Good Grief Travel

Derrik Dyka
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Places & Travel

Good Grief Travel is a free-form conversation about what happens when people go somewhere unfamiliar and come back different. One guest, 45 to 60 minutes, no script. Sometimes that's the other side of the world. Sometimes it's the other side of the street. The distance isn't the point — the door is. Some episodes are funny. Some are uncomfortable. Some are all of that at once. We go where the story goes — bad decisions, strange encounters, unexpected kindness, the places life sends you that you never chose. Honest, respectful, mostly unscripted. Strong language shows up occasionally, because real people swear when they're telling the truth. This is not a show about having life figured out. Nobody's handing out a map. Just evidence there's a way out — people who kept moving, went somewhere they were afraid to go, and came home changed. Or never came home at all.

Episodes

  1. Oct 15

    Good Gried Travel - See That Boob Tube,Dad? - Neil Laird

    See That Boob Tube, Dad?Neil Laird — documentary producer, novelist, and accidental time travelerGood Grief Travel · Episode 9 A broke twenty-something ducks into the New York Public Library for the air conditioning, wanders to the end of the stacks, and — for the first time in his life — turns left, toward history. Thirty years, seventy countries, and a thousand hours of television later, Neil Laird has filmed crumbling tombs and lost cities for Discovery, National Geographic, the BBC and nearly everyone else — and written himself into a trilogy of comic novels about a feckless TV crew that keeps messing up the ancient world one episode at a time. In a conversation that runs everywhere neither of us planned, Neil talks about the father who bet he'd fail, the morning he woke up feeling like he was floating on air on a road near the Iranian border, what he quietly gave up to become "the suit," and the feeling he's been chasing ever since. A few things we get into: The library book that rerouted his entire lifeThe life-insurance policy his dad bought on only one of his three kids — and whyMonkey porn, a grizzly bear, and getting arrested as a pirateWhy Egypt "did it first and best" — and why Derrik said no to going backBecoming a network executive, and what it cost him to stop being the guy in the tombAbout Neil LairdNeil Laird is a multiple Emmy- and BAFTA-nominated documentary producer who has made over a thousand hours of television across seventy-plus countries — history, archaeology, science and adventure for Discovery, National Geographic, the BBC, PBS, History, Science Channel and more, including launching Brain Games and Border Wars. After decades on both the production and network sides, he now writes the Prime Time Travelers series — comic novels about a TV crew that time-travels into the ancient world — and lectures on cruise ships and at festivals. The trilogy's third book, Prime Time Troy, is out now, alongside Prime Time Travelers and Prime Time Pompeii. Find NeilWebsite: https://www.neillaird.com/ — books, films, talks, and toursBooks: Prime Time Travelers, Prime Time Pompeii, and Prime Time Troy — search Neil Laird on AmazonIMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0481987/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neillaird/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gay_history — ancient queer historyFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61557422344116From the showGood Grief Travel is a weekly conversation with people who made a real, costly change — and found a way through. Hosted by Derrik Dyka, author of the travel memoir Good Grief Travel and the novel Greg: He's Fine. Website: https://www.goodgrieftravel.com/The memoir: Good Grief Travel by Derrik DykaThe novel: Greg: He's Fine (under the pen name Beau Griffin)

  2. Oct 8

    Good Grief Travel - Too Brave for My Own Good - Linda King

    Linda King has been to 43 countries and written fourteen books about it — and by her own count, half of them are catalogues of things going spectacularly wrong. She was a banker before this. In this conversation she tells the ones that aren't in the brochure: an engine blowing out over the Australian outback with her parents in the next seats, a holding room at the Chinese border with two armed guards and a stranger crying on the floor, and the sentence she lives by now — you can get the money back, you can't get your life back. It started with a four-month childhood road trip and one question to her father — can we just keep going? — and she's spent forty years answering it. We get into how she actually funds a life of travel, why the trip you're sure you can't afford is usually the cheap one, why she writes her disasters down while they're still happening, and the Miami hurricane that taught her how to get herself out of trouble. If you've ever talked yourself out of a trip because you "can't afford it," this one's aimed at you. FIND LINDAWebsite: https://www.thesmarttravelista.com/ Books (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/author/kinglin — the Smart Travelista guides (travel for less) and the Antics from Abroad series (the disasters; newest is Hot Mess) Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesmartravelista/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linda-king-81541523a/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thesmartravelista TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thesmartravelista Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Thesmartravelista X: https://x.com/the_travelista FROM THE SHOWGood Grief Travel is about movement, reinvention, and the trips that change a life. Follow or subscribe so you don't miss a conversation. More at goodgrieftravel.com. If this one put the itch in you — that's the idea. I wrote about where mine led in Good Grief Travel.

