Contact the desk

The desk is one person in Charleston, and it keeps posted hours three mornings a week. Write with a question about a trip, a correction to something already published, a public place worth adding to the list, or a request about your own data. Everything lands in the same inbox and gets read in the order it arrives. The form below reaches me directly, and so does the address printed further down this page if you would rather use your own mail program.

Before you write

A few small things make a letter much easier to answer well, and they are worth the extra thirty seconds.

• If your letter concerns one particular entry, name the trip and its date in the first line. Sixteen records are more than enough to get me confused about which gravel lot you mean.
• If you are reporting a change on the ground, tell me when you were there. A closed gate in March and a closed gate in July are two entirely different facts.
• If you are suggesting a place, say how a visitor reaches it and whether the ground is open to everyone. This journal covers public ground only, so private property and gated land cannot appear here.
• If your letter concerns your personal data, send it to register@travelundercost.com so that it lands in the correct queue from the start.
• If you are writing about published material and who owns it, the Terms of Use describe what a notice should contain before it reaches the desk.

There are also things the desk simply cannot help with, and it is fairer to say so here than after you have written. It cannot arrange a trip, hold a spot, book lodging, or take a payment, because the company does none of those things and never has. It cannot give medical or financial guidance. It will not guess about conditions on a road I have not driven myself, because a confident guess from a stranger is how people end up on gravel in the dark. When a question falls outside what the records actually cover, I say so plainly instead of inventing an answer that sounds better.

Response times

The desk sits open on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings, Eastern Time. Trips are driven on Tuesdays, so that morning often belongs to the road and the mail waits for Thursday. Most letters receive an answer within three business days, and corrections usually move faster than that, because a correction changes a page that people are reading today. A note that arrives on Saturday afternoon waits for the next open morning, so plan around that if your question is tied to a weekend drive.

If your message concerns a fact that could mislead a reader right now, put the word correction in the first line and it moves to the front of the stack. Requests about personal data follow the separate schedule described in the Privacy Policy. Concerns about published material and its ownership follow the process in the Terms of Use, which sets a response window of ten business days. Anything sent on paper takes as long as paper takes to cross the state.

Volume is modest, which is the honest reason the desk can answer at all. A one-person journal cannot promise same-day replies during a week of long drives, and I would rather set the expectation low and beat it than the reverse. During a stretch of day trips the inbox sits untouched for two mornings, and the backlog gets cleared in one sitting when I am home again.

The desk