For most of my life to date I thought that I cared far more about the destination of my travels than the stops along the way, but a few aspects of travels changed my mind, namely the way that the spaces in between the destination can add to the enjoyment of a journey that one may not expect. Whether it is the unexpected sites that one can see on an extended car trip, or the various sights you can see from a plane or the airports one stops at with the joys of taking off and landing and seeing some truly unexpected and often cozy little places. A couple of trips, at least for me, stand out as being highlights in terms of the places in between where one starts and where one stops, one of them the trip that my family and I took from the Feast of Tabernacles in 2019 and Martinique (for a couple of days), and then Guadalupe and Haiti on the way back to the United States. The other was a milk run that I took myself on Alaska Airlines on the way back from the Feast of Tabernacles in 2021, where I got to stop at some really endearing small airports in what would otherwise have been a pretty boring trip from Anchorage to Seattle.

There are all kinds of reasons why the trade-off between more time spent along a travel and more stops along the way is an enjoyable one for the traveler who is well-prepared for the slower journey. Among them is the fact that it is enjoyable simply to have new experiences and be in new places, especially those places that one might otherwise never have the chance to visit. Often journeys that make various stops along the way do so because those areas would not be served by transportation routes unless those routes were strung together, thus serving multiple places in the same trips. These visits can provide life-saving transportation for medical reasons for small communities and also provide logistical support for somewhat isolated areas. They also provide means for people to see these isolated places and to support the services provided to them, and that can be an enjoyable opportunity if you are not in so much of a hurry that you would rather see everything from 35,000 feet and never get closer to it.

There often seems to be an inverse relationship between the amount of speed you travel from one place to another and the depth which you know it well. There are a great many people who zip from one place to another and think that they know all about it that they need to know, but there are a great many places that can resist being known for a long time. Much depends on the amount of time that one is willing to watch someone or something and observe its ways and seek to understand it. Some places and people and phenomena only reveal their secrets after considerable observation, and some of them not at all. There are layers to how we know things, whether not at all, or only superficially, or to some degree of depth that has been won through a great deal of focused effort and time spent. We only have so much time to see things, and how we choose to spend our time can help determine the extent to which we know things and the level we understand them, and ourselves.