On our last day in London, my wife and I wandered past, and of course in, a travel bookstore near Covent Garden called Stanfords.

Actually not Stanfords, but another bookstore in which I bought too many books

One of the (too many) books I picked up was Dan Kieran’s The Idle Traveller: The Art of Slow Travel:

your brain delves into itself when you are in an unfamiliar place and wholly alone. When you travel alone your identity slips away, especially if you do it slowly and travel a long way. You speak very little, which in itself is quite meditative. Your thoughts are free to roam into the often-neglected parts of yourself. The transition can be uneasy at first, but soon there is great comfort in what is lost.

Kieran is a propagandist for slow travel (I’ve written a bit about the concept of slowness, and how it’s more a psychological than technical thing), and the book is about the virtues of going by rail and bus, seeing things at less than 20,000 feet, interacting with locals, and generally traveling in ways that get you out of the closed circuit of airports, global brands, hotel chains, and the countless bars / clubs / restaurants that fill out the global tourism ecosystem.

Budapest train station, 2009

I’m hoping the book will give me a little more insight about the relationship between train travel and mind-wandering, but even if I don’t, it’s a good read.