A Finnish mother, a Dutch father and an English upbringing ensured that Sabine Zetteler did a lot of travelling from a very early age. And the zigzagging across the continent continued in her working life, first with travel club Mr & Mrs Smith and then with Zetteler, her communications agency, which works with progressive brands across design and architecture.
But then in 2018, she changed tack: she decided that Zetteler would stop travelling by plane to anywhere that could be reached by train. This year alone, members of the team have been to Madrid, Milan, Venice and Copenhagen, all without leaving the ground.
Here, Sabine explains the joys of slow travel to us and how ditching the flight transformed her trip to the Adriatic.
‘The merits of slow travel are endless. You can pack a large suitcase, as heavy as you like, and take all your products. And I find it very romantic, travelling by train. It’s the pace of it, and the fact that you experience everything at eye level – the rooftops and the shape of the buildings. I love sitting there watching the landscape change so dramatically; desert environments to forests, and then to cities and towns and villages.
‘People often think that the way we travel is a huge waste of time, but being on a train, I find my brain works in a completely different way. I get into a completely different headspace. It’s much more thoughtful, staring out of the window, pacing across countries. I feel like I do an amazing amount of strategic imaginative thinking when I’m detached from normal life, detached from the office.
‘And when you’re arriving by train, you don’t arrive at some airport 30 miles out of town. You get to roll straight out of the train station and have a coffee immediately – in the middle of Venice or wherever you are.
‘More than anything else, though, I think that when you’re going somewhere and you’re genuinely interested in where you’re going, it’s amazing to be able to feel yourself getting there. This summer, for my birthday, we went from London to the Croatian islands and back on the train, via a different route each way. We booked through Byway, an amazing slow-travel company, who we asked to send us via places that are nothing like our destination. So we went from London to a place called Ulm, which is a very chocolate-box German town, well known in architecture circles and famous for being the birthplace of Einstein.
‘From there, we went to Zagreb, and had a night in the city before taking another train down to Split and then a ferry to the islands. On the way back, we went straight from Split to Vienna, arriving at 3pm, so we were able to wander around, go to a museum and have dinner. Then the following day, we took a really lovely train from Vienna to Zurich, which I had never visited before and thought would be all bankers and chocolate, but it turned out to be staggeringly beautiful.
‘Travelling this way, with all these different experiences en route, made it feel like a much longer holiday: I felt as if we’d been away for six weeks, when actually it was only two and a half.’
You can find out more about Zetteler at zetteler.co.uk. And to book some slow travel with Byway, go to byway.travel
