Three buses and about five hours to reach a village I had picked off a map because the road to it looked satisfyingly indirect. When I got there I looked at a shop that was closed, drank a bottle of water that had gone warm in my bag, sat on a wall for twenty five minutes and then caught the only bus back, which was the same bus, driven by the same man, who did not comment.
Nothing happened. Not in the quiet way that people mean when they say nothing happened and then describe something. Nothing happened. I did not meet anyone, I did not see anything I had not seen from the road, and I took no photographs. I lost a day. I have thought about that day quite a lot, because it is the clearest example I have of a thing I did wrong for years.
Slowness does not generate meaning
The belief I was operating on, without ever saying it out loud, was that if I made the effort then something would be given back. Go far enough out of your way and the place will reward you for the trouble. It will not. Places do not know how you arrived and are not keeping score.
What slowness does is remove some obstacles. It puts you in front of things for longer, and it means you are around at hours when people are doing ordinary things instead of only at the hours a schedule allows. That is genuinely useful. But it is a condition, not a cause, and the difference matters. A slow route gives you more chances. It does not convert hours into experiences at a fixed rate.
The phrase does work it has not earned
Part of the problem is that slow travel, as a phrase, has become an answer rather than a description. It carries a whole implied argument: that this way is more thoughtful, more respectful, better. That argument gets used to justify decisions nobody has examined, including several of mine.
I know I have done it because I can hear how I described that five hour day to a friend afterwards. I said it was nice to just be somewhere without an agenda, which was a way of not saying I wasted a day out of vanity. If a route only makes sense when you describe it in the vocabulary of a movement, it probably did not make sense.
Chosen inefficiency and inefficiency that happens to you
There is a real distinction between the two and I keep confusing them. Chosen inefficiency is when you take the longer route because of something specific: the road goes through a valley you want to see, or the timing puts you somewhere at the right hour, or you want to be on a vehicle full of people who are actually going somewhere.
Inefficiency that happens to you is a connection that does not exist, a bus that only runs when school is on, a road washed out. That kind you handle, and sometimes it hands you something. But you did not achieve it, and there is no virtue in it. Treating the second kind as if it were the first is how you end up defending a wasted day as a philosophy.
What actually made the good ones good
When I go back through the slow routes that paid off, none of them paid off because of duration. They paid off for concrete, boring reasons. The vehicle stopped somewhere long enough to get off and stand around. The route was one that local people used to get to work, so it went through the parts of towns that are not for anyone in particular. It ran in daylight. It followed a river or a coast, so the view kept changing rather than repeating.
Those are checkable in advance, more or less. Duration is not a proxy for any of them. A six hour bus down a dual carriageway has none of them and a ninety minute local train might have all four.
The check I run before a pointless detour
Not a rule, a couple of questions. What specifically do I expect to be in front of me for those hours, and can I name it. If the only answer is that the road looks good on a map, that is worth knowing before I commit a day rather than after.
And what am I giving up. A detour is only cheap if there is nothing at the other end I am cutting short. On that five hour day I was three days into a place I liked and had barely walked. That is what the trip actually cost, and it did not appear anywhere in the decision.
I still take the long way, with lower expectations
None of this has made me stop. I took a route last month that added three hours for no defensible reason and I would do it again. What has changed is what I expect from it, and what I say about it afterwards.
I now assume most detours will give me nothing in particular, and I take them anyway when the cost is low and I am not owed anywhere. That is a much more honest arrangement than the one I had before, where every long way round was supposed to be justified by an outcome and I quietly manufactured outcomes when there were none. Sometimes the extra five hours are just five hours. You can still choose them, as long as you know that is what you are buying.