For a journal about slow travel, we spend a surprising amount of time rushing round our own city. This is the second autumn of Slow Lens, and Edinburgh, where we live and where every story is edited, has never had a story of its own. So at the start of October we gave ourselves a rule: treat the city exactly as we would treat anywhere else. No errands, no shortcuts, no buses unless the rain was coming sideways. Walk, start early, look up.

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Several friends told us to skip Bled. Too many coaches, too famous for its own good. Clara gave the answer she gives about most famous places: go anyway, but go before breakfast. So on our first morning in Slovenia, last October, we walked down to the lake at a quarter to seven, past shuttered cafés.

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Madeira is really one mountain rising out of the Atlantic, and it makes its own weather. The trade wind piles cloud against the north side, which is green and dripping; the south, around Funchal, sits in the rain shadow and gets the sun. For five centuries the islanders have been cutting channels into the hillsides to move water from one side to the other. These are the levadas, and the narrow maintenance paths beside them have become the best walking on the island. We spent a week last month following them, and the weather.

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You can see the Cinque Terre from the train, in theory. The line from La Spezia runs almost entirely through tunnels, so the coast arrives in flashes: black, then a slab of blue sea and a pink house, then black again. We had come in the first week of June, before the schools break up, which felt like a clever plan and turned out to be everyone’s plan.

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We flew into Las Vegas in the middle of April, picked up a hire car the colour of a fridge, and left the city as fast as the traffic allowed. Tom had the route written on an index card: Zion, Bryce, Moab, Monument Valley, Page, and back. It fitted on the card with room to spare. The distances fitted nothing.

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For a week in early April our alarm went off at a quarter past five. Clara set it, Clara heard it, and Clara stood over me with a cup of tea until I agreed that getting up had been my idea. Cappadocia rewards this kind of bullying. The light is best in the first hour, the valleys are empty, and on calm mornings the sky fills with balloons.

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Everyone who had been to Sossusvlei told us the same thing: be at the gate in Sesriem when it opens, or don’t bother. So on our second morning in the Namib we sat in a line of headlights before dawn, engine off, windows fogging, a flask wedged between the seats and the stars still out. We went last August, in the middle of the southern winter, and the desert at that hour is properly cold. I wore everything I had packed, plus Tom’s spare jumper.

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You hear the Perito Moreno Glacier before you understand it. From the road’s end on the Magallanes peninsula the path drops through a strip of beech woodland, and somewhere ahead there is a sound like distant artillery, or furniture being moved in a very large house upstairs. Then the trees open, and there is the ice.

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Everyone warns you about the wind. They warn you in Puerto Natales, where the buses leave for the park in the half-dark, and again at the park gate, where a ranger told us to hold on to our hats in the weary tone of someone who has watched a great many hats leave for Argentina. None of it prepares you. On our first afternoon Clara tried to unfold a map at a viewpoint, and it took both of us, and a rock, to win.

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I left Nara out of our Kyoto story because it kept trying to take it over. Towards the end of that autumn fortnight we gave it two whole days, taking the early Kintetsu train down from Kyoto each morning and coming back after dark, and I think they were the two days of the trip that Tom talks about most.

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Nobody tells you that autumn in Kyoto moves. The maples on the wooded hills that ring the city turn first, and the colour drifts down into the temple gardens over a few weeks, so that one garden is still green while another, a bus ride away, is at its peak. We arrived at the beginning of November with a list of famous places and soon threw it out in favour of a simpler rule: go wherever the colour has got to, and get there before the coaches do.

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Clara wanted to take the train to Kyle of Lochalsh. I wanted to drive, mainly so that we could stop wherever we liked, and since I had done all the planning, I won. We left Edinburgh on a Thursday morning in fog so thick that Stirling Castle never appeared at all.

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We landed in Svolvær under a ceiling of cloud so low and even that it looked plastered on, and for most of the following week it barely moved. People who know Lofoten from posters expect needle peaks against a hard blue sky. What we found in early September was grey and green, the mountains switching on and off as the weather drifted across them, and I have come round to thinking that is the better version.

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Everyone we told about the trip had an opinion on the weather. Bring waterproofs, they said, then a second set of waterproofs, and expect to see nothing. Clara packed accordingly. For the first half of our ten days in late August the Faroes did their best to agree: a lid of grey cloud sat on the islands a few hundred metres up, the light was soft and even, and the wind came from every direction in turn.

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We came into the Salzkammergut the slow way, on the regional line that leaves the main railway at Attnang-Puchheim and follows the lakes south into the mountains. Past Gmunden it runs along the shore of the Traunsee, under the pale limestone wall of the Traunstein, and Tom spent most of that stretch leaning across the aisle, and a family’s picnic, to look at it.

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Clara likes to say I plan walks the way other people plan weddings. This one I barely planned at all. We had four days at the end of June, a pair of boots each, and a rough line on the map from Ortisei across the Puez-Odle to Colfosco in Val Badia, sleeping in mountain huts on the way. The only rule we kept was the one everyone gave us: start early and be indoors by two, because the afternoons belong to the thunder.

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From Ouarzazate we drove east along what the guidebooks call the Road of a Thousand Kasbahs, and for once the guidebooks are not exaggerating by much. The Taourirt kasbah sits right in the town, a sprawl of earthen towers and courtyards behind a fringe of palms, and after that they keep coming: in Skoura, along the Dades valley, above every oasis. A few are restored. Most are slowly melting back into the ground they were made from.

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We flew into Marrakech at the end of April, and the last half-hour of the flight was the best introduction to the country we could have asked for. The High Atlas lay under the wing, a crumpled sheet of rock with snow still lying in the creases, and Tom, who had the window seat, narrated it to me in reverent whispers until the man across the aisle leaned over to ask which mountains they were.

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The first thing Seville does is smell. We walked out of the station into a street lined with orange trees in full blossom, and the scent was so thick that Clara stopped on the pavement and said, slightly accusingly, that nobody had warned her. They are the bitter oranges, the ones that end up in British marmalade, and at the start of April every tree in the city hums with bees.

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We arrived in Istanbul at the start of March with a list of mosques, two bazaars and a vague plan to take a ferry. By the second morning the list had turned inside out. The ferries were the point, and everything else was what we did between crossings.

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Clara had been to Venice once before, in August, and what she mostly remembered was other people’s elbows. So when we finally went together, we went in December, rented a small flat in Santa Croce for a week, and made only one plan: get up early.

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It is four o’clock in Edinburgh, the street lamps are already on, and that seems as good a reason as any to finally write up the week Clara and I spent driving Iceland’s ring road last July. We went clockwise from Reykjavík: seven days, one small hire car, and in all that time I never once saw it get properly dark. In January that feels like something I made up.

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Lisbon gave us a week of October light. Porto, a few weeks later, gave us a weekend of weather. The forecast for the first weekend of December was a single word repeated three times, and for once it was right.

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Every journal has to start somewhere, and this one starts on a staircase in Alfama, about halfway up, with Tom stopped beside me pretending to admire a doorway while he gets his breath back. We spent a week in Lisbon at the end of October, and if I had to sum up the city in one physical sensation, it would be calves.

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