European Dispatch | In Praise of Travel Days

| image courtesy of elephant journal |

I've never been one who needs to leverage time traveled by staying longer in the places furthest away.  Recently, Katie and I briefly considered orchestrating  a coffee stop in Luxembourg on our European tour just so we could add another country to our list of places we'd visited. We didn't do that. But we did drive seven hours round trip last weekend to have lunch with my favorite uncle.  

I strongly believe that waiting until I can stay long to go far limits my opportunities to get the most out of life.  I like to think of the long travel days as "sea days" and try to get as much enjoyment or relaxation out of them as I possibly can.  

I see them as long stretches of down time to peer out the window, read my book or chat with my travel buddies.  And as opportunities to experience things not strictly on my itinerary:  pizza in Naples on our way to Monopoli, a listening party of Taylor Swift's entire catalog in chronological order on our way from New Hampshire to Maine, an impromptu vintage car tour in Paris on our way from Puglia to Île de Ré, finding a Harry Potter car on a train from Amsterdam to Antwerp, stopping to see the bears in Bern on our way from Basel to Zermatt.