Slow Travel, Exploration and Drawing the Line

The Practice of Slow Travel

“Live your life by a compass, not a clock.”

Stephen R. Covey

Modern travel has long been a race against time. Flights are judged by how many hours they shave off a journey, airports are evaluated by how efficiently they move passengers through security lines, and vacations are often planned around how many destinations can be visited in the shortest possible time. Speed has become the dominant measure of value, and efficiency the language through which movement is understood.

Yet despite this acceleration, speed has not necessarily made travel more meaningful.

Somewhere along the way, the journey itself was reduced to little more than transit - the empty space between departure and arrival. Airports replaced harbours, highways replaced footpaths, and even railways, once the great narrative threads across continents, were increasingly treated as relics of another age.

Amid this culture of acceleration, another way of travelling still persists. Slow travel exists alongside the rush of modern movement, offering a different relationship with distance, time, and the landscapes that lie between departure and destination. For us, slow travel is neither nostalgia nor rejection of modern life. Instead, it represents a conscious decision to move through the world at a pace that allows meaning to emerge gradually. Whether walking long-distance trails, crossing continents by rail, or voyaging across oceans on historic liners, these forms of travel restore the journey itself.

Over time, those journeys have begun to give way to something else entirely – a line.

The Line Clearer

The idea of the line of slow travel first appeared during the years we spent walking across Canada on the Trans Canada Trail, an experience we later documented in our #Hike4Birds and Come Walk Across Canada posts. At the end of many long days on the trail, we would often review our GPS tracks, watching the route we had followed across forests, farmland, rivers, and mountain valleys. At first this habit simply served as a way to record the day’s progress, but gradually something unexpected emerged from the map.

A line began to appear across Canada from coast to coast to coast. 

It was thin and imperfect, bending along coastlines, looping through towns, and occasionally doubling back when the trail wove in its uniquely frustrating way or when we detoured for supplies or shelter. The path wandered through wetlands, climbed across mountain passes, and followed river valleys that shaped the landscape long before modern highways appeared. Though far from straight, it carried a sense of continuity from coast to coast to coast. Each kilometre represented footsteps placed one after another across a continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic.

The line contained far more than geography. It held the memory of hurricanes lived through in Atlantic Canada, early mornings on forest trails in Quebec, conversations with strangers and classroom students who we met unexpectedly along the route, long summer days in the prairies and evenings in the mountains of the west coast – as well as thousands of bird observations recorded along migration corridors that stretch across the nation. The map gradually transformed from a simple record of our hike into a reflection of lived experience.

Once we noticed the line, we could not stop seeing it. And soon we began noticing others.

Lines Across Landscapes

Many of our earlier journeys had left similar traces.

In France, the Via Podiensis pilgrimage route, which we later explored in the Via Podiensis blog series, followed medieval roads and quiet country lanes from Le Puy-en-Velay toward the Pyrenees. Beyond those mountains, the route continued across Spain along the Camino Francés, eventually leading pilgrims to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela.

Other Caminos extended the pattern. The Camino de Madrid, Camino San Salvador, and Camino Primitivo offered quieter and more rugged alternatives across Spain’s interior landscapes, while the Via de la Plata and Camino Sanabrés followed ancient Roman roads northward across western Spain.

Portugal provided yet another thread. Along the Atlantic coast trails such as the Rota Vicentina and Camino Portuguese Coastal and Espiritual route trace beaches, fishing villages and estuaries before crossing into Galicia.

In Britain, additional lines appeared through our hikes on Wainwright’s Coast to Coast, the Pennine Way, the West Highland Way, the Great Glen Way, and Hadrian’s Wall National Trail, each route crossed national parks, ancient Roman frontiers, glens, and moorlands shaped by centuries of pastoral life. As well as repeatedly crossing and traversing England and Scotland.

Individually, these journeys were separate experiences taken in different years. Yet when viewed together they began to resemble something larger than isolated trips. They formed a network of paths slowly emerging across the landscapes of multiple countries. 

The question that followed was both simple and also oddly compelling: could these lines eventually connect?

Walking the Continent

Hiking remains the most elemental expression of slow travel because walking (connected to the land) restores the true scale of the world. Distances that disappear behind the glass of a car window regain their meaning when measured by footsteps. Twenty-five kilometres becomes a full day’s effort, while mountain ranges (such as those in the Canadian Arctic) represent weeks of movement rather than hours.

Walking also restores attention.

Subtle changes in vegetation reveal differences in soil and climate. Birdsong and migration patterns become noticeable in ways that are easily missed by faster forms of travel. During our years walking across Canada, we observed ecosystems shift gradually across the continent. Boreal forests gave way to prairie grasslands, and eventually, mountains rose from the western plains. Each is unique, yet each are part of interconnected systems. For someone trained in conservation biology, this pace transformed travel into a form of ecological observation. Long-distance hiking became something akin to a living transect across landscapes, allowing us to watch environmental systems change across distance.

