I stood on the deck for four hours because the seating inside smelled of diesel and I had decided, somewhere around the second hour, that I was going to see the coastline arrive rather than read about it later. The light went from flat to gold to something orange and unhelpful for photographs. Nothing happened for a long time. Then the shape on the horizon stopped being an idea and became a place with buildings on it, and I found I had been holding the rail.
By the time I stepped off I already knew how the place sat in the water, which way the wind came from, and how far it was from everything. I had not read any of that. I had watched it approach for four hours.
The time I arrived and felt nothing
The comparison that taught me this was a place I reached the fast way, out of tiredness and a tight schedule. Door to door in a couple of hours, most of it not looking out of a window.
I got there and it was fine. Genuinely fine, objectively a good place, and I have almost no memory of the first day. It took me until the second afternoon to have any sense of where I was, and I think that is because I had been delivered rather than having travelled.
I am wary of turning this into a rule, because the obvious version of this argument is smug and I have heard it from people who use it to look down on other travellers. But the effect is real, and I have felt it in both directions enough times to stop dismissing it.
What the slow approach actually shows
Mostly it shows scale, and scale is the thing that is hardest to acquire any other way.
When I have spent six hours watching a landscape gradually stop being one thing and start being another, I understand why the food changes at a certain point, why the buildings change shape, where the boundary between two ways of doing things sits. Nobody tells me. It assembles itself out of the window over a long enough period that I do not notice it happening.
It also shows me the gradient of remoteness. There is a difference between a place that is far and a place that is hard to reach, and you cannot feel that difference if you skipped the reaching. The last hour of getting somewhere difficult, when the road narrows and the traffic disappears and the vehicle is now mostly carrying people who live there, tells me more about the place than the first day inside it.
Waiting rooms are where the information is
The parts of the approach I resented most turned out to be the most useful. Long waits at junctions. A ferry terminal at an hour when nothing was open. Two hours on a platform because the connection did not connect.
Those places are full of people who are also stuck, and the ordinary reserve drops a little. I have gotten the best practical advice of entire trips from people I met while we were both annoyed at the same delay. Where to eat, which road is closed, that the thing I was going to do requires a permit I did not know about.
Waiting rooms are also honest in a way that arrival points are not. Nobody is presenting anything. It is just people going about a Tuesday, with their shopping, dealing with the same broken timetable I am dealing with, and for an hour I am not a visitor, I am another person waiting.
The problem with calling this the real experience
Here is where I want to be careful, because there is a version of this argument I find genuinely obnoxious.
Taking the slow route does not make me a better traveller than someone who flew. It usually means I have more time than they do, which is a resource, not a virtue. People with a week of annual leave and a family are not failing at travel by moving efficiently. And the people who live in these places overwhelmingly take the fast option when it exists, because they are not collecting an experience, they are going home.
The slow approach is also not more authentic. There is nothing authentic about a foreign person choosing a longer journey for the texture of it. That is a luxury and it is fine to enjoy it, but it should not come with a claim attached.
When I skip it on purpose
I skip it when I am tired, and I have stopped feeling bad about that. Arriving exhausted at somewhere I have looked forward to for months is a way of wasting the place, and a slow arrival that leaves me with nothing left is worse than a fast one that leaves me capable of paying attention.
I skip it when the slow option is not scenic, just long. Six hours of motorway in a coach with the curtains half drawn is not an approach, it is a corridor. The value is in seeing the transition, and some routes have nothing to see.
And I skip it on the way back. Almost always. The journey home does not do the same work, and I have never once regretted taking the quick way out.
What I actually remember
When I go back through a trip in my head months later, an unreasonable proportion of what survives is transit. The deck. A junction at dawn with two other people and a dog. The hour when the road surface changed and everyone in the vehicle went quiet at the same time.
The destinations are there too, but flatter, and they blur into each other in a way the journeys do not. I think that is because arriving somewhere is a short event and getting there is a long one, and long events lay down more to remember.
So I plan the getting there now instead of treating it as the tax I pay for the being there. Not always, not when I am wrecked, not on the way home. But often enough that I have stopped thinking of it as the boring part, and started thinking of it as the first day.