Slow travel at its most joyous

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more clearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization.”
So wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in Travels With A Donkey in Cévennes, the ultimate homage to slow travel. Almost 150 years later, many of us are rediscovering the joy of the journey, making it part of the adventure rather than rushing from departure to arrival.
Hilary Bradt, founder of the Bradt travel guides, has been hitchhiking all over the world since her teens and is still sticking out a speculative thumb at the age of 82. “It’s partly the serendipity – having no idea who you’ll meet and where you’ll end up – but mostly that, more than any other form of travel, it confirms the innate kindness of most human beings,” she says.
Mary Novakovich has been visiting her parents’ homeland of Croatia since she was a child, but had never made the journey by road until recently. Over three weeks and 3,000 miles, she discovered Germany’s oldest town in Trier; arrived in Italy to watch a beautiful Renaissance town wake from its afternoon snooze and come alive with the evening passeggiata; and discovered a part of Crotia left behind in the country’s recent tourism boom.
For Rachel Mills, the four-day adventure from London to Tirana was all about the romance of train and sleeper ferry, passing “cinematic Tuscan scenes of scorched fields, vines and Italian cypress trees” before arriving in the Albanian capital where “striking new skyward architecture on every nearby street … stands as a symbol and monument to change.”
This is slow travel at its most joyous. Enjoy the ride.