The Art of Going Nowhere in Particular
Why the most restorative trips you'll ever take involve no itinerary, no Tripadvisor, and no agenda whatsoever.
There is a particular type of travel we have collectively forgotten. Not the kind where you sprint between UNESCO sites with a lanyard around your neck. Not the kind where every meal is pre-booked six weeks in advance and reviewed for vibes on a subreddit. The kind where you arrive somewhere, sit down in the first café that looks right, and have absolutely no idea what comes next.
There is a particular type of travel we have collectively forgotten. Not the kind where you sprint between UNESCO sites with a lanyard around your neck. Not the kind where every meal is pre-booked six weeks in advance and reviewed for vibes on a subreddit. The kind where you arrive somewhere, sit down in the first café that looks right, and have absolutely no idea what comes next.
The travel industry has done a thorough job of convincing us that good trips require maximum optimisation. Five-star bucket lists. Hidden gems. Curated experiences. The word 'curated' has colonised so much of modern travel writing that it's almost impossible to read a hotel brochure without it. What's funny is that the most memorable trip most people can recall usually has nothing curated about it at all. It's the afternoon you got lost in a market in Lisbon. The stranger who invited you for lunch. The ferry you almost missed that turned out to be the best decision of the week.
The best trips most people can recall usually have nothing planned about them at all.
The best trips most people can recall usually have nothing planned about them at all.
Psychologists who study memory have a name for this. Unexpected pleasures — experiences that broke from the script — lodge more deeply in episodic memory than anticipated ones. Your brain is simply more engaged when it doesn't know what's coming. Which means that, somewhat paradoxically, the less you plan a holiday, the more of it you actually remember.
This isn't an argument for total chaos. Booking a flight still seems sensible. But there's an enormous amount of space between 'I have a plane ticket' and 'I have scheduled 11am gelato at a specific gelateria that someone called TheTrueFlorentine123 swears is better than the one next door.' Most of us are booking trips that sit closer to the second end of that spectrum than we'd like to admit.
This isn't an argument for total chaos. Booking a flight still seems sensible. But there's an enormous amount of space between 'I have a plane ticket' and 'I have scheduled 11am gelato at a specific gelateria that someone called TheTrueFlorentine123 swears is better than the one next door.' Most of us are booking trips that sit closer to the second end of that spectrum than we'd like to admit.
The good news is that slow, unstructured travel is genuinely having a moment — partly because it's cheaper, partly because people are exhausted by the performance of it all. Workation culture has blurred the lines anyway. If you're going to open a laptop in Seville, you might as well actually look at Seville whilst you're there.
Wander. Get on a bus without checking where it goes. Eat at whatever place has locals in it and no photographs of the food on the menu. Talk to the person behind the bar about where they'd spend a free afternoon. You'll almost certainly get somewhere more interesting than the third-most-reviewed trattoria on Google Maps.
The itinerary can wait. It usually can. And if the thought of abandoning it entirely feels too uncomfortable, try this: plan the first day properly, then deliberately leave the rest open. Most people find, somewhere around day two, that the unplanned bits are the ones they're already looking forward to telling people about.
Wander. Get on a bus without checking where it goes. Eat at whatever place has locals in it and no photographs of the food on the menu. Talk to the person behind the bar about where they'd spend a free afternoon. You'll almost certainly get somewhere more interesting than the third-most-reviewed trattoria on Google Maps.
The itinerary can wait. It usually can. And if the thought of abandoning it entirely feels too uncomfortable, try this: plan the first day properly, then deliberately leave the rest open. Most people find, somewhere around day two, that the unplanned bits are the ones they're already looking forward to telling people about.
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