Good Grief Travel

Derrik Dyka
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Self-Improvement

Good Grief Travel is conversations with people who left one life for another, and what it cost them to go. 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.

  1. 2d ago

    Julie Greene - Can I have two?

    Julie Greene sold everything she owned — the house, the car, even the cat — and flew one-way to a village in Bali. She meant to use it as a base for seeing Asia. She stayed eight years. Then her 90-year-old mother needed her, and Julie folded up that life and came home to Portland, where she grew up. In this conversation she talks about leaving, coming back, and the question that became the title: when someone asks where home is, can the honest answer be “can I have two?” Along the way — a 1978 trip behind the Iron Curtain that lit the travel bug (and a stranger in a Moscow park who wanted to buy the jeans off her legs), her mother’s wartime family history and the day they stood on that ground again, a $10-a-night homestay that became a life, a $1,100 villa over the rice fields, and what it actually takes to move abroad and build a life you love — twice. FIND JULIE GREENE Website: https://www.liveyourdreamoverseas.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julieoftheworld/ Her course and forthcoming book: Live Your Dream Overseas — The Adventurer’s Guide to Moving to a Foreign Country ABOUT THE SHOW Good Grief Travel — conversations with people who left one life for another, and what it cost them to go. Hosted by Derrik Dyka. goodgrieftravel.com

  2. Nov 5

    Good Grief Travel - I Opened My Mouth and Said Hello - Barry Maughan

    Barry Maughan was doing well in New York advertising — Crest, Honeycomb, the corner office in sight — when he and his wife Suzanne sold up, bought a Volkswagen camper they named Bridget, and set off with no plan past "head south." What started as a European jaunt became a drive down the length of Africa: Michelin maps, no phones, a one-year-old in the back, and a border slammed shut by a coup that rerouted everything. Along the way he talks his way into Cairo as the guest of one of Egypt's most powerful men, bleeds the tires down to sneak a too-tall camper onto a river barge, gambles the last of the fuel across the plains of northern Kenya, and ends up at the southern tip of the continent watching two oceans close over it. Half a century and a Voice of America career later, he's writing it all down for one reason — to be a bridge to the people who come after. A conversation about saying hello to strangers, and the doors it opens. Find Barry: https://www.barrymaughan.com

  3. Oct 30

    Good Grief Travel - Hi, I'm Your Sister - Allie Grack

    She went looking for the family that gave her up — and found draft horses, a brother, and herself. At eight years old, Allie Grack was driven down a gravel road to a stranger's house and told, very calmly, that if she didn't like the rules she could walk back to town on her own. She spent the next few decades proving she could do exactly that — eleven schools in six years, foster care, teen motherhood, and eventually a marketing agency she built from nothing. Then she did the one thing a person who learned to need no one almost never does: she went looking for the family that gave her up. What she found is one of the warmest, strangest, most honest hours we've recorded — an aunt across a hotel-lobby table, a brother she'd never met, and a biological father who, impossibly, raised the same draft horses her company is named for. Allie is funny, unvarnished, and entirely herself, and somewhere in here she makes peace with the little girl who got her this far. Come for the reinvention. Stay for "hi, I'm your sister." CHAPTERS0:00 — The stories we don't tell anymore 1:17 — The Hobo Convention Capital of the world 3:57 — A nomadic childhood: divorce, Ames, foster care 5:38 — Eleven schools 11:28 — On making it to this age 12:29 — The gravel road at eight 14:48 — Butch, Bev, and being sent back 17:57 — Finding her biological family on Ancestry 20:00 — The Tom Selleck father 24:08 — Workhorse, and the draft-horse coincidence 30:21 — The door gets kicked in 35:11 — "Hi, I'm your sister" 43:11 — Little Allie: "it was worth it" 46:27 — The man who saw potential, not chaos 54:07 — "Don't threaten me with a good time" 59:10 — Rapid fire LINKSAllie — Workhorse Marketing → teamworkhorse.com Allie on LinkedIn → linkedin.com/in/allie-grack-teamworkhkorse Allie on Instagram → @alliegrack18 My book, Good Grief Travel → goodgrieftravel.com HASHTAGS#GoodGriefTravel #adoption #fostercare #DNA #ancestry #reinvention #podcast #Iowa #Minnesota

  4. Oct 27

    Good Grief Travel - The Best Year of My Life Got Me Deported - Chancellor K. Jackson

    Episode 10 — Chancellor K. Jackson: The Best Year of His Life Is the Year It Broke Him Chancellor Jackson flew to Beijing to teach English and ended up doing fourteen days in a Chinese jail — deported at twenty-three, home with nothing, a drug charge behind him. Instead of burying it, he put his real name on a book about it and built a publishing life on the worst two weeks he’d had. He calls that year the best of his life and the one that broke him, in the same breath — and he’d still tell you to go live somewhere far from home. We get into the football career that didn’t pan out, the job search that sent him to the other side of the world, the knock on the door on April 4th, the cell with fourteen other men and nine wooden beds, the flight home, and how a friend’s outline in his phone turned the whole thing into a #1 bestseller. Plus the number he didn’t notice until he sat down to write — and why he named his character Lucky. In this episode: How a kid from Smyrna, Georgia ends up teaching English in BeijingApril 4th, 2019 — the arrest, the interrogation, the fourteen daysThe detail he didn’t catch until he started writing the bookComing home deported at twenty-three, and the doorway where the book was bornWhy he turned his own story into a novel narrated by “Lucky”The case for living abroad, not just visiting — from the one guy who paid full price for itFind Chancellor: Website: Korleh Publications — korlehpublicationsllc.com Book: 14 Days in Beijing — on AmazonMore books: You Love and You Learn · Real Love Never Dies · The Power of Becoming: Seven Pillars of Growth and EmpowermentInstagram: @korlehjLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chancellor-jackson29Good Grief Travel — honest conversations with people who made a real, costly life change. Hosted by Derrik Dyka.

  5. Oct 15

    Good Grief 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)

  6. 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.

  7. 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/

  8. 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.

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5
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

Good Grief Travel is conversations with people who left one life for another, and what it cost them to go. 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
    13
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Derrik Dyka
  • Show Website
    Good Grief Travel

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