  3. Oct 1

    Good Grief Travel - Help Staying Put - Dianna Germany

    Dianna Germany was thirty-nine when her husband died suddenly, leaving her with four kids and a life she never planned to navigate alone. Instead of standing still, she kept moving — turning a lifetime of family travel into a career, and then into CuraVela Global, helping seriously ill people cross borders for treatment, work that grew out of the years she's spent fighting for her own son. In her first-ever podcast, Dianna and Derrik — both widowed young — trade the opposite ways they survived the same loss: she couldn't stop moving, he couldn't start. A conversation about motion and stillness, about being the steady one for everyone else, and about what she actually needed when no one told her to need it. Find Dianna: CuraVela Global — https://www.curavelaglobal.com Instagram — https://instagram.com/ddgermany LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianna-germany/

  4. Sep 25

    Good Grief Travel - He Built Hockey In China - And Couldn't Stop - Mark Simon

    When Mark Simon flew to Beijing in 2006 to teach English, he didn't even know there was hockey in China. Thirteen years later he'd helped grow the game from four clubs to a national scene — coaching in Beijing and Shanghai, working with the KHL's Kunlun Red Star, and watching a wave of Olympic money reshape the sport before the 2022 Games. Then the pandemic stranded him mid-flight, and he went home to Canada — carrying two hockey coaches' suitcases he never delivered and leaving behind two cats he paid rent for, six months, from the other side of the world. Six years later, he's going back — not to the mainland this time, but to Hong Kong, to build it one more time. This is a conversation about hockey in the unlikeliest place on earth, the money and ambition behind China's ice boom, and the harder question underneath it all: what makes a person keep leaving the thing they built? GUEST LINKS Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bingqiumarkLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marksimonhockey/Currently: Director of Player Development / Head Coach (U13–U16), China Hockey Group, Hong KongHis charity: Hockey Hands — teaching hockey and English to kids in orphanages and migrant schools FROM THE HOST  Derrik's memoir Good Grief Travel and his novel Greg, He's Fine are linked at goodgrieftravel.com, along with every episode.

  5. Sep 17

    Good Grief Travel - His Country, She Stayed - Chanoa Inez

    Chanoa Inez flew to Montenegro to start a life. Her partner was from there, and the whole plan — a new home, a new career on the coast — was built around his roots. They'd been in the country only a matter of days, everything still in storage back in Miami, when she woke one morning to find he had died in his sleep. She spoke barely a hundred words of the language. Most people would have flown home. She stayed — not for a week, but for nearly seven years. In this episode she tells Derrik what that morning actually took: opening the balcony to shout for help in English over a square full of holidaying families, the neighbor's teenage daughter who spoke enough English to come up the stairs, a funeral to navigate in a country that wasn't yet hers. She talks about why she didn't go back to Miami, what it meant to rebuild a life in the place where she lost him, and — nearly seven years on — why she finally left all of it for Los Angeles. The conversation turns on identity. Chanoa describes feeling like "less than one person" afterward, her sense of self so bound up in the relationship that losing him left her completely unanchored. Derrik, who lost his wife of twenty-four years, admits his own experience ran the opposite way — a rare, honest divergence between two people who have walked through the same kind of loss and come out understanding it differently. Her book, Dream On, grew out of everything that came next. Find Chanoa Book — Dream On: How to Create the New Life of Your Dreams After Upheaval or Loss (2025): https://www.chanoainez.com/Website: https://www.chanoainez.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chanoa/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chanoainez/Substack: https://substack.com/@chanoainez

