Wildmere
Wildmere
rail & slow travel
we're going somewhere. We're just not in a goddamn hurry.
The journey doesn't have to be the part you endure.
Somewhere along the way, we decided the goal of travel was to get everywhere as quickly as fucking possibly.
Fly in. Grab the bags. Get to the hotel. See the thing. Take the picture. Move on. Repeat until somebody needs a nap and everybody's quietly pissed off.
But there's another way to travel.
Take the train and watch the mountains, villages and coastlines change outside the window. Stay in one place long enough to figure out which cafe makes your coffee exactly right. Spend an afternoon wandering without needing to accomplish a goddamn thing. Wake up knowing you don't have to pack your suitcase again today.
Slow travel isn't about doing less because you couldn't fit more in.
It's choosing to leave enough room to actually experience where you are.
And rail fits beautifully into that rhythm. You don't disappear into the weird fluorescent nowhere-land of an airport and magically reappear hundreds of miles away. You watch one pace slowly become another. You arrive in the middle of a city, step onto the platform, grab your bag and keep going.
Sometimes getting there really is half the fucking fun.
Maybe we should stop rushing through that part.
this isn't just how you get there
There's something wonderfully different about watching the distance happen.
On a train, one place doesn't simply disappear and another magically appears a few hours later. Cities thin into suburbs. Suburbs give way to fields. Mountains start showing up on the horizon. Villages flash past the window, and every once in a while you see one that makes you think, well shit, I want to go THERE.
You can read. Have coffee. Open a bottle of wine. Stare out the window for an unreasonable amount of time.
Nobody cares.
And instead of spending half your day getting to an airport, standing in security, taking off your damn shoes, waiting at a gate, flying somewhere, finding your luggage and then figuring out how the hell to get from the airport back into civilization...
You can walk into a station in the middle of one city and step off in the middle of another.
But rail travel gets really interesting when we stop treating every train as nothing more than Point A -> Point B.
because sometimes?
The train itself is the fucking experience.
sometimes the view is the itinerary
There are rail journeys were arriving almost feel beside the point.
Mountain passes. Glacial valleys. Coastlines. Tiny villages tucked beneath enormous peaks. Routes that snake through landscapes you simply wouldn't experience the same way from 35,000 feet.
This is when you get the good seat, order something to drink, put the damn phone down for a minute and look outside.
and sometimes, it's just really convenient
Not every train ride needs to be a cinematic journey through the Alps.
Sometimes rail is glorious because you board in London, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam or Edinburgh and a few hours later you're somewhere completely different without sacrificing most of the day to airport bullshit.
No rental car. No unfamiliar highways. No figuring out where the hell you parked.
Get on. Sit down. Go somewhere.
Beautifully uncomplicated.
And then there are the journeys where the train absolutely knows she's the main character.
Sleeper cabins. Dining Cars. Observation lounges. Multi-day journeys. Historic routes. The kind where dinner and a glass of wine while the landscape rolls past aren't things you do between destinations.
They are the destination.
Rail can be practical. It can be spectacular. It can be ridiculously indulgent.
And sometimes it's all three.
yes, there are fancy trains too
stay long enough to actually be there
Slow travel doesn't necessarily mean traveling for months.
It doesn't mean you have to move into a little stone cottage, learn to bake bread from somebody's Italian grandmother, and dramatically reconsider every decision you've ever made.
Although, frankly, that sounds pretty fucking good.
It simply means stopping long enough for a place to become more than a checklist.
Instead of three cities in six days, maybe you choose one or two.
Instead of waking up every morning thinking, Where are we going next?, you wake up wondering where you'll get coffee.
You learn which street takes you back to your hotel without checking your phone. You recognize the woman at the bakery. You discover the little wine bar you never would've found on a "Top 10 Things To Do" list because you wandered past it Tuesday night and thought well, that looks interesting.
And somewhere around day three, something changes.
You're not just visiting anymore.
You're there.
fewer places. More of them.
This is the part that can feel completely backwards when you've spent thousands of dollars and crossed an ocean.
Of course you want to see everything.
You're already in Europe - why wouldn't you squeeze London, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome and Barcelona into ten days?
