The places between the highlights

Itineraries are usually drawn between famous names. Yet many of a journey's best moments happen where nobody planned to stop.

TOLIAI editorial · 2 min read

Photo: niu / Unsplash

Look at any itinerary and you'll see dots: cities, parks, famous places. Between them run lines, usually treated as mere transfers. Yet looking back on a journey, we often realise that some of its best moments happened on those lines.

The village café where you stopped because you needed coffee, and where the owner started telling you about the region. The small mountain-town station where the train paused for five minutes and you decided that next time you'd get off. The bend in the road that opened onto a valley no guidebook mentions.

Why the in-between is worth so much

Famous places are famous for good reason, but they are also the most shaped around visitors. In the places between, life runs to its own rhythm: a school bell, market day, people who weren't expecting you and so behave entirely naturally. There you see a country as it is on a Tuesday morning, not as it would like to look in photographs.

The places between also help you understand distance and transition. Travelling slowly from the coast into the mountains, you watch roofs, dishes and the sound of speech change. That's what gives each of the next 'dots' its meaning.

You know a country best as it is on a Tuesday morning.

How to make room for them

Break a long transfer in two and stay the night in a small town along the way, rather than in yet another well-known city.
Where it makes sense, choose the train or the road over a domestic flight – not always, but when the journey itself is beautiful.
Leave free hours on travel days. A stop you didn't plan isn't a delay.
Ask your guide, driver or host where they would stop along the way.

When we plan a journey, we look at the lines between the dots as carefully as at the dots themselves. Tell us how you like to travel – and perhaps, among the famous names, there'll be a place you remember longest.