  6. Sep 9

    Good Grief Travel - Seven Years in Bust Mode - Matt Savino

    Matt Savino — Seven Years in Bust Mode Episode description: In 2017, Matt Savino left a stable software career to drive the Pan-American Highway toward Ushuaia, the southernmost city on earth, in a silver FJ Cruiser. He never made it. Plantar fasciitis, thinning money, and a nationwide uprising in Nicaragua turned the quest into a detour — and the detour became Land Without a Continent. Matt talks about talking his way through student roadblocks on cold beer and respect, why he's felt more alone in London than in any war-adjacent backroad in Latin America, and the running list of reasons — COVID, the book, a wedding, his dad's health — that keep the trip in "bust mode" seven years on. A quiet, honest one about the difference between the leap you take and the one you keep putting off. Chapters: 00:00 — Two FJ Cruisers and a T-boned car01:49 — Physics, poker, and the $13-a-credit-hour career09:35 — Broke in San Francisco, and a moment of joy that stuck13:30 — Derrik's turn: leaving, loss, and landing in Bangkok15:30 — How a Patagonia photo trip became a drive to South America19:40 — Plantar fasciitis, running low, and shipping the car home22:25 — Teaching himself to write, four and a half years, one book30:00 — Into Nicaragua as the uprising spreads34:30 — The roadblock: beer, a homemade rocket launcher, and the crux of the whole trip44:20 — Seven years in bust mode48:20 — Less alone in Latin America than in London52:00 — The five-dollar bill that came back58:14 — Rapid fire: Vietnam, Antigua, and what's always in the FJ Links — Matt: Book: Land Without a Continent — via bookshop.orghttps://bookshop.org/p/books/land-without-a-continent-a-road-trip-through-mexico-and-central-america-matt-savino/fa4ab18a23d67b8a?ean=9781959099727&bkshp-astro=tWebsite: mattsavino.comInstagram: @ushuaia_or_bust · YouTube: @suzzer99 · Facebook: /MattSavinoAuthor · LinkedIn: matt-savino-7021ba8Links — the show: Good Grief Travel and Greg: He's Fine — goodgrieftravel.com

  7. Sep 3

    Good Grief Travel - Bravest Chicken in the World - Allison Gieschen

    The first time Alison Gieschen left the home she loved, she didn't get a say. She was fourteen, staying at a friend's over Christmas break, when someone knocked on the door and handed her a plane ticket. Her family had sold the farm — the horses, the animals, all of it — and she was moving south that day. She didn't speak to her parents for a year. Forty years later, she did it again — sold everything she owned and left. This time it was her idea. Alison and her husband Dan have been sailing around the world for eight years now: fifty countries, four oceans, one forty-three-foot boat named Equus. She writes books out there — two sailing memoirs with a third on the way, plus fiction and children's stories — and posts from ports most people will never see. She's watched manta rays swim up to the hull while her grandkids cheered over video from California. She's also hand-steered a broken boat 680 miles across the Pacific and lives with the fear that never quite leaves after your first ocean nearly kills you. She calls herself the bravest chicken in the world. Terrified of the storm, sailing through it anyway. This one's about what you carry when you make the big move — whether you jumped or got pushed — and how the person you become keeps changing with every mile. That close echoes her own line ("we are different, and we're still on the journey") without quoting it, and lands on the "edge of an unmade change" listener. Short paragraphs, honest early, understated out — your house style. Where to find Alison Books & author site: https://alisongieschen.com/ Sailing blog: https://sailmates.org/ Socials YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoWlRF2iuCXPNG8AkiYW-aA Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sailmates_on_equus/

  8. Aug 27

    Good Grief Travel - We're Leaving in Four Weeks — Paula Barnes

    Paula Barnes is Australian, has spent nearly twenty years living across Asia, and has moved eight times in that stretch — six countries, three separate stints in Hong Kong, and eight years in Singapore. Every one of those moves was for her husband's job. She calls herself an expat chameleon: dragon boating in Hong Kong, mahjong in Kuala Lumpur, pickleball in Singapore. New city, new version of Paula. Her three kids grew up between two hemispheres, went to boarding school in Australia, and are now in Sydney. She's in Hong Kong. Two and a half weeks in, she hasn't found a coffee place yet. Paula runs Truly Expat Travel, hosts a podcast of the same name, and takes small groups of women — Sri Lanka, Morocco, South Korea, Taiwan — on trips designed for people who spent twenty-odd years waiting for someone else's schedule to clear. This one goes to the arithmetic of a life like that. What it costs, what it gives back, and what her father would have made of it. GUEST LINKS — PAULA BARNES Website: https://trulyexpattravel.com/ Podcast: https://podcast.trulyexpattravel.com/ Expat lifestyle site: https://trulyexpatlifestyle.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/trulyexpattravel/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@trulyexpattravelpodcast TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@trulyexpattravel Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/trulyexpat/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulabarrecabarnes/ Host Website: https://goodgrieftravel.com

