How do you travel slowly when all you have is a weekend?

Somebody asked me this at a wedding, between the speeches and the cake, which is one of the last places left where a stranger will still ask you a real question. She had read something I wrote about night buses and long detours, and she said, not unkindly, that it was all very well for me, but she had two days and a budget and a Monday, and how exactly was she supposed to travel slowly inside that.

It is a fair point, and I have been chewing on it since. For a long time I would have said that slow travel needs time, and that a weekend is not travel at all but a sprint with luggage. I no longer think that is true. Slowness is not a quantity of days. It is a way of spending the ones you have.

Here is what I told her, more or less, once I had stopped being defensive about it.

Go to one place and stay there. The single thing that ruins a short trip is the belief that you must see everything, which means you see a list rather than a place. Pick one town, one district, even one street, and refuse the rest. You are not missing the other things. You are choosing this thing properly, which is the only kind of seeing that stays with you afterwards.

Arrive the night before if you possibly can. The whole character of a weekend changes if the first morning is already yours instead of being eaten by getting there. A late train on the Friday, a cheap room, a bad sandwich at the station: this is not lost time, it is the trip starting early. I would rather land tired on Friday night and wake up somewhere than spend Saturday morning in transit watching the hours drain.

Eat where you can see the kitchen, and go back twice. There is no faster way into a place than ordering the same breakfast two mornings running at the same counter. By the second morning the person behind it has decided something about you, and will tell you where to go that is not in any list. That conversation is the trip. Everything else is scenery.

Walk the first hour with no plan and no map in your hand. I have said this before and I will keep saying it until somebody believes me. The map turns a street into a set of instructions. Put it away, get a little lost, and let the place arrange itself around you before you start arranging it.

And then, the hard part, do less than you think you should. A weekend has room for one good long walk, one unhurried meal, and one thing you did not plan. That is a full weekend. The trips I remember are never the ones where I ticked the most boxes. They are the ones with a single long afternoon I can still walk through in my head.

She listened to all this, then told me she was going to the coast for a weekend in a fortnight and would report back. I hope she gets lost. It is the only souvenir worth carrying home.

A weekend can still leave room to move, and Leave Room for Rain shows how to plan an itinerary that bends when the weather or the trains change.