I’ve hit on my ultimate holiday experience, the ideal day out. You can do this anywhere in the world. It’s like a haiku: you can take its confined parameters and mould them with infinite possibility.
But this, to me, is travelling well. This makes my heart sing and my spirit soar. It fires my senses. It fills my cup.
And the experience is: walking to lunch. This is how I would spend my ideal day while travelling, and how I have spent many of the best days of my life.
It’s a simple concept but it requires a little fleshing out. I’m not talking about a 10-minute stroll to a café instead of a short Uber ride, and I’m not talking about a coffee and a sandwich.
This “walk to lunch” should be a long walk, and it should be a long lunch. It should combine two of the things I love the most – the outdoors, and food – into one lengthy and lazy travel experience.
The walk should be point to point, a proper journey, and it should take at least three hours. It needs to be a mission. I want to go on a hike, I want to breathe fresh air and feel my heart pumping and go to places with no one else around.
And at the end, I want to arrive at an incredible restaurant, a place of pilgrimage, a travel experience all its own. I want to sit down to a lunch that is just as long as the hike – three hours or more – and indulge in beautiful food and expensive wine and service that’s friendly and warm.
I’ve made this day happen on plenty of occasions, most notably in Spain. I made it happen in San Sebastian, where you can lace up your hiking boots and walk part of the Camino del Norte, the northern route of the Camino de Santiago, hugging the windswept coastline to the east before you descend into the riverside town of Pasajes.
There, you board a little ferry and chug across the river to a seafood restaurant called Casa Camara, open since 1884, an incredible haven of grilled shellfish and good wine.
Three hours of walking, four hours of dining. “Well” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Or how about in Ribadesella, on Spain’s north coast, a small hamlet that is also on the Camino del Norte. Here, you follow that pathway west for about 10 kilometres until you reach Playa de Vega, a tiny village that’s home to another incredible seafood restaurant, Gueyu Mar.
The fire-grilled alfonsino at Gueyu Mar is like nothing you’ve ever tried before. The wine list arrives at your table in three volumes. The service is friendly and charming, the sort of place you want to settle into for an afternoon and never leave.
So this, friends, is what I mean by walking to lunch. You can find places to make this day happen almost anywhere in the world, from Peru to Japan to France to South Africa. Find an isolated restaurant, somewhere pilgrimage-worthy, find a hiking path that leads there, and you have yourself travel perfection, the ultimate holiday experience.
This is travelling joyfully, travelling beautifully. Travelling well.
