We didn’t plan any of it. That’s probably the point.
In the first year of the pandemic, my wife Bonnie and I did what a lot of people did: we sat still. We watched the news too closely. We waited for something to change. By the time spring turned to summer, the waiting had curdled into something else — a restlessness that had nowhere to go, because everywhere still felt closed. So we did the only thing that seemed available to us. We got in the car.
There was no itinerary, which is really just another way of describing what’s now called slow travel, and that turned out to matter more than I expected. Most of the travel we’d done in our working years followed a familiar shape: a few packed days, a checklist of sights, a return flight already booked before we’d left. Rolf Potts, who has spent his career studying how modern culture treats travel, has a phrase for that shape — he calls it quarantining our travel, penning it into short, frenzied bursts we purchase like a product, the way a person might glance in a mirror just to confirm what they look like when no one’s watching. John Muir noticed a version of the same pattern a century earlier, watching well-heeled tourists rush through Yosemite and out again in a few hours. He was famously unimpressed even by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who marveled at the giant sequoias and then hurried off after barely two hours — Muir dryly wondered afterward whether the man had actually seen the trees at all.
We weren’t rushing through anything. We’d pick a direction out of Tulsa — north toward the Kansas line, east into the Cherokee hills, west across the wheat flats — and just drive. It wasn’t the kind of trip anyone plans; it was just a day trip near home, taken almost by accident. Two hours, sometimes three. We took the road that curved instead of the one that ran straight. If a gravel turnoff looked interesting, we took it.
We took the road that curved instead of the one that ran straight.
Somewhere in those aimless afternoons, we found towns we’d lived near for decades without ever knowing existed — several of Oklahoma’s historic all-Black towns, founded by families who’d walked out of slavery and Reconstruction and built something of their own on the prairie. We’d driven within thirty miles of these places our whole lives. We had never once turned onto the road that led to them.
Standing in one of those towns, reading a historical marker neither of us had known to look for, it felt — absurdly, but truly — like we’d crossed into another country. I’ve thought about why that was, and I think it comes down to something researchers who study the psychology of exploration have named more precisely than I ever could: our everyday environments, built for safety and routine, quietly close off what one line of research calls the landscape of affordances — the countless small opportunities for discovery and engagement the world offers, if we’re moving slowly enough to notice them. Bonnie and I hadn’t found a new landscape that Sunday. We’d finally slowed down enough to let the old one open up.
I think about that distinction often now, because it runs against nearly everything travel is supposed to mean to men our age. We’re told, implicitly and constantly, that travel is a reward for a life of restraint — the cruise finally booked, the bucket-list country crossed off before the knees give out. There’s a case, though, that our sixties and seventies are exactly the wrong time for that kind of hurry. The essayist Pat Tompkins calls it the “now-or-never stage,” the point at which we’re finally free to set our own pace instead of someone else’s — not to cram in more, but to finally settle down and stay a while, wherever “a while” happens to be.
It’s not the point at which we cram in more. It’s the point at which we finally get to settle down and stay a while.
Robert Louis Stevenson made something like this his whole literary project. In Travels with a Donkey, he wasn’t hurrying toward anywhere in particular; the negotiating, the wrong turns, the nights under the stars were the entire point, not the inconvenience standing between him and it. Rick Steves, of all people, makes a more practical version of the same argument — advising that one day of active sightseeing is best followed by a quiet one, and that a good travel day can simply mean a sidewalk table, a drink, and unhurried people-watching. Some of our best Oklahoma afternoons were exactly that: a diner with good pie, and nowhere in particular left to be.
None of this is an argument against big trips. If Rome or the Rockies is calling you, go — I’ve taken those trips myself and don’t regret a mile. But I’d push back gently on the idea that the meaningful travel only lives in the big trip, while the drive to the next county over is just killing time. Our unplanned Sunday drives gave us something the planned vacations rarely did: no destination to perform for, nothing to prove to anyone once we got home. Just two people, a windshield, and the road.
There’s a deeper shift that happens, too, the longer you spend moving slowly through a place instead of past it. Aldo Leopold wrote that once we see land as a community we belong to, rather than scenery we’re passing through, we start to treat it with something closer to love. That sounds like a large claim for a two-lane county road, and maybe it is. But somewhere on those drives, the wheat fields and the small towns and the historical markers stopped feeling like backdrop and started feeling like a place we were quietly, gradually becoming part of — not tourists in it, but neighbors to it, however briefly.
Bonnie and I still take those drives, less out of pandemic restlessness now and more out of habit — slow travel, if you want to put a name to it, and a good habit I’d recommend to anyone. We don’t always find a historic town or a story we didn’t know. But often enough, we find something. And every time we do, I’m reminded that the richest part of travel was never really about how far we went. It was about whether we were paying attention on the way.
You don’t need three weeks and a suitcase to find out. You need an afternoon, a full tank of gas, and a willingness to take the road that curves.
