The joy of slow travel
The Slow Food movement, which started out in Italy, wasn’t literally about eating slowly; it was about eating in such a way that you savour the enjoyment of food. If it was actually about slow food, our daughter would already be global patron (how can it take 45 minutes to eat a small bowl of pasta? I mean, seriously, how??
OK, sorry, back to topic…)
When I talk of the joy of slow travel, I don’t mean that travelling slowly is a joy in and of itself. But car-free travel provides moments of unexpected joy that I simply don’t think you’d get by car.
Here are a few from me:
1 Cycling serendipity
After 25 years gap, we took up cycling again during Covid. During the brief ‘summer of fun’ (as our daughter ironically calls it - the window between lockdowns when we were allowed out more than once a day…), Thomas needed to go into town for a rare face-to-face meeting.
He checked and worked out that the best cycling route from Walthamstow to London Bridge was to take the C23 cycle route from Walthamstow to Clapton, then the C27 from Clapton to London Fields, then the Q13 to Shoreditch and then to piece together a safe route to London Bridge.
What he didn’t realise was quite how lovely the journey would be. The trip took him the full length of Columbus Road, with its stunning Georgian shopfronts, round some picturesque Shoreditch sidestreets (think Oliver Twist meets hipsters) and the length of Brick Lane, past the wonderful old Truman Brewery.
He was on my way into town for a meeting but that ride felt like the highlight of his week, and it was entirely fluke. Best of all, he even came across the church from Rev, the brilliant BBC TV series. If he’d been in a car, he would have been on the main roads and missed it all - and he certainly wouldn’t have been able to stop for a cheeky selfie!
Me, having stumbled upon the church from the TV series Rev
2 The slow train across Europe
We can’t call this blog CarefreePlanefree, as we have got planes occasionally. But we hate them. Everything about plane travel is stressful. Somehow plane travel achieves a weird paradox: you get there so fast it’s disorientating, but it manages to take all bloody day to do a two-hour journey.
So when we go anywhere remotely accessible, we try to do it by train.
If you want, I’ll describe some of our favourite European slow train rides in future posts (please do let us know if that is what you want!) but one example was coming back from a holiday in Milan.
Instead of getting the plane or even the TGV, we got a series of slow trains from Milan up and over the Alps via Lake Como, the Bernina pass, Lucerne and Berne. It took an extra four nights to get home, so that was seriously slow travel but what better to do with four days than sit on a train travelling through some of the most beautiful scenery on Earth?
3 Train picnics
The ultimate is, of course, to combine slow food with slow travel into the train picnic. Helen is to write separately on this magnificent topic, so I won’t steal her thunder. But my ultimate train picnic was on a train back from Pisa to Santa Margherita Ligure. We bought have an Italian market load of prosciutto, cheese, sun-dried tomatoes and olives and then munched as the train clattered along the railway line around La Spezia, overlooking the glittering Italian Riviera. At times like that, life doesn’t get any better.
