THE LONG WAY IS THE POINT.

From Lake Bled and the European Drift to a cold October morning beside Ladybower. A camera, a campervan and a reminder that the best bit of a journey is often the part you never planned.

I've spent an extraordinary amount of my life on the road. Some of those miles have been in a great big lorry with a destination, a deadline and paperwork waiting at the other end. The rest are the miles I choose for myself — when I can take a turning because it looks interesting, pull over because the light is doing something unusual or simply decide that getting there is not the whole point.

That's where photography comes in. It's the excuse to stop, look properly and notice the little things you miss when all you're watching is the arrival time.

The European Drift taught me to keep looking

In May and June 2026, Vanilla and I wandered across Europe. It wasn't a dash between famous landmarks. It was a chance to see what the journey looked like from one place to the next, with enough freedom for the plan to change whenever a better idea presented itself.

My Flickr archive includes a photograph simply titled Lake Bled, taken on 27 May. The following day there's another called Near Munich. Those plain little titles say more to me than a detailed itinerary. One frame fixes a place, a day and a point in the trip; another proves the road carried on.

And somewhere in all that travelling is the real pleasure of a campervan. You're not looking through an airline window at the places between destinations. You actually get to travel through them.

Then October came along

By October the European skies were a memory, but the habit hadn't gone away. A little trip in Vanilla took me out into the Peak District, through the sort of autumn landscape that doesn't need sunshine to look wonderful.

At Ladybower Reservoir I found myself drawn to concrete, curves, stone towers and water levels. It was almost a photographer's equivalent of a busman's holiday: I'm supposed to be escaping machinery, yet here I am admiring it all over again. Once an engineer, always interested in how things work.

What caught my attention wasn't a postcard-perfect blue sky. It was the shape of the overflow, the textures in the stonework, the woods changing colour and the way the reservoir reveals its scale when the water is low.

Sometimes the destination is just an excuse

On paper, a drive across the Cat and Fiddle Road is about going from one place to another. In reality, it's about the changing road, the weather on the tops and seeing an old landscape from a different angle. It doesn't matter how often I've been through this country. There is always something I haven't noticed before.

And then there's Vanilla. She's part vehicle, part escape pod, part photographic supporting actor. Put her beside a pub on a bleak moorland afternoon or under trees with the roof up, and suddenly the picture isn't just of a parked Transporter. It tells me where I was and what sort of day it had been.

It's a different feeling to driving for work. Nobody's ringing to ask where the trailer is. Nobody's trying to save seven minutes by cutting out a proper stop. There's time to wander, make a photograph and then get on with the day.

The Flickr frames I'd keep

My Flickr collection is enormous, but an archive only comes to life when you bring individual photographs back out of it. These five original public entries are the ones I chose to accompany this story. Each opens the actual photograph in my Flickr account — no stock substitutes, no made-up locations.

For me the connection is obvious: Europe in May, the Midlands in October, two different landscapes and the same instinct to pull over and take the picture. Even a frame called Vanilla and Caroline is part of the story — another little chapter that would be lost in the thousands of images if I didn't go back and find it.

One more stop before home

I used to think the important photographs were the dramatic ones: the drone high above a valley, a huge landscape under a perfect sky, the sort of image you'd print big and put on a wall. I still love those. But I've become just as fond of the smaller frames — the parked van, the ordinary pub stop, the details beside a reservoir.

They're personal. They hold the day together. And decades from now, they'll probably be the pictures that bring the memories rushing back.

There's more European travelling on the horizon, more roads through Britain and plenty more opportunities to take far too many photographs of Vanilla. Good. That's the idea.

The long way is the point. — NIX