There was a day I made four connections. Bus, train, a second train after a two hour wait, then a minibus that left when it was full rather than when the paper said. I covered a serious amount of ground and the only thing I can still picture is a station cafe near the end of it where the chairs were already stacked on the tables and a man let me sit down anyway while he mopped around my feet.
Everything else from that day is gone. Not vague, gone. I have a photograph of a hillside that I cannot place and no memory of taking it. That was the day I stopped thinking about how far I could move and started thinking about how far I should.
The unit is transitions, not kilometres
Distance turns out to be a bad way to measure a travel day. A long ride in one seat, with a book and a view, can leave you fine at the other end. Three short hops with waits between them will wreck you, even if the total on the map is small.
The reason is that every transition has a fixed cost that has nothing to do with distance. You have to find the right platform or the right corner of the square where the bus actually stops, work out whether the ticket you have covers this leg, guard your bag, keep half an eye on the time so you can never fully settle. Do that four times and you have spent the day being mildly alert about logistics, which is the most tiring possible way to spend a day and produces nothing.
My ceiling is one real move
What I try to hold to now is one significant move per day. One departure, one arrival, ideally one vehicle. Everything on either side of it is walking and looking. Whether that move is one hour or six matters much less than whether there is a second one waiting behind it.
When I break that rule, and I break it whenever the timetable makes me, I plan the day around the recovery instead of the arrival. That means booking the bed in advance, knowing what I will eat, and accepting that the evening is written off. Deciding all that beforehand is much cheaper than trying to make decisions at nine at night in a place I have never been, when I have already used up my capacity to choose things.
The cost that nobody counts
There is admin attached to every move that does not appear on any timetable. Packing properly rather than stuffing. Finding out where you are staying and how to get in. Working out where the water is, where food is, which direction is the centre. That is easily an hour at each end, and it is the least interesting hour of your day.
Two nights in a place roughly halves that overhead per day. It is the single change that has made the most difference to how much I actually see, and it has nothing to do with any philosophy about pace. It is just that arriving is expensive and doing it less often costs less.
When moving a long way is fine
I am not arguing for crawling. There are days when the right move is to cross a great deal of ground in one go, and I try to spot them. When the country in between is a corridor with nothing in it, spending three days working through it slowly is not depth, it is stubbornness. Cross it in one seat and start where the interesting part starts.
Overnight moves are worth a mention. When they work, they cost you a night rather than a day, which is a genuinely good rate. When they do not work, you lose the night and the following day too, so I only take them when the alternative is a full day of hops.
Staying put is not the same as not moving
The thing that took me longest to accept is that a day without a move is still a travel day, and often the productive one. It is the day you go back to a street you half saw, or take a local bus out and back for the afternoon with nothing on your shoulders, or sit somewhere long enough that the same people pass twice.
I resisted this for years because it felt like not making progress. Progress against what, though. Nobody is counting the towns. When I look at what I remember from any given trip, an unfair share of it comes from the days I did not go anywhere new, which is a slightly annoying thing to have learned.
The rough shape I aim for
What I aim for now, when the timetables allow it, is something like this. A move roughly every second day. That move in the morning, arriving early enough that the afternoon is still usable. A day either side with nothing to catch.
It goes wrong constantly. Buses run twice a week, a place turns out to be worth one night rather than three, someone tells me about somewhere three hours away and I go. But having a rough shape means the departures from it are choices instead of drift, and I can usually tell afterwards whether the extra distance bought anything. Most of the time, when I moved twice in one day, it did not.