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The tyranny of the perfect itinerary

Last summer I met a man on a ferry who had, by his own account, planned every hour of a ten-day trip to a coastal town. He showed me the spreadsheet. It had colour-coded columns for sights, meals and "buffer time", and a cell at the bottom, shaded green, that read "Spontaneity: Thursday afternoon". I laughed, and then I stopped laughing, because I recognised the impulse. I have drawn up versions of that spreadsheet myself.

We have become, it seems, a generation of optimisers, and nowhere is the habit more visible than in the way we travel. Reviews, rankings and maps that compress whole cities into a list of "must-sees" promise to spare us the risk of a wasted afternoon. Seldom do they pause to ask what a wasted afternoon might have been for. The wrong turning, the closed museum, the café chosen only because it was raining: these are not failures of planning but, very often, the raw material of the stories we later enjoy retelling.

Defenders of the carefully planned trip are quick to point out that time and money are finite, and they are right. Nobody should be condemned to a week of aimless queuing out of some romantic loyalty to chance. Were I to arrive in an unfamiliar city with a single day to spare, I would certainly want some guidance. My objection is not to preparation as such but to the assumption, rarely spoken yet widely shared, that a holiday is a product whose quality can be maximised, like the output of a factory.

The trouble with that assumption is that it quietly changes what we are doing. If the aim is to extract the greatest possible value from every hour, then every hour becomes a test, and we are bound to be found wanting. On another trip, the woman beside me spent the whole of a sunset adjusting her camera, and then complained that the photograph did not capture it. Had she simply looked, she might have felt less short-changed. Research on memory suggests, incidentally, that we judge a past experience largely by its most intense moment and its ending rather than by its average, which ought to make us wary of the idea that every moment must be equally rewarding.

None of this is an argument for chaos. The most contented travellers I know plan loosely: they fix the hard points, such as the train, the bed and the one concert they refuse to miss, and leave the rest deliberately slack. They treat the gaps not as dead time to be filled but as the part of the journey that belongs to them. It is a modest discipline, and perhaps a harder one than it sounds, since it asks us to tolerate the faint anxiety of not knowing what comes next.

As for the man on the ferry, I hope Thursday afternoon went well. I suspect, though, that the truest spontaneity of his trip occurred somewhere no cell could have predicted: in the minutes when the ferry was delayed and he, for once, had nothing scheduled to do about it.