Travel guru Rick Steves finds surprising joy staying in one place

THIS SUMMER, I TRAVELED. THERE WERE SUN-soaked Italian hill towns; a sleepy Portuguese fishing village; a musty, centuries-old timber church in Romania. I saw it all from my couch, or sometimes the faded hammock on the porch. And I did it under the gentle narration of Rick Steves, the unassuming travel magnate whose childlike wonder and irreverent curiosity, seen in decades of cheap and cheerful guidebooks and travel TV shows, have introduced multiple generations of tourists to the charms of small museums and the pleasures of a walking tour.

Now, with the coronavirus pandemic making international travel obsolete, Steves—just like the rest of us—has been staying home. “You can’t go to Europe? Poor boy,” he reminds himself with a burst of laughter. “From my point of view, my life has been on an