The Secret to Unforgettable Travel: Why “Très Awesome” Is the Only Standard Worth Having
There’s a particular feeling that hits you somewhere between the third croissant and the second glass of Bordeaux, sitting at a café table while pigeons argue over a crumb near your feet and the whole city hums along without the slightest concern for your schedule. It’s the feeling that you have stumbled into something genuinely, unreservedly, très awesome.
That phrase — borrowed halfway from French elegance and halfway from the kind of unbridled enthusiasm that makes strangers turn and smile — captures something that most travel guides never quite manage to articulate. It isn’t luxury, necessarily. It isn’t Instagram-perfection or a five-star rating. It is that ineffable quality of an experience that makes you feel more alive than you did before it happened.
This is a post about chasing that feeling, understanding it, and building it into every trip you take, every meal you order, every sunrise you drag yourself out of bed to watch.
What Does “Très Awesome” Actually Mean?
Let’s start with the obvious: “très awesome” is not a phrase you’d find in a French dictionary. It is, technically speaking, a hybrid of two languages, two sensibilities, and two entirely different eras of enthusiasm. The French “très” — meaning “very” — pairs with the very American “awesome” to create something that feels both sophisticated and effortlessly fun. That tension is intentional.
Because the best experiences in life tend to sit in exactly that tension. They are refined but not stuffy. Exciting but not exhausting. Beautiful but not untouchable.
When something is très awesome, it earns that designation not by checking boxes but by leaving an impression. You remember it a year later. You describe it to a friend at dinner and catch yourself saying, “No, you don’t understand — it was different.” You find yourself Googling it at 11pm just to relive it for a few minutes.
That is the standard. And once you’ve experienced it, settling for less feels almost offensive.
The Philosophy Behind the Chase
Most people plan travel the way they plan errands. They create a list of sights to see, restaurants to visit, hotels to book, and then they execute the list like a project manager closing tickets. The trip ends, the photos go online, and somewhere deep down there’s a nagging feeling that it wasn’t quite as transformative as they’d hoped.
The très awesome philosophy asks you to flip this model entirely.
Instead of starting with a list of what, start with a question of how. How do you want to feel on this trip? What do you want to carry home with you that can’t fit in a suitcase? What story do you want to tell?
When you start from those questions, the logistics follow naturally — and more importantly, the decisions you make along the way start serving your actual goal rather than just filling time.
A traveler who wants to feel connected to local life will skip the tourist restaurant recommended by every aggregator and instead follow a local into the side-street market. A traveler who wants to feel genuinely moved will spend three hours in front of a single painting rather than speed-walking through every gallery. A traveler who wants adventure will say yes to the thing that scares them a little.
This is not about being contrarian or avoiding anything popular. Some popular things are popular because they are genuinely, legitimately très awesome. The point is to choose with intention rather than default.
Building a Très Awesome Morning
The morning of a trip sets the entire tone, and most people waste it.
Here’s what the très awesome version looks like: you wake up slightly earlier than planned — not because you set an alarm out of obligation, but because the city outside your window is making sounds you don’t want to miss. You skip the hotel breakfast (not always, but today) and walk until you find a place where actual residents are eating. You order whatever they’re having, even if you can’t pronounce it. You sit with your coffee and your notebook and you write down nothing practical — just impressions. The smell of the kitchen. The argument two tables over that you can’t understand but somehow follow. The quality of the light.
This is not a morning that produces productive outputs. It does not tick any boxes on your itinerary. But by 9am, you are more present in that city than most tourists will be at any point during their entire stay. And everything that follows in the day is colored by that presence.
The très awesome morning is available anywhere. In Tokyo, it means finding the coffee shop in the basement of a building that has no sign and three seats. In New Orleans, it means sitting on a stoop while someone practices trumpet a block away. In Cape Town, it means driving out to the waterfront before the market opens and watching the boats come in.
You don’t need to travel far to find it. You need to slow down enough to see it.
The Art of the Très Awesome Meal
Food is the fastest portal to the soul of a place, and the très awesome meal is not always the one at the restaurant with the Michelin star.
To be clear: Michelin stars exist for good reasons, and some of the most transcendent eating experiences on earth happen in those dining rooms. But the category of très awesome is wider and more democratic than that.
The très awesome meal might be a bowl of pho at 6am in Hanoi, the broth so perfectly balanced that you understand for the first time why people travel specifically to eat it. It might be a wood-fired pizza in a Naples neighborhood where the queue snakes around the block and nobody seems to mind because the conversation is good and the anticipation is part of it. It might be your grandmother’s recipe, made with local ingredients you found at a market that morning, eaten with people you just met at a hostel who are now, improbably, your friends.
