Rediscovering Travel Closer to Home

This has been the year many of us looked at a map of our own country and realised how little of it we’d actually seen. With long haul trips off the table for so many people, there’s been a quiet return to something simpler: the road trip, the coastal town an hour away, the market town you’d always driven past but never stopped in. It turns out staying local doesn’t have to mean staying bored.

Treat your own region like a destination

Part of the trick is attitude. If you approach a weekend in a nearby county the same way you’d approach a trip abroad, booking a nice place to stay, planning a couple of meals out, allowing yourself to be a tourist, it stops feeling like a consolation prize. Look up the odd local museum or walking trail you’d normally scroll past, and you’ll often find something genuinely worth the detour.

Plenty of people are discovering that the places they’d written off as boring, simply because they were too close and too familiar, are actually full of things they’d happily recommend to a visiting friend. It just took not being able to fly somewhere else to notice.

The joy of the slow road trip

Driving without a strict itinerary, stopping wherever looks interesting, has a completely different rhythm to flying somewhere and ticking off sights. You notice things: the way the landscape changes county to county, the small bakery with a queue out the door, the view from a hill nobody mentioned online. A tank of petrol and a loose plan can go a surprisingly long way.

Part of what makes this kind of trip work is resisting the urge to fill the boot with a rigid route. Pick a general direction, a rough number of nights, and let the actual stops reveal themselves as you go. Some of the best overnight stays come from simply noticing a nice looking town on the map an hour before you need to stop for the day.

Off season has its own charm

With fewer people travelling far, quieter destinations and off peak timing have become more appealing than ever. Visiting a seaside town in October rather than August means cheaper stays, empty beaches, and a completely different atmosphere, often a better one. It’s worth remembering this lesson even once bigger trips are back on the table, because shoulder season travel rarely disappoints.

There’s also something to be said for seeing a place without the crowds it’s usually known for. A famous viewpoint with nobody else standing at it, or a high street without a queue outside every cafe, changes how a destination feels far more than people expect until they’ve experienced it themselves.

Still deciding where to go next? Our guide to Things to Do in Bath might help.

For more inspiration, take a look at our guide to Things to Do in Berlin.