Because eventually your vacation becomes an elaborate luggage relocation program.
More destinations don't necessarily mean more experience.
Sometimes three nights become five. Sometimes you choose Scotland instead of trying to cram Scotland, Ireland and England into the same trip. Sometimes you spend a week exploring one region instead of collecting countries like fucking Pokemon.
You're technically seeing fewer places.
You're experiencing considerably more of them.
leave room for the shit you didn't plan
This might be my favorite part.
Not every hour needs a reservation.
Leave an afternoon open because you have no idea what you'll find once you're there.
Maybe somebody tells you about a tiny village twenty minutes away. Maybe the weather is gorgeous and you decide to sit beside the water for three hours. Maybe you walk into a bookstore and emerge sometime during the next geological era.
Or maybe you're tired. So you take a nap.
You are allowed to take a fucking nap in Europe.
The colosseum will survive without you for two hours.
The point isn't to do nothing.
It's to leave enough space for the trip to become something you couldn't have completely planned from home.
the good stuff happens in between
Rail and slow travel work so beautifully together because neither one asks you to treat the space between destinations like wasted time.
You don't have to build an entire trip around trains. And you don't have to spend three weeks in one village to qualify as a slow traveler.
Sometimes it's simply choosing a route that gives you five nights here instead of two, then taking the train to the next place instead of hopping on another flight.
Maybe it's London for a few days, then north to Edinburgh while the English countryside rolls past your window.
Maybe it's Florence followed by a smaller Tuscan town, with enough time in both that you aren't dragging your suitcase across cobblestones every other fucking morning.
Maybe it's a spectacular rail journey through Alaska or the Canadian Rockies tucked into a larger trip.
Or maybe you find somewhere you love and decide...
Fuck it. We're staying another day.
That's the beauty of traveling this way.
The itinerary still has shape. There are still things you're excited to see and places you absolutely want to go.
There's just enough breathing room for the trip to have a life of its own.
You don't have to go full slow
This is important because "slow travel" can sound like you need unlimited vacation time and enough money to casually relocate to France for six weeks.
You don't.
A ten-day trip can be slower.
A cruise can have slow moments.
A rail journey can connect two longer stays.
Even one deliberately unscheduled day can completely change the rhythm of a trip.
Slow isn't a number of days.
It's leaving enough room to notice where the hell you are.
not all train trips look the same
Sometimes the train is simply the smartest way to get from one place to another.
Sometimes you choose it because the view outside the window half the damn reason you're there.
And sometimes you book a journey so spectacular that getting off at the end feels almost rude.
Rail can be transportation, experience, or the entire fucking vacation.
the scenic one:
you're here for the view
the get-you-there-one:
because airports aren't always the answer
the train is the trip one:
oh, she knows she's fancy
This is the train you take because flying over the landscape would completely miss the point.
Mountains. Glaciers. Canyons. Rivers. Coastlines. Tiny towns tucked into places that make you wonder who the hell looked at that spot and thought, yep, let's build there.
Alaska. The Canadian Rockies. Colorado. Switzerland. Routes where the landscape gets top billing and the train basically becomes a moving front-row seat.
Get the window seat.
Seriously.
Get the fucking window seat.
Not every train needs to be an Experience.
Sometimes you just want to get from London to Edinburgh, Paris to Amsterdam, Rome to Florence, or wherever the hell you're wandering next without sacrificing half a day to airport bullshit.
Board near the middle of one city. Sit down. Have Coffee. Read something. Watch the world go by.
Step off near the middle of another.
Sometimes rail is wonderfully precise because it's so damn easy.
And then there are trains that have absolutely no intention of pretending they're merely transportation.
Private cabins. Gorgeous dining cars. Observation lounges. Multi-course dinners. Cocktails while mountains roll past the windows. Maybe you're sleeping onboard. Maybe you're crossing countries - or continents - over several days.
These journeys aren't about getting somewhere efficiently.
They're about making getting there so fucking fabulous that the destination has some competition.
And yes, some of them cost an obscene amount of money.
But champagne in a beautiful dining car while the world rolls past?
Well, fuck. There are worse ways to spend your money.