Let me be the first to tell you that I am a romantic when it comes to travel. I love motor court hotels, grand old train stations, and the scene in parking lots outside old Soviet termini where microbuses are loading, where the best shawarma is sold next to cemetery flower arrangements and bottles of cognac. Over a few years of being an archaeologist, I have spent a lot of time in transit spaces—sleeping on a pile of luggage in western Ireland or on an overnight bus in coastal Peru, waiting for a train in the middle of the night under a single lamppost in the open steppe near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan, or hailing a ride on the Aparan-Yerevan highway, and then spending hours pressed against patient riders as the microbus jolted down the mountainside to the city.