After spending eight hours driving through "wintry mix" last night and today, I remembered something that occurred to me a few weeks ago while scurrying through airport security for an early morning commuter flight -- travel and transit are very different things. "Travel" is a concept, encompassing a wide range of sights, sounds, smells, people, places, and experiences (good and bad). But travel is not always motion. Often the best travel experiences come from sitting still for a while and getting the true sense of a place. By contrast, "transit" is motion, how you get from where you are to somewhere else. Often transit is unpleasant, involving cramped seats, rough roads, inevitably bad weather, dodgy border crossings, and bad food. And while transit is a necessary part of travel, it doesn't need to -- and shouldn't -- define the experience of travel.
We make an effort to minimize transit and, where unavoidable, improve it. There are lots of ways to do this, but mainly we try to find places we like and then stay put for a few days (or weeks). You can learn more about Argentina in four days on a cattle ranch than you can on a week-long, five-stop tourist itinerary. Sure, you might miss a few "sights," but what you miss in sights you'll probably gain in experience. But, of course, to travel the travelers must move. So we try to make the "transit" part of travel as interesting and pleasant as possible. Instead of taking a quick-hop flight, we look for overland options like trains. In cities, we walk or rent bikes instead of taking cabs or underground metros where you can't see anything. And through all this, we shift from running-around-in-transit-mode to traveling in a way where we can get as much from a place as it has to offer. Like right now, in Pennsylvania, where we're trying to get the most out of a couple of beers and a lazy afternoon.
