How I Plan and Capture a Travel Episode on the Road
I don’t travel with a giant creator backpack full of microphones, tripods, and extra batteries.
When I’m on the road making Maxwell’s Kitchen travel episodes, I’m just collecting footage and information. The actual podcast-style voiceover and studio production happen later, when I’m home and can line up all of my thoughts.
That matters because travel content can get out of hand fast. If you’re not careful, you come home with 900 random clips, no idea what anything cost, and a vague memory that one of the gyros in Greece was life-changing.
My system is simple. I shoot video on an iPhone 16, grab extra POV footage with Meta glasses, keep obsessive notes in Apple Notes, and use Flighty to keep the flight side of the trip from becoming chaos. Then I come home, sort the trip city by city, and turn it into a proper episode in Premiere.
This is how I do it.
I am not trying to record a full podcast on the road
That’s the first distinction.
When I travel, I’m not hauling my full studio setup through airports. I’m not trying to record perfect voiceover in a noisy hotel room or on a windy beach. I’m getting the visuals, the prices, the logistics, the moments, and the small details I know I’ll forget later.
The studio side happens at home on my normal chain: Shure SM7B, Zoom H6, BMPCC 4K cameras, and Premiere. The road side is much lighter. That split keeps the trip manageable and the final product better.
My travel setup is basically just a phone, Meta glasses, and a notes app
That’s the whole point.
iPhone 16
The iPhone is my main camera on the road. I shoot in landscape because the full YouTube “24 Hours in...” episodes go out in 4K widescreen. Later, in Premiere, I crop some of that footage vertically for Instagram Reels.
I just use the regular iPhone camera app. No special field rig, no cinema cosplay. It’s fast, it’s always with me, and it gets me footage I can actually use.
Meta glasses
The Meta glasses are mainly for walking shots. Getting off the plane, strolling through a city, moving through streets, entering a square, that kind of thing.
They’re good for footage that feels more natural and less “guy holding up a phone in front of his own face.” Since they default to portrait, they’re especially useful for social clips too.
Apple Notes
Apple Notes is the real hero.
I use it to keep track of:
flight info and booking links
dates
hotels and addresses
what we ate
what things cost
transportation details
random frustrations
useful logistics
jokes and observations I know I’ll want later
That note becomes the memory of the trip.
Here’s the kind of thing I write down: flight delays, whether the airport was efficient, whether the train ticket machines were annoying, what the taxi cost, whether the breakfast was good, whether Ryanair pulled the bag sizer move, and what I ate right outside the station. That stuff matters later when I’m building an episode people can actually use.
Flighty is the best flight app I’ve used
Flighty is one of the few travel apps I actually feel strongly about.
What makes it useful is that it updates in real time and gives you the kind of information that reduces airport stress instead of adding to it. Flighty says it tracks inbound aircraft well before departure and uses machine learning to predict delays caused by late-arriving planes, sometimes before the airline posts the delay itself. It also surfaces gate and terminal information, flight status alerts, and other real-time changes in one place.
That’s helpful when you’re moving between cities quickly and trying to keep the whole trip from turning into a spreadsheet with emotional damage.
The part I care about most is simple: it helps me know what’s happening now, what’s likely to happen next, and whether I need to start jogging through an airport.
I document more than just pretty shots
A lot of travel content looks good and tells you nothing.
That’s not what I’m trying to make.
My goal is to document enough of a place that someone watching can decide whether they would actually want to go there. That means I’m not just filming beaches and church towers. I’m also documenting what things cost, how the transit works, what the airport was like, where I stayed, how long something took, and whether a place was genuinely worth the time.
I want people to feel like they were there, but I also want them to leave with a practical sense of the city.
That usually means I’m trying to capture:
arrival footage
transportation
the hotel or neighborhood
food
prices
one or two honest reactions that are not brochure language
A place can be beautiful and still be annoying. A place can be chaotic and still be worth it. That’s the kind of thing I want the episode to show.
I shoot a lot of B-roll on purpose
I try to get as much B-roll as I can while I’m there.
Not because I’m trying to win an award for “most footage taken by a sweaty man on vacation,” but because editing gets a lot easier when you have options. Walking shots, harbor shots, market shots, signs, menus, train stations, streets, hotels, food, beaches, random wide shots, all of it helps later.
The trick is not just filming a lot. It’s filming things that will help tell the story.
If I know I’m going to talk later about the bus line, I want footage of the bus stop. If I’m going to talk about a beach being too crowded, I want a shot that proves it. If I’m going to mention a meal, I want the plate, the restaurant exterior, and ideally some surrounding context so it doesn’t feel like I stole the photo from Yelp.
My travel notes are basically the script outline
When I get home, I go through one city at a time, usually every other week.
That’s important. I don’t try to process the entire trip in one giant editing sprint because that would ruin my will to live.
For each city, I go back through my Apple Notes and rebuild the day from what I wrote down:
where I landed
what happened
how I got into town
where I stayed
what I paid
what was worth it
what annoyed me
how the place felt
Then I record the voiceover in the studio and build the whole thing in Premiere from Adobe.
It takes me around 2 hours to record and work through notes for a city, then another 6 to 8 hours to edit, caption, and cut reels out of it. That’s not nothing, but it’s still a lot more efficient than trying to do full studio-level production while actually traveling.
The whole system is built around remembering real details
This is the thing people underestimate.
When you get back from a multi-city trip, the days blur together fast. The gyro in Greece becomes the pasta in Italy becomes the taxi in Spain becomes the airport story in Ireland. If you don’t write things down while you’re there, you will absolutely invent fake details later and call it memory.
That’s why I track prices, addresses, flight numbers, and small observations in real time. Every day. I’m not trying to journal. I’m trying to leave enough breadcrumbs that Future Cody can make a useful episode without lying accidentally. Because this memory ain’t what it used to be.
My rule for travel episodes
Get enough footage and information to tell the story. But, don’t let filming ruin the trip. You want to enjoy it AND document it.
That’s the balance.
I want to document as much as I can so people feel like they’re there, but I’m not trying to turn every meal and every walk into a production meeting. The whole point of Maxwell’s Kitchen is that it still feels like a person went somewhere, not a drone with a credit card.
That’s also why I care about costs. A lot of people assume Europe is automatically too expensive. It isn’t. If I can show the flight price, the hotel price, the food prices, and the local transportation clearly, the viewer gets something much more useful than a generic montage of pretty buildings.
The best travel workflow is the one you’ll actually repeat
That’s really the whole lesson.
If your travel content system requires a suitcase full of gear, three charging bricks, a field recorder, two panic attacks, and a minor divorce from reality, you probably won’t keep doing it.
Mine is simple:
iPhone 16 for the main footage
Meta glasses for walking shots and point-of-view moments
Apple Notes for the memory of the trip
Flighty for flight sanity
studio recording and editing when I get home
That’s enough.
It’s not the fanciest workflow in the world. It is, however, the one that gets finished.