What makes a meal très awesome has nothing to do with the price per head. It has everything to do with context, intentionality, and presence. Are you actually tasting what’s in front of you, or are you eating while scrolling? Are you talking to the person who made it? Do you know why this dish exists, what history it carries, which hands shaped the tradition?
When you eat with that kind of attention, even simple food becomes extraordinary.
Why the Unplanned Moment Is Often the Best Moment
Every seasoned traveler has a version of this story: the plan fell apart, the booking was wrong, the train was late, the weather closed in — and what happened instead became the best part of the trip.
This is not coincidence. It is the nature of très awesome experiences to live outside the schedule.
When everything is planned, you are executing. When the plan dissolves, you are living. You are forced to be resourceful, to talk to strangers, to notice things you would have driven past at full speed. The missed train that leaves you stranded in a small town for an afternoon might introduce you to a local festival, a family who invites you to dinner, a view from a hilltop that no travel magazine has ever featured because no travel magazine has ever thought to look.
This is not an argument for being disorganized. Good logistics remove stress and create space for serendipity. But there is a meaningful difference between a trip that has a structure and a trip that is a prison of pre-commitment. Leave gaps. Build in afternoons with no agenda. Say yes to the invitation you didn’t plan for.
The très awesome moment is almost never the one you scheduled.
Très Awesome at Home: The Local Life You’ve Been Ignoring
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that no travel blogger wants to say out loud: the très awesome life is not exclusively available to people who can afford plane tickets.
Your own city, your own neighborhood, your own ten-block radius — these are places that visitors arrive in with wide eyes and genuine curiosity, seeing things you’ve stopped noticing. The bakery you walk past every morning without going in. The park that’s beautiful in a specific way at a specific time of day that you’ve never bothered to discover. The museum you’ve been meaning to visit for four years.
The très awesome philosophy is a lens you can apply at home with the same results you’d get abroad. Walk a route you’ve never taken. Eat somewhere you’d normally dismiss as too unfamiliar. Strike up a conversation with someone who isn’t like you. Sit in a public space and observe it rather than rushing through it.
You will find things worth carrying with you. That is guaranteed. The only question is whether you’re willing to look.
How to Share a Très Awesome Experience Without Ruining It
There is a particular tension in the social media era between experiencing something wonderful and performing the experience of something wonderful, and this tension can quietly hollow out the very thing you came for.
Here is a useful heuristic: experience it first, document it second, share it eventually.
Take the photo if you want the photo. But put the phone down first. Stand in the moment long enough that you have something to remember independently of the image. Let the experience live in your body before you package it for an audience.
The très awesome post — the one that actually communicates something real — comes from someone who was genuinely present for what they’re describing. You can feel the difference. The caption that says “magical” and means it and the caption that says “magical” as a formula for engagement are not the same thing, even when they use identical words. People know.
If you share your très awesome experiences from a place of genuine feeling, something interesting happens: they become gifts. People read them and feel, even secondhand, a flicker of what you felt. That’s the real value of travel writing, of food photography, of the postcard your grandmother kept on her refrigerator for thirty years. Not proof of presence but transmission of feeling.
Making Très Awesome a Practice, Not an Accident
The people who consistently have très awesome experiences are not luckier than everyone else. They are more practiced at a particular set of habits.
They say yes more often than no. They eat at the bar and talk to the bartender. They ask the taxi driver what neighborhood they’d show someone who wanted to see the real city. They accept uncertainty as part of the deal rather than a problem to be solved. They pack lighter than feels comfortable, because lightness is freedom. They travel slower, spending more time in fewer places rather than the inverse. They read about a place before and after visiting, not just during.
Most importantly, they have given themselves permission to prioritize the quality of their experience over the quantity of it. They are not collecting countries like stamps. They are not running a checklist. They are trying to feel something, and they are willing to do the slow, patient, occasionally uncomfortable work of actually feeling it.
That is not a personality trait you either have or don’t. It is a practice. It gets easier and more natural the more you do it. And it starts, always, with a decision to hold your experiences to a higher standard — to insist, quietly but firmly, that ordinary will not do.
The Standard You’re Allowed to Demand
You are allowed to want more from your life than competent mediocrity. From your meals, your travels, your mornings, your conversations. You are allowed to hold out for the thing that actually moves you rather than settling for the thing that merely fills time.
Très awesome is not a destination. It is an orientation. A way of showing up to your own life with enough attention and enough appetite that the world has a real chance to impress you — and, more often than you’d expect, it rises to the occasion.
The croissant is still warm. The wine is still good. The pigeons are still arguing. And if you are paying attention, right now, today, wherever you are — there is something in your immediate vicinity that is waiting to be très awesome.
All it needs is your full and genuine presence.
And now you know the standard. The only question left is whether you’re going to hold yourself to it.
