A journey might be prompted by self-indulgent nomadic rootlessness or a gentle sense of enquiry into the manners of other countries: either way it is an invitation to explore our surroundings and ourselves. A long journey across Europe by train is perhaps a better cure for melancholia than any prescription drug. Slow travel can be wonderfully therapeutic - with or without a donkey. Stevenson was driven by lamentable ill health to forsake his native Scotland. The potential adventure of a journey is discarded in favour of a speedy arrival. We fly from one end of Europe to the other in four or five hours. So often in our work for hidden europe, we feel that modern travel patterns prioritise the destination at the expense of the journey. "The great thing is to move," wrote Stevenson, "to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly to come down off this featherbed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints." Modestine the donkey probably would not agree, but Stevenson has a point. His account of the journey was published in 1879, and in it Stevenson insisted that he travelled not to reach anywhere, but merely to savour the process of travel. The Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson once spent a fortnight wandering through the Cévennes area of southern France with a peculiarly stubborn donkey called Modestine.
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