We happen to take the idea of slow travel quite seriously. All the articles which we wrote for this issue of hidden europe were researched and written without recourse to flying. But does merely eschewing flying mean one can claim to be a slow traveller? Dan Kieran seems to think so. Dan can, on the face of it, lay claim to some decent slow travel credentials. A few years ago, he purchased an old milk float on eBay and travelled across England at a sedate twenty kilometres per hour. Dan told the tale of that slow expedition in his 2008 book Three Men in a Float (co-authored with Ian Vince).

Dan’s latest book is The Idle Traveller: The Art of Slow Travel. It was published on 1 July. In it he reveals that “there was no great philosophical plan” behind the milk float stunt. So much for the ecotainted prose of the 2008 book, where Dan does a very plausible job in trying to persuade readers that riding across Britain in a battery-powered cart is a great way to save the planet. Fast forward to 2012 and Dan gives a fresh gloss on his milk float journey. “It was all an elaborate joke,” he writes in The Idle Traveller.