Twelve hundred miles, nineteen days, and not a single booking made more than one night in advance. I had done the opposite trip two years earlier — spreadsheet, confirmations, a laminated thing — and remembered almost none of it.
How it actually worked
Drive until about four. Find somewhere by five. That was the whole system. It failed exactly twice: once in a festival town where everything was full, and once on a Saturday I had not thought about, both of which ended in a worse room than I would have booked and a better evening than I had planned.
The two days that made the trip
Day eleven, I took a turning because the sign had an interesting name, and ended up on a single-track road along a sea loch for two hours, stopping whenever I felt like it. Day fifteen, I stayed put, in a town I had meant to pass through, because it was raining and the café had a fire.
Neither of those days could have survived an itinerary. That is the entire argument for travelling this way, and I do not have a second one.
A plan is a promise you made to a version of yourself who had not been there yet.
What I would do differently
- Book the first two nights. Arriving tired into nothing is the one genuinely unpleasant part.
- Leave one fixed point. I had none, and drifted for a week in the middle. One thing to aim at gives the drift a shape.
- Write it down the same evening. Everything I did not write down within a day is gone.
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