We booked the first two nights and nothing else. This is either obvious or reckless depending on when you last tried it, and the honest answer is that it only works for about five months of the year — which happens to be the five months this magazine is interested in.
In August, arriving in a small town at six in the evening without a room is a mistake that costs you two hours and a bad hotel by a roundabout. In the first week of November it costs you a phone call.
What the road gives back
The specific pleasure is not spontaneity for its own sake. It is that the day stops being an itinerary and becomes a series of small decisions, each of which can be wrong without consequence.
We stopped for two hours at a viewpoint over a valley because the cloud was doing something. We took a road marked as scenic that was not, and then a road not marked as anything that was. We stayed a second night in a village we had intended to drive through, because the room was good and the rain was horizontal and there was nowhere better to be.
None of this would have happened with a booking waiting ninety minutes further on.
A reservation is a promise made by a version of you who had not yet seen the weather.
The rules that make it work
Four, learned expensively.
Stop looking by four o’clock. Not five, not when it gets dark. In the off months the small places close their desks early and stop answering the phone, and the difference between four and six is the difference between a choice and whatever is left.
Never pass the last fuel for sixty kilometres. Out of season, rural stations keep shorter hours and some do not open at all on Sunday. This is the single most avoidable way to ruin a day.
Carry one night’s worth of food. Not for romance. For the evening you arrive somewhere at seven and the one restaurant closed in October.
Book ahead for exactly two things: the first night, because you will be tired and useless, and any night that falls on a local festival or public holiday, when a town of four hundred people acquires four thousand.
What it costs
Less than the equivalent booked trip, by a margin that surprised us — roughly a fifth cheaper across nine nights, because the rooms available at five in the afternoon in November are priced to be filled that evening.
The cost is elsewhere. You will stay in one genuinely bad place. You will drive further than you planned on at least two days. And if you are travelling with anyone who finds uncertainty tiring rather than pleasant, you will find that out by day three, which is a poor time to discover it.
Would we do it again
We are doing it again in February. Different country, same rules, and this time we are not booking the first night either — which, on the evidence of nine days, is probably one rule too few.
