AMSTERDAM — Derek Poulsworth has stood at the edge of the Grand Canal at dusk. He has watched the sun rise over the temples of Chiang Mai. He has pressed his palms together in a Kyoto shrine and felt, he says, "the ancient weight of everything." He then walked eleven minutes to the nearest Applebee's and ordered the Fiesta Lime Chicken.

An investigation by this publication — conducted by reviewing four years of Poulsworth's Instagram captions alongside his publicly available Google Maps check-ins — has confirmed that the 34-year-old content creator and self-described "experiential nomad" has dined at an Applebee's Neighborhood Grill & Bar in fourteen separate countries, including Japan, Morocco, Portugal, Thailand, and, with particular determination, Iceland.

Poulsworth, who runs the travel platform Unfiltered Horizons and frequently urges his 87,000 followers to "eat where the locals eat," did not respond to requests for comment. A post published the morning of our inquiry showed him captioning a photo of himself in a narrow Lisbon alley: "you can't understand a place until you let it inside you."

His Lisbon Applebee's check-in was timestamped forty-five minutes later.

"What Mr. Poulsworth has achieved is a kind of anti-pilgrimage — a spiritual journey structured entirely around the avoidance of spiritual journeys."

"What Mr. Poulsworth has achieved is a kind of anti-pilgrimage — a spiritual journey structured entirely around the avoidance of spiritual journeys," said Dr. Celeste Funnimore, Associate Professor of Performative Authenticity and Chain Restaurant Geopolitics at the University of Central Lancashire's Institute for Vacation Studies. "The Applebee's functions, for him, as a psychological pressure valve. The world is very large and the Two-for-Twenty menu is the same everywhere."

Poulsworth first began his streak in 2018 in Cancún, which friends concede "barely counts," before systematically expanding to Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and the North Atlantic. Sources close to him say he does not consider the behavior contradictory.

"He genuinely thinks the Applebee's is part of it," said travel companion Brianna Schloss, who has joined Poulsworth on three of his trips and describes herself as "spiritually exhausted." "He'll spend the morning at a UNESCO site, really absorbing it, taking notes in a little leather journal, and then he'll say, 'Right, let's find somewhere authentic for dinner,' and he opens Google Maps and I just watch his thumb go straight to the little Applebee's pin he's already saved."

According to Dr. Funnimore, Poulsworth's case is not unusual. Her department's most recent white paper, Wanderlust Without Discomfort: The Rise of the Curated Abroad, found that 62 percent of self-identified "immersive travelers" will abandon a recommended local restaurant if the online menu lacks photographs of the food.

Poulsworth's next itinerary, teased this week to followers as "somewhere raw, somewhere real, somewhere that will fundamentally undo me," lists Nairobi as the destination.

The Kenyan capital has had an Applebee's since 2022. It has a four-star Google rating. Poulsworth has already left a review.