exact moment they were talking about. The song is rolling along, good, familiar, and then the whole thing lifts a step. Whitney decides she wants to dance with somebody. Bon Jovi is suddenly halfway up the fretboard. Beyoncé stacks four of them at the end of "Love on Top" purely to show off. The energy jumps, the hair on your arms stands up, and there you are, on your feet in your own kitchen, singing to no one.

That lift is not the whole song. It is a few seconds. But it is the part you wait for, the part you remember, the reason you reach over and turn it up.

 

Then it hit me - Trips have key changes too.

 

It is the moment the road stops climbing switchbacks and the valley drops away and Lake Como is just sitting there below you, and everyone in the car goes quiet at the same time. It is the plate of cacio e pepe at a mountain rifugio you almost skipped, that turns out to be the best thing you eat all week. It is a corner you turn on foot in a town you'd never heard of, where the light does something to the park in front of you that will have you trying to describe that feeling to people for years.

 

Nobody plans a whole trip around the hotel lobby. What you remember, is the key changes.

Here is the part most people miss: those moments feel spontaneous, and the good ones are almost always set up. The view lands because you are on that road at that hour, not stuck behind a tunnel of tour buses. The rifugio lunch happens because someone knew to send you up the mountain on the right day, before the fog. Spontaneity, done well usually has a stage manager.

So no, I don't really sell destinations. Everybody has the destination. I build the trip so the key changes are waiting where you'll actually hit them, and so there is room to stand up in the kitchen, so to speak, when one lands.

 

The trip is the song. The key changes are what I plan around.

P.S. We are still picking our faves, so I need some tiebreakers. Reply with your all-time greatest key change and I'll add the winners to the running list. And if you want to lose your own evening, here is the playlist of the best key changes ever. You have been warned. :-)

A FEW DETOURS WORTH TAKING

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