Three Weeks Without a Plan

I gave myself one rule for this trip: no bookings past the first night. Everything else — where to sleep, when to move on, whether to stay a week in one town because the bakery was that good — got decided the day of, or not at all.

This is a very different kind of travel than the spreadsheet-and-reservations version I usually do, and it took about four days to stop feeling like I was doing it wrong.

The town that wasn't on the list

I ended up in Bra — a town I picked because the train stopped there and I liked the name — for six nights instead of the planned one. There was no single reason. A cheese shop owner walked me through eleven kinds of toma before I'd bought anything. The town square did a slow, unhurried version of evening that I didn't want to leave. So I didn't.

An itinerary is a promise to your past self about what your future self will want. It's rarely a promise worth keeping.

The trade-off is real, though. Not booking ahead means some nights you're standing in a train station at 6pm with a backpack, calling the third guesthouse on a list because the first two are full. That happened twice. Neither time was a disaster, but both times I understood exactly why most people book in advance.

What slow travel actually costs

It costs you the ability to see everything on a list. I did not make it to Turin, which had been the loose anchor point of the whole trip. I don't think I'd cut it if I did this again — I think I'd cut something else. That's the actual mechanism of slow travel: not doing less, but letting the place in front of you decide what "less" means instead of deciding in advance.