About the gazette and its company

The short version

Hayrace Travel is an independent gazette about going places slowly, published from Providence, Rhode Island, by a company with one desk and one editor. It prints walking circuits that begin and end at public transit stops, and standing essays about the rooms where travel waits. New pieces appear twice a month, corrections run with dates, and every route is walked before it is written. The subtitle on the masthead calls it an independent travel gazette, and both of those words are doing real work. If you are new here, the circuits board is the place to start, and the FAQ answers the practical questions.

The publisher is Hayrace Media LLC, a registered Rhode Island Limited Liability Company, and the founder and editor is Nell Harrow. The company sells no travel, takes no bookings, holds no ties to carriers, and accepts no favors from anyone with a timetable of their own. That arrangement keeps the walking unhurried and the prose accountable to readers alone. Everything below is detail, but it is detail we believe a reader deserves in full, so here it is in one place.

The story

Hayrace Media LLC was formed in Providence on September 3, 2020, as a small publishing and web media company. For its first years it did quiet editorial work: route research, municipal records, the patient tidying of small archives that nobody else wanted to keep. The office at 50 Kennedy Plaza sits a short walk from the city's main bus exchange, which turned out to matter far more than the lease ever suggested. A company that watches departures all day eventually starts taking notes on them, and ours did. The plaza outside the door fills and empties on the hour, and that rhythm has gotten into everything the company makes.

Nell Harrow spent those years walking to work the long way, timing blocks, counting stair streets, and reading posted schedules the way other people read the sky. The habit filled notebooks, the notebooks turned into hand-drawn loops, and the loops kept getting borrowed by friends who wanted a Saturday shaped for them. Somewhere in that lending and returning, a private routine became an editorial idea. If a walk could be written down clearly enough to hand to a stranger, it deserved a publication with a schedule of its own. The first loop she ever wrote out properly began at a bus shelter and ended at the same shelter, ninety minutes later.

In 2026 the company gathered all of that walking into a gazette and put the name Hayrace Travel on the masthead. The name belongs to this masthead and this company alone: the gazette has no connection to any travel agency, past or present, in this country or any other. It plans nothing, sells nothing, and books nothing. It prints routes and essays, twice a month, in plain American English, and it intends to keep doing exactly that. Readers sometimes ask whether the gazette will grow beyond New England someday, and the honest answer is only at walking speed.

Why a gazette rather than a blog is a fair question, and the answer is about obligation. A gazette implies a schedule, a masthead, a corrections habit, and a reader who is owed all three without asking. The old word sets the right expectations for pace, and pace is the entire subject here. Providence rewards that kind of paper, being a city you can cross on foot between two buses with time left for coffee.

What the company does

Hayrace Media LLC exists to publish, and the gazette is its whole catalog. The work is narrow on purpose, and in practice it sorts into a short list that has not changed since the first issue. Each item below is small on its own, and together they are the whole of the enterprise.

• Researches walking circuits on foot, twice each, before any direction is allowed to reach the page.
• Writes and publishes junction essays from depots, ferry landings, bus hubs, and airfield fence lines around New England.
• Maintains the archive, the corrections record, and the small table of facts that travels with every piece.
• Sends The Timetable, a short reader letter, twice a month to people who have asked for it.
• Reads and answers letters at the Providence postbox on posted office days, in the order they arrive.

What it does not do

The shorter list is the more important one, and we keep it in plain sight on every page of this site. If an activity involves selling travel, arranging travel, or taking a commission on travel, it is not something this company does or will do. A shorter form of this list rides in the footer of every page, so it is never more than a glance away.

• No trip planning, no itineraries for hire, and no travel arrangements of any kind for anyone.
• No sale of tickets, seats, rooms, tours, or gear, and no processing of payments on this site.
• No affiliation with airlines, railways, ferry operators, or booking platforms, formal or informal.
• No paid placement inside routes or essays, and no gifts accepted from operators or venues.
• No collection of reader data beyond what the privacy policy plainly describes.

How the gazette is funded

The gazette is paid for by its publisher out of the company's ordinary publishing budget, and reading it costs nothing. There are no locked pages, no memberships, and no counting of visits against a quota. If consent-based advertising is ever enabled, it will be labeled as advertising, kept apart from the routes, and switched on only after a reader agrees in the notice card that appears on a first visit. Should that day come, the policies on this site will say so first, in writing, before anything changes on the page. Until then, the only thing the gazette asks of a reader is attention, and only for as long as a piece deserves it. That bargain seems fair to us, and it is the only one on offer here.

Who makes it

Nell Harrow is the founder and editor, and for now she is also the entire newsroom. She has lived in Providence since before the company existed, walks to the office across Kennedy Plaza, and keeps her route notebooks in a drawer that no longer quite closes. She writes every piece herself, walks every reported correction herself, and answers the postbox personally on office days. Her portrait on this site is a simple silhouette, because she holds that the routes are the only likeness that matters. Readers who meet her on a circuit usually recognize the notebook before they recognize the editor, which is how she prefers it. If the newsroom ever grows, this page will introduce each new name with the same plain detail you see below.

Company records

Legal name

Hayrace Media LLC

Entity type

Limited Liability Company

State

Rhode Island

Registrar

Rhode Island Department of State

Entity ID

001712384

EIN

85-3172940

Formed

September 3, 2020

Registered agent

Nell J. Harrow, 50 Kennedy Plaza, Providence, RI 02903

Office

50 Kennedy Plaza, Providence, RI 02903, United States

Phone

+1 (401) 421-5836

Email

[email protected]

Independence

Independence here is a practice with a paper trail, not a line of copy. The gazette accepts no hosted stays, no arranged rides, and no introductions from anyone who has a schedule to fill or a seat to sell. When a route disappoints, the piece says so in print, and when we get a turn wrong, the correction runs with a date beside it. Hayrace Travel is written for the person paying an ordinary fare out of an ordinary pocket, and for no one else. Letters that test that claim are welcome at the postbox any week of the year, and the contact page explains how to send one. We would rather lose a pleasant sentence than a reader's trust, and that trade has never once felt close.