Yet walking also has limits. The planet is vast, and oceans separate continents. If the line was to continue beyond the boundaries of land and beyond the shorelines of Canada, another form of movement would be required. Beyond the horizon lies the greatest challenge to any attempt at drawing a continuous line across the world.

The oceans.

Oceans as Pathways

For centuries, oceans connected continents long before aircraft shortened global distances. Ocean liners carried migrants, artists, diplomats, and explorers across the seas, forming the great maritime and trade corridors that linked societies.

Modern cruise ships often follow circular itineraries designed for tourism, but one vessel still maintains the traditional role of point-to-point ocean travel. Cunard’s Queen Mary 2, which we have travelled on several times – both eastbound from New York to Southampton and westbound from Southampton back to New York on a transatlantic voyage.

Stepping aboard Queen Mary 2 represents a return to an older form of travel, as the only true ocean liner still in service, in which the crossing itself becomes the experience. The voyage from New York to Southampton or the reverse takes approximately a week, unfolding entirely at sea without port stops.

Days aboard the ship follow a slower way of life than most modern travel and are more defined by the Atlantic horizon outside our cabin windows, sunrises on deck, enrichment talks, and watching seabirds follow the ship for hours.

Evenings are filled with clear skies, fields of stars, and gala dances, along with midnight walks along the promenade deck. In this way, the crossing gradually became less about the ship and more about the moment of traversing the ocean itself.

In that moment, the Atlantic ceases to appear as a barrier between continents. Instead, it becomes a bridge connecting the lines already traced across land.

Connecting the Journeys

Once we began to think about ocean liners and sailing ships as extensions of the trails we walked, the map of our travels began to take on a new meaning. The Trans Canada Trail linked the Atlantic to the Pacific and eventually toward the Arctic. Pilgrimage routes across Europe formed additional pathways across France, Spain, and Portugal. National trails in the UK created further lines through the landscapes of England and Scotland.

Ocean crossings bridged the distances between continents. Together, these journeys began to resemble a transect across the natural and cultural landscapes of the planet. In ecological research, a transect is a line across a study area along which observations are recorded. Scientists use transects to measure how ecosystems change across distance, documenting shifts in species, climate, and terrain.

Our travels gradually became something similar. Each journey provided an opportunity to observe how landscapes, wildlife, and human communities connect across the globe. An opportunity not only to see new species or have new experiences – but the chance to see how everything is fundamentally connected. A truth we too often forget these days.

The Value of Moving Slowly

In a world defined by speed, choosing slower forms of travel can seem impractical. Flights shorten distances dramatically, and digital navigation makes movement increasingly efficient. Yet slow travel offers something increasingly rare: perspective.

More importantly, moving slowly creates space for reflection. Without constant schedules and rapid transitions between destinations, travellers can notice subtle relationships within the world around them. As experiences take place and observations accumulate, the journey itself becomes a teacher.

Slow travel also fosters humility. Standing on a trail that crosses mountains, watching endless prairies from a train window, or gazing across the Atlantic from the deck of an ocean liner reminds us how small we are within the larger systems of the planet. These experiences place human activity within a broader ecological and historical context, encouraging a deeper respect for the natural world.

Continuing the Line

“Life is not a problem to be solved, it is an adventure to be lived!”

The line across the map remains unfinished and perhaps always will. Its purpose was never to create a perfect circle around the globe or to claim any form of conquest over geography. Instead, it represents something more essential - a lifetime of movement through the world at a human pace.

Each journey adds another segment. Another trail walked. Another railway crossed. Another ocean voyage completed. The line bends along coastlines, follows mountain passes, and crosses rivers and seas. Over time, it becomes less about reaching destinations and more about the practice of moving through the world attentively.

The Trans Canada Trail was not just another line added to the map for us – it was the line that taught us what travel, even intentional travel, can be and likely always will be imperfect. Hikes and voyages can be interrupted, rerouted, and shaped by weather – but what matters is that they are lived deliberately – one step and one sail at a time. The lived experience that later becomes a line on the map will always be different than the hike or voyage that is being planned. Yet the idea of slow travel is not about completing a perfect route – instead, it is about allowing the route to change how you see the world, how you meet other people and cultures, and who you are.

With the Trans Canada Trail now completed (for now) there are future journeys to embark on ahead of us. While we will still be posting about the TCT there are new pilgrimage routes, other trails that interest us (Northern Europe, the Via Francigena, Australia’s Bibbulmun Track, New Zealand’s Te Araroa, and Japan’s Shikoku) and the possibility of traversing other countries and other continents that we have yet to explore. As well as sailing across other oceans and seas that connect each distant shoreline.

Whether these journeys take place over years or decades matters little. What matters is the commitment to move slowly enough to see the world clearly.

The line continues to grow – by trail, rail and sail.

See you out there!