  9. Aug 20

    Good Grief Travel - My friend Bangkok Bill - Bill Mullen

    My Thai friends call me a local. The joke is that I know about a square mile of Sukhumvit extremely well and almost nothing else — which is exactly what living somewhere does to you. Bill Mullen made the opposite bet. A Thai friend called him out on his excuses and found him a $619 flight. Three weeks later he was sitting on a beach in Koh Samui looking at a bill so small it rearranged his retirement plan. He flew home, walked into his boss's office, gave three months' notice, and sold everything he owned. That was eight years ago. He's now spent those years getting deliberately lost in a country most visitors see about four percent of — mountain villages where he counted exactly one Westerner in three days and it was him, long-tail boat rides that cost ten dollars and take all afternoon, and the parallel Thai economy that most foreigners never find the door to. He's also the reason this show exists. I'd been sitting on the idea for a long time. He told me to stop talking about it and do it. We get into the resident versus the rover, why "where do I want to go" is the wrong question, how a Westerner pays 300 baht and his wife pays 40 for the same waterfall, and what he'd say to someone who's been calling Thailand a someday for years. This is the first episode of Good Grief Travel. Thanks for being here. IN THIS EPISODE The $619 flight that dismantled eight years of excusesA beach in Koh Samui, a bar bill, and the moment Key West got scratchedWhy his Plan B — teaching English — turned out to be the whole gameButapu: three days, five thousand people, one WesternerThe two-price system, and why the real value of Thailand is on the other side of itUncle Young, a hammock, a tarp full of fish, and the best ten dollars in the countryWhy "where do I want to go" is the wrong question to plan a trip aroundThe tuk-tuk tailor shop, told at his own expense800,000 baht that lived in a bank account for five minutesGetting told to go buy pants, mid-appointmentResident vs. rover — and the word I'm stealing from himBook two: circumnavigating the Gulf of Thailand on an 18-foot Hobie Cat named the magic carpetWhat to do if Thailand has been a someday for you FIND BILL Website https://www.thailandadventurenetwork.com Podcast: Thailand Adventure Secrets Book: Getting Lost in the Magic of Thailand: Island Hopping Down the Siam Spice Route — released September 8. Amazon and Barnes & Noble. His standing offer: Bill does free Zoom calls for anyone planning a trip to Thailand, MENTIONED On IHG points and five-star mornings in Asia — Bill and I both turn out to be Intercontinental people. Here's the long version of how that works: https://goodgrieftravel.com/2026/01/28/why-ihg-points-changed-how-i-travel-in-asia/ On the Thailand LTR visa — including the part where I got sent out mid-appointment to go buy pants: https://goodgrieftravel.com/2026/07/24/the-thailand-ltr-visa-what-i-wish-id-known-and-why-i-now-own-parachute-pants/ goodgrieftravel.com

  10. Trailer

    Intro

    Intro to Good Grief Travel

  • 1 Trailer
    9 Episodes

Trailer

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About

Good Grief Travel is a free-form conversation about what happens when people go somewhere unfamiliar and come back different. One guest, 45 to 60 minutes, no script. Sometimes that's the other side of the world. Sometimes it's the other side of the street. The distance isn't the point — the door is. Some episodes are funny. Some are uncomfortable. Some are all of that at once. We go where the story goes — bad decisions, strange encounters, unexpected kindness, the places life sends you that you never chose. Honest, respectful, mostly unscripted. Strong language shows up occasionally, because real people swear when they're telling the truth. This is not a show about having life figured out. Nobody's handing out a map. Just evidence there's a way out — people who kept moving, went somewhere they were afraid to go, and came home changed. Or never came home at all.

Information

  • Creator
    Derrik Dyka
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    10
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Derrik Dyka