Marc Leblanc

My friends joke that my travel reviews read like engineering reports. They’re not entirely wrong.

When you’re travelling with 8-year-old twins and a baby, the difference between a good trip and a catastrophic one often comes down to: how many steps between the metro platform and the street level? Does this museum have a lift that actually fits a double buggy? Is the stroller parking at this café indoors or on the pavement in the rain?

My decade as an urban planner in Montréal and Berlin trained me to read a city’s infrastructure the way most people read restaurant menus. The Berlin U-Bahn, for instance, is actually more accessible than most people think — but you have to know which lines and which stations have the working lifts on which platform.

That hyper-practical lens is what I bring to every review I write. Not just “can you bring a buggy?” but “here’s exactly which entrance to use, which tram stop is closest, and which café has a high chair that doesn’t collapse.”