A Road Trip Diary

A Week in the Passenger Seat: A Road Trip Diary

Day 1 — Leaving with no real plan

I've done the multi-country sprint before — the kind of trip where you're in a new bed every night and half your photos are of train station departure boards. This time I wanted the opposite. One car (mostly), one slow week, and nowhere I had to be by a certain hour.

We loaded the trunk before sunrise, mostly so we'd have an excuse to watch the sun come up somewhere other than our own kitchen. No fixed hotel list, just a loose string of towns and a promise to each other that if somewhere felt worth staying longer, we'd stay longer.

Day 1 — The coast road

The first stretch was all coastline, and it was slower going than I expected — not because of traffic, but because we kept pulling over. A viewpoint here, a fruit stand there, a beach that wasn't on any list we'd made. By early evening we'd covered maybe half the distance I'd originally planned for the day, and I didn't care even a little.

We ended up staying in a tiny harbor town that wasn't supposed to be an overnight stop. It just was one, once we got there.

Day 2 — The ferry crossing

This is the part of the trip I didn't expect to love as much as I did. To reach the next stretch of coast without backtracking two hours inland, we put the car on a ferry and crossed a stretch of water I couldn't even name until I looked it up standing at the railing.

There's something about a car ferry that forces you to stop being a driver for an hour. No steering wheel, no directions, just the two of us leaning on the rail watching the mainland shrink behind us. We ate bad ferry coffee and good ferry pastries and didn't look at our phones once.

Day 2 — Into wine country

Off the ferry, back in the car, and the landscape changed completely — coastline gave way to rolling hills covered in vineyards, and the road started curving in ways that made the drive itself the point of the day. We picked a town almost at random because it had a market going on, and ended up staying two nights instead of one.

Day 3 — The town that kept us

This was meant to be a driving day. It wasn't. We woke up, found a bakery, found a second bakery, and by midday had fully committed to doing nothing except walking around and eating well. I've taken enough trips to know these are the days you remember most, even though nothing "happened."

Day 4 — Handing the car off, briefly

For one stretch, the road we needed to take was closed for a local festival, so we did something I hadn't planned for at all: parked the car at a train station, took a regional train two towns over, and picked up a rental on the other side. It sounds like a headache written down, but in the moment it was just... a different kind of travel day. Same trip, different vehicle, same direction.

I liked the train leg more than I expected to. No navigating, no fuel stops — just watching the vineyards blur past the window for forty-five minutes before we were back behind a wheel again.

Day 5 — Mountains, briefly

The road climbed for most of the morning, switchback after switchback, until we were high enough that the vineyards from two days ago looked like a different country entirely. We stopped at a lookout for longer than the view technically required, mostly because neither of us wanted to get back in the car yet.

By afternoon we'd dropped back down into a river valley, and the whole rhythm of the trip shifted again — slower roads, smaller towns, more waves from people sitting outside cafés.

Day 6 — The lake, and slowing all the way down

We reached a lake by midafternoon and made the executive decision to stop driving altogether for a full day. The car sat in a gravel lot while we rented two bikes and did laps around the water instead. It's strange how a week that started as a road trip ended up having a day with no road in it at all — but that felt like exactly the kind of thing a slow trip is supposed to allow for.

Day 7 — The long way home

Last day, and we took the longer route back on purpose. No ferry this time, no train — just road, all the way, the two of us and a week's worth of half-used maps and gas station snacks. We didn't talk much for the last hour. Didn't need to.

Reflections

I've taken trips that covered more ground than this one. I don't think I've taken one that felt fuller. Somewhere between the ferry crossing, the accidental train leg, and the day we ditched the car entirely for bikes, I stopped thinking of this as "a road trip" and started thinking of it as just — a trip, one that happened to change its mode of transport whenever the road (or the schedule, or the mood) asked it to.

That flexibility ended up being the whole point. Not the fastest way from A to B, but whatever way let the week actually unfold the way it wanted to.