Satellite navigation has quietly made everyone's journeys worse in one specific way: it always points you at the fastest road, and the fastest road is almost always the dullest. The art of the scenic detour, of trading an hour for a memory, is a skill the highway has nearly trained out of us, and it is worth deliberately relearning.
The trick is knowing which detours pay off. A coastal road that shadows the direct route, an old highway the interstate replaced, a pass over a range instead of the tunnel through it, these reliably reward the extra time. The signal to look for is a road that runs alongside water or over height, because that is where the views live.
Small towns are the other great detour. The places the fast road bypasses are often the ones that kept their character precisely because the traffic stopped coming through. A main street, a local bakery, a diner where the coffee is bottomless and the waitress knows everyone, these are the texture that the highway erases.
Give yourself permission to be inefficient on purpose. The whole point of a road trip, as opposed to simply arriving, is that the journey is the thing, and a journey with no detours is just a slow flight. Build the slack in so the detour does not feel like it is costing you the schedule.
You will not remember the miles you made good time on. You will remember the wrong turn that turned out right, the viewpoint you nearly skipped, the town you meant to drive through and stayed two hours in. Leave the fast road often enough and the trip becomes the story rather than the commute.
