Every long route starts with a decision that looks like a mistake. The bus is going in the opposite direction, the ferry is late, and the only sensible thing to do is get on.
There is a stretch of road in the interior where the only thing that changes is the colour of the ground. People who have driven it describe it as the most peaceful forty minutes of their lives, and then they describe the next forty minutes, which are not.
No trees, no farms, no fences, no names. Stone and weather and the shape of the ground, and after an hour of it your head quietly stops looking for anything to do.
The trees close in somewhere past the pass and do not open again until the coast. You drive for hours with the wipers on, and the only light in the world is the occasional gap in the canopy and a white reflector post.
There is no warning. The road crests a low hill and the whole right-hand side of the world becomes light and noise, and the car seems to have been driving through a wall for three hours.
That is the trick of the long way. You spend a day going nowhere in particular, and you arrive somewhere completely different, and the difference is not the road.
Ferry, bus, two trains, one very long road and a walk at the end. Nineteen hours of it spent moving and the rest spent looking out of a window, which is the ratio every long journey eventually reaches.