A surprise layover becomes a free day of unexpected discoveries.
一场意外的逗留，一天探索的自由。

大家有没有这样的体会？多少次为了计划旅行，查攻略、看机票、看酒店。。。还没出发就已经感觉很累，自由行不“自由”；有人说，你也可以订旅行团啊，但事实上也不省心，有时碰到不靠谱的更麻烦，我也有去一次去台湾走亲子团，在台中高速公路上一天内来回三次的经历，天知道路线怎么排的。

那怎么办？

读了这篇国家地理的旅行文章分享：无目的地的旅行，会带来意外的惊喜，忽然有点开窍了。

大意是：

无目的地（Nowhere）是你永远不想去旅行的地方。
但要为Nowhere点赞，是因为：
1）完全没有计划，你压根不需要读导游书或攻略;
2) 直接把旅行中最危险的“行李”:期待(Expectation)干掉。期待这个东西吧，有好有坏，问题是它常常会把你带到所谓的官方景点，旅游胜地，而那些地方，有的只是游客去的地儿。

３）没有人知道我在这里，我也没有任何事情要做；突然间，我就”偷得半生闲"。

作者提到了他的个人有趣体验，因为一次转机延误关系，逗留在加利福尼亚的密尔布瑞市（Millbrae）24个小时;在大家印象中，这个地方永远只是个路边小地方。
作者既来之则安之，无法改变这个事实，那就好好发掘这个地方吧。看看电视，街上走走，看看行人，吃个很棒的汉堡，欣赏漂亮的夜景，还完整的看了一遍金像奖。不知何故，变成了个完美的一天短假期。

原来如此！在现实和自己的回应中，永远都有一段缓冲：个人选择的自由。现实你无法改变，就像转机延误这种事故；但你可以控制自己的选择，泰然处之，仔细观察、呼吸不一样的空气、见到不一样的人、随便闲逛、随便找人聊聊、带着好奇心去看这个地方，那就够了。

从这篇短文中，我学到了：

在旅行这件事上，热爱生活，体验生活，胜过周详计划，胜过刻意。

相信大部分人和我一样，还是会选择有目的地的旅行，但也许可以考虑以下两点：

1) 大致计划可以有，基本大头搞定就好，不需要一直一直看，否则那就是刻意；

2) 不需要旅程安排太满，留半天时间做做探索挖掘，可以：找个当地司机，全城走一遍，再让推荐本地人去哪儿玩；带张地图，选一个方位，开始走。

有类似经验的童鞋可以分享。

P.S. 真当学学梁朝伟，到巴黎喂喂鸽子。

全文如下：

Nowhere is the place you never want to go. It’s not on any departure board, and though some people like to travel so far off the grid that it looks like Nowhere (or Nome or Nuuk), most wanderers ultimately long to get somewhere. Yet every now and then—if there’s nowhere else you can be and all other options have vanished—going nowhere can prove the best adventure around.

One beauty of Nowhere is that it’s entirely uncharted; you’ve never read a guidebook entry on it or followed Paul Theroux on a train ride through its suburbs. Few YouTube videos exist of it. And this leads to the second grace of Nowhere, which is that it’s cleansed of the most dangerous kind of luggage, expectation. Knowing nothing of a place in advance opens us up to a wide-awake vitality we seldom encounter while traipsing around Paris or Kyoto with a list of the 10 things we want—or, in embarrassing truth, feel we need—to see.

I’ll never forget a bright January morning when I landed in San Francisco from Santa Barbara, just in time to see my connecting flight to Osaka take off. I hurried to the nearest airline counter to ask for help, and was told that I would have to wait 24 hours, at my own expense, for the next day’s flight. The airline wasn’t responsible for fog-related delays, a gate agent declared, and no alternative flights were available.

Millbrae, California, the drive-through town that encircles San Francisco’s airport, was a mystery to me. With one of the world’s most beautiful cities only 40 minutes to the north, and the unofficial center of the world, Silicon Valley, 27 miles to the south, Millbrae is known mostly as a place to fly away from, at high speed. And an unanticipated delay is exactly what nobody wants on his itinerary.

NOWHERE IS SO FAR OFF THE MAP THAT ITS SMALLEST BEAUTIES ARE A DISCOVERY.

But what I found, as I dropped my checked-in suitcase off at a left-luggage counter, reserved a room at an airport hotel, and walked out into the winter sun, was that Nowhere can have grace notes that Anywhere would envy.

It was a cloudless, warm afternoon as a shuttle bus deposited me in Millbrae. Locals were taking their dogs for walks along the bay while couples sauntered hand in hand beside an expanse of blue that, in San Francisco, would have been crowded with people and official “attractions.” I checked in to my hotel and registered another advantage of Nowhere: Nobody knew I was here, and there was nothing I had to do.

Suddenly I was enjoying a luxury I never allow myself, even on vacation: a whole day free. I ordered a salad from room service—healthier and much tastier than anything I could have eaten in seat 17L—and then noticed that The American, a movie I’d longed to see when it sped through the cineplex, was available on my TV.

The movie and meal behind me, I went for a walk, and, looking in on the Marriott down the road, found myself caught up in the last dramatic seconds of an NFL playoff game on a giant screen, doubly exciting for one who doesn’t have a TV set at home. The whole event was made festive by the conferencegoers who had turned the impersonal space into a weekend party. Heart still pounding as the players rushed the field, I stepped out again, strolled along the water, and caught sight of yellow arrows pointing to the finest burgers in the West. My dinner at In-N-Out cost me all of $4.27.

Nowhere is so far off the map that its smallest beauties are a discovery. And as I made my way back to my hotel, lights began to come on in the hills of Millbrae, and I realized I had never seen a sight half so lovely in clamorous, industrial Osaka. Its neighbor Kyoto is stunning, but it attracts 50 million visitors a year.

Not so Millbrae. I had the waterfront to myself and no need to dodge tour buses or postcard peddlers. Back in my room, I saw that the irresistibly unbuttoned Golden Globes were on—I’d never managed to catch them before—and I was reminded that one of the blessings of any trip is that it can open your eyes to what you’d never take notice of at home.

Next morning I headed back, uncharacteristically refreshed, to the airport and collected my suitcase from the left-luggage counter. I arrived there to find a slim silver laptop opened to YouTube. On it, Martin Luther King, Jr., was extolling “the fierce urgency of now” and his dream of the glorious day when “the rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight.”

I looked up and saw that the manager of the left-luggage counter, an older black man with a graying beard, was standing beside me, eyes welling, as moved as I was. We stood together in silence, and it came to me, belatedly, that this was Martin Luther King Day. If my trip had gone according to plan, I’d have missed the day almost entirely, turning my watch 16 hours ahead and arriving in Japan just as it was all but over.

I’m not sure I recognized the smiling traveler who boarded his flight to Osaka, newly aware of both this particular holiday and the meaning of every holiday. I’d slept well, and I’d seen a pretty, unpresuming town that I’d never thought to explore before.

Who knows if I’ll ever visit Millbrae again? But I’m confident that Nowhere will slip into my itinerary many times more. And I’ll relish whatever it serves up to me. No place, after all, is uninteresting to the interested eye.

Santa Barbara-based Pico Iyer is the author, most recently, of The Man Within My Head and The Art of Stillness. You can follow him on Twitter @PicoIyer.

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