Vellum: Eyes in the Sky

For a long time I've wanted a travel assistant. Not an app I open and poke at when something goes wrong. Something quieter than that. A pair of eyes in the sky that could look at my itinerary, see where I was, and tell me the things I'd want to know without me ever having to ask. I almost imagined a friendly, wiser British gentleman like Batman’s Alfred. Someone that could see the field ahead of me and make my journeys better.

I'd think about it on trips, usually at the wrong moment. Standing somewhere new with my phone out, thumbing between a weather app and a map and a half-remembered blog post, trying to assemble a picture of the day. That part of travel has never been the part I love. The managing. The low hum of small decisions that quietly pulls you out of the place you came all that way to be in.

So before our trip to Denmark and the Faroe Islands, I stopped thinking about it and built the thing. It’s called Vellum.

The name comes from the material old maps were drawn on. That felt right. Vellum isn't the map. It's the layer underneath, the thing the map is drawn on top of. It holds your itinerary, watches the world moving around your trip, and reaches out to you. You don't open it. It comes to you.

The first build was fast and a little scrappy. A small service doing the plumbing. Weather pulled from a free forecast. Claude doing the thinking. Everything delivered over WhatsApp, because we'd be abroad and WhatsApp works anywhere there's a signal.

The shape of it is a loop. Each morning it sends one message about the day ahead. A couple more times during the day it looks at what's coming and checks it against what's actually happening out there, and if something is worth saying, it says it. When I reply, it answers in context, because it knows where I am and what I'm meant to be doing. No dashboard. No feed. No app to install. Just a message that arrives when it should, and silence when it shouldn't.

Then the trip taught me what my desk couldn't.

My first instinct had been to make Vellum about logistics. Weather, closures, timing. Useful enough. But a few days into the Faroes I realized I'd built something a little too close to a forecast. And a forecast is not why you go to the Faroe Islands.

So I changed what it was for. The point of Vellum isn't to tell you it might rain. It's to tell you the thing you wouldn't have found on your own. Not "go see Sørvágsvatn," because you already know that one. More like: the lake reads best from the high western ridge, not the lower viewpoint everyone walks straight to. The turf-roofed church worth the small detour. The dish worth ordering before it's gone for the season. Weather earns a mention only when it actually changes the plan.

Everyone knows to go see the Eiffel Tower. I wanted something that would tell me about the little bar tucked at the back of the hotel that nobody walks into.

Using a tool you made while standing in the place you made it for is a strange and good thing. You feel every rough edge right away. Vellum talked too much at first. It got eager and sent three messages where one would have done. It warned me about Monday on a Saturday, which only made Saturday feel crowded. So I tightened it. Fewer words. One message at a time. Today's things today, tomorrow's closer to tomorrow.

And then there were the mornings it got it right. A message would land, and I'd actually change my afternoon because of it. That was the whole idea, sitting there in my hand.

Vellum is a Tool, in the Cove's sense of the word. Something built to make a journey better. Right now it is small and it is mine, held together with the kind of code you write in the Air Canada lounge while you wait for your flight to Denmark. But it worked. It briefed me each morning in the Faroes, pointed me toward a few things I would have walked right past, and mostly it let me put the phone away and just be there.

The next voyage for it is to grow up a little. To become something other travelers can use, not only me. That's a longer build, and a hopeful Vagabond Cove Artifact for the future.