The room was never the point.

“Any chance you could pick me up at the little airport?”

I started using Airbnb back when it felt very different from what it often feels like today.

One of my earliest trips with it was while flying a Piper Archer from Minnesota toward Los Angeles. I’d land somewhere along the way, look for an interesting place nearby, and message a host asking something like: “Any chance you could pick me up at the little airport?”

Sometimes they said yes. And those stays became much more than a room.

I met people I never would have met otherwise. We talked, ate together, traded stories, explored places, and sometimes stayed in touch long after the trip was over. That human connection was what I loved about the early sharing economy.

The bedroom was almost incidental.

Wabasha, and the eagles

Years later, when we opened our own home to travelers in Wabasha, Minnesota, I wanted to create that same kind of experience.

People came from different places, with different backgrounds and different stories. Some stayed briefly. Some lingered around the table. Some were simply traveling through the Mississippi River valley. Others came to see the bald eagles soaring along the river.

The point was never really the room. It was the people.

Eventually, though, that same openness put us into conflict with the city. And this is where the story got wonderfully absurd.

Exhibit A: the cookies

One of our early Airbnb reviews included this sentence:

“Douglas and Colette were so welcoming and met us at the door when we arrived with fresh baked cookies.”

The city printed out the reviews, took a yellow highlighter to that line, and apparently considered it useful evidence of the seriousness of the alleged activity taking place at my house.

Fresh. Baked. Cookies. Highlighted.

As evidence in court. For a criminal trial.

What made it even better was that the sentence was grammatically ambiguous. Read literally, it almost sounds like the guests may have been the ones arriving with the cookies. So naturally, this raised important legal and culinary questions. Who actually had the cookies? Who baked them? Were they, in fact, fresh baked cookies? Or were they actually scones?

At one point I imagined subpoenaing Cookie Monster as an expert witness so he could testify as to the true nature of the alleged baked goods. I also seriously considered bringing a tray of fresh baked cookies to trial and offering them into evidence for the jury to examine during deliberations. After all, if fresh baked cookies were part of the prosecution’s theory of the case, it only seemed fair that the jury should be allowed to carefully consider the evidence.

I thought they might appreciate that.

The city wanted to introduce Airbnb reviews as evidence at trial. From my perspective, these were out-of-court statements written by guests, and they should have been treated as hearsay rather than proof of what supposedly happened inside my house.

Free as an eagle

But instead of hiding from the absurdity, I made fun of it. While the case was still active, I made T-shirts.

On the front was FREE AS AN EAGLE. That wasn’t just a slogan. It was an homage to the bald eagles that regularly soared past the house and through the Mississippi River valley — one of the things people came to Wabasha to see in the first place. They also seemed like a pretty fitting symbol for the moment.

On the back, the shirt read: “I came for No Lodging or Fresh Baked Cookies, and all I got was this T-shirt.”

And people actually wore them around town. The whole thing became part protest, part joke, and part celebration of the freedom to meet people, share stories, and welcome someone into your own home. Many locals were making fun of city officials for wasting taxpayer funds on this.

The reviews became creative writing

Then the guests started having fun with it too. If the city wanted to treat Airbnb reviews like courtroom evidence, people decided they might as well make the reviews worth reading.

One review that Airbnb later removed is still one of my favorites. It described the property as if it were some surreal blend of PBS’s Posh Nosh and Stefon from SNL: a “gourmand style meal,” a tour of the wine cellar, becoming familiar with wines from Tuscany and the Barolos of Piedmont, Dansuke watermelon served with saffron butter cream sauce and Almas caviar, white truffles from Croatia, and finally this masterpiece:

“Doug spoke fondly of his trip to Croatia to adopt the 2 pigs that roam freely on the property, diligently bringing the truffles to him when he called.”

It went on to describe Colette as a gourmet chef, duck with foie gras, and a “Pi in the Sky” experience that exceeded the wildest imaginations.

It was ridiculous. It was hilarious. And it made the whole situation funnier, because there was a real possibility those kinds of reviews could end up being read in front of jurors.

The stakes were real

Around that same time, I reached out to Airbnb hoping they might support what we were doing. I told them that, from my perspective, Airbnb had become much more than lodging. It felt more like a social network built around travel, connection, and shared experiences. The room was just the excuse for people to meet.

Not long afterward, Airbnb began expanding into Experiences. I’m not suggesting one caused the other, but the timing stuck with me because it reinforced something I already believed: the most interesting part of the platform was never just access to a bed. It was access to people, places, stories, and experiences you might never have encountered otherwise.

