Not faster.
Not further.
Just better.

About the writer

I'm James Morrow — a travel writer based between London and wherever the next overnight train is going. I've been writing about slow travel, European rail, and culinary destinations for the better part of a decade, and I still find the overnight train from Paris to Venice more interesting than any flight I've ever taken.

My approach to travel writing is practical first, philosophical second. A good guide should tell you the actual prices, the right booking window, and what the platform looks like at 6 a.m. — and then, if it's earned it, say something true about what it means to be in that particular place.

I've ridden the California Zephyr twice, crossed the Bernina Pass in winter, taken slow local trains through Morocco, and spent more time than I should admit waiting on platforms in Czech station cafés. The knowledge on this site comes from those trips — not from press releases or tourism board briefings.

About Art of the Travel

There is a particular quality of attention that arrives only when you slow down. Not the attention of the tourist moving between monuments with a checklist, but something quieter: the awareness that comes from staying somewhere long enough to develop preferences, from taking the train rather than the plane, from eating where the locals eat because you've been there long enough to find out where that is.

Art of the Travel is a guide to that kind of travelling. It's rooted in a simple conviction: the means of getting somewhere is part of the experience of being there. The overnight train from Paris to Venice doesn't just deliver you to Venice — it changes what you know about the distance between them, the countries that lie in between, the continent you're moving through.

Alain de Botton wrote that we rarely give much thought to how we travel, only to where. This site is an attempt to correct that.

What you'll find here

Practical, detailed guides to train routes across Europe and North America — with real prices, booking advice, and the kind of information that actually helps you decide whether a journey is worth taking and how to take it well. I cover the economics of rail passes, the difference between operators, and the things worth knowing before you board.

Essays on slow travel as a practice — not as an aesthetic pose, but as a genuine argument about what makes a trip worth having. I'm interested in the philosophy of travel: why we go, what we're looking for, what we actually find.

Culinary travel, because food is the most direct way into a place. The market in Bologna, the coffee ritual in Vienna, the particular pastry that only exists in one city and nowhere else — these are not distractions from travel. They are the travel.

Interactive tools: a daily trivia game, a quiz that tries to match your travel personality to a journey worth taking. Because travel planning should be engaging, not just functional.

A note on affiliate links

Some links on this site are affiliate links — meaning if you book through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to things I'd genuinely recommend. The editorial content is independent; a commission does not influence what I write about or how I assess a route, product, or service.

Full details in the Affiliate Disclosure.