Meanwhile, the case kept moving forward. And beneath all of the jokes, the stakes were real. If convicted, I was facing up to six months in jail.

We got all the way to the point where jurors were about to be selected. Then, just before jury selection, the city offered a continuance for dismissal, which got the case out of court but gave the city up to six months to bring it back, if they decided to.

So Cookie Monster was spared the subpoena. The jury never got its cookies. And the increasingly imaginative Airbnb reviews never got their courtroom debut.

No lodging. No fresh baked cookies.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, the dispute produced its own name. The phrase was deliberately tongue-in-cheek: the city had been duly informed that my private home was neither a commercial lodging establishment nor a restaurant.

No lodging. No fresh baked cookies. Problem solved. At least in theory.

Eventually, the case went away. The name didn’t. So I incorporated:

No Lodging or Fresh Baked Cookies, Inc.

At first, the name was mostly a souvenir from an absurd chapter of my life. A little rebellion. A reminder not to take ridiculous situations too seriously. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the original Airbnb experiences that started all of this represented something I still believed in — something that seems harder to find now.

After the trial, the rainforest

If that chapter taught me anything, it’s that the worst one doesn’t have to be the last one. What came after has been about resilience, new experiences, and doing things almost nobody else on Earth gets to do.

In 2016, after the trial, I went to Guyana. For three years I volunteered as a medevac pilot with Remote Area Medical — RAM — flying in the Amazon rainforest.

RAM was started by Stan Brock, the former co-host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Stan sold everything he had to start it. He slept on a mat at the organization’s building in Tennessee and showered with a garden hose. 60 Minutes did a story on Stan and RAM, and recently a follow-up.

After Guyana, I volunteered as a medevac pilot in the Serengeti, in Tanzania. Landing often meant making a pass over the airstrip first, to clear the giraffes, camels, elephants, gazelles or wildebeest off the runway.

Still landing at little airports

I sold the house in Wabasha in 2021. These days I’m traveling the world in my own airplane, a Flight Design CTLS.

Which puts me right back where all of this started: landing somewhere small, hoping someone might be around to say hello.

What NoLodging.com is for

Today, so much travel has become transactional. Search. Book. Check in. Get a door code. Sleep. Leave.

And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. There are beautiful properties, great hosts, and incredibly efficient systems. But efficiency isn’t the same thing as connection.

A perfectly staged bedroom isn’t what I remember from those early trips. I remember the people who picked me up at little airports. The conversations. The meals. The unexpected detours. The invitations. The people I never would have met if I had simply checked into a hotel room, closed the door, and gone to sleep.

That’s the idea behind NoLodging.com: a peer-to-peer community built around a simple idea — people can do more together than they can independently.

That might mean travelers meeting locals. It might mean someone pulling up a chair at a dinner table. It might mean finding someone to explore a city with, share an adventure with, build something with, learn from, teach, help, host, or simply sit down and talk to. It might mean discovering the person you never would have met because there was no reason for your paths to cross.

And I think it can eventually become much more than travel:

• Shared homes, and community-owned properties.
• People pooling resources to buy or create things none of them could easily do alone.
• Local services — cleaning, maintenance, transportation — and other opportunities created around the community.
• Reputation systems that help people establish trust based on what they’ve actually done and how they’ve treated others.
• Ways to bring in reputation you’ve already earned elsewhere, rather than starting from zero every time you join a new platform.
• Places where people can offer what they have, find what they need, and create experiences that might never exist in a conventional marketplace.

In other words, I don’t want NoLodging.com to become another site that simply sells access to bedrooms. There are already plenty of those. I want it to help create reasons for people to meet.

Because the room was never really the point. The room was just where the story happened. The table mattered because people sat around it. The door mattered because someone opened it. The cookies mattered because someone thought enough of a stranger to bake them. Even the ridiculous reviews mattered because people took something adversarial and turned it into humor, creativity, and a shared story.

My hope is that NoLodging.com becomes a place where people open the door a little more often. Where travel becomes less sterile. Where reputation matters more than polished marketing. Where strangers have a reason to become acquaintances, and acquaintances sometimes become friends.

Some of the best things that happen in life weren’t scheduled, optimized, packaged, or purchased. Sometimes someone simply says: pull up a chair.

And occasionally, apparently, somebody brings cookies.

Come as strangers. Leave as friends.