The World, Off The Straight Line
Zglobtroter is an editorial guide to detours, multi-stop routes and the cities most itineraries drive straight past. Honest travel times, real transport connections, and thirty-four guides that tell you where the interesting turning is.
Six ways in
Every guide on the site sits in one of these six sections. Start wherever your trip already is.
8 guides
One famous city, and the loop of places most people never reach.
7 guides
Multi-stop journeys that turn transit time into travel time.
6 guides
Unexpected cities and alternative places worth the extra leg.
5 guides
Another option next to the famous one. Not instead of, alongside.
4 guides
How to think about zigzag trips before you book anything.
4 guides
Practical planning for multi-stop, slightly crooked journeys.
The core of the guide
One famous city, and the two or three places around it that change the whole trip.
Detours
Paris rewards the traveler who leaves the river for a while. This loop trades the postcard center for locks, slopes and a park built on old quarries.
Detours
Rome doesn't need an introduction, but its outskirts do. This route leaves the Forum behind for a buried port town, a hillside of fountains, and the neighborhood across the river.
Detours
Amsterdam is flat, small and easy to leave for a day. This loop covers a second canal city, a cluster of working windmills and a lakeside castle, none of them far.
Detours
Barcelona's coast and hills both hold better half-days than another hour on Las Ramblas. This route covers a river city, a beach town, and a monastery cut into rock.
Skip the obvious
Not instead of. Alongside, and often on a much better day.
Journeys, not transfers
Routes
The fast train does this trip in ninety minutes. Here is why you might not want it to.
Routes
Lakes, mountains and a Roman arena, strung together without a single flight.
Routes
An hour on the fast train, or two unassuming towns and a war-marked landscape in between.
Places, not lists
Destinations
A handful of European cities that get mentioned in passing but rarely get the visit they deserve, from a river bridge in Slovenia to a shipyard town on the Baltic.
Destinations
Some of the best travel decisions are made an hour outside the famous city, in a smaller town that gets a fraction of the visitors and none of the crowds.
Destinations
Paris tends to eat an entire trip's worth of days on its own, but a short train ride out in almost any direction turns up a city with its own cathedral, its own history, and far fewer people in front of it.
Plan your trip
We do not sell travel. These are the four things worth sorting, in the order that saves the most time.
Compare arrival and departure airports before you fix the route. An open jaw often costs the same.
Start here →One base plus a night or two on the road usually beats a new hotel every evening.
Start here →Only worth it where trains thin out. Great for valleys and coastlines, awkward in big cities.
Start here →Method
Travel Ideas
Every journey between two cities has at least three shapes. Most people only ever take one of them.
Travel Ideas
Zigzag trips don't happen by accident. They start with a map, a pencil, and a willingness to ignore the fastest option.
Travel Ideas
Adding time to a journey is only a mistake if the time gets spent badly. Sometimes it's the best part of the trip.
Travel Ideas
The best stops between two cities rarely announce themselves. You have to know where to look.
Traveller reviews
Warsaw, travels with her partner twice a year
We had already done Paris properly, twice, so the idea of going back felt a bit flat. The Paris Detour page gave us Canal Saint-Martin and Belleville and honestly that weekend felt like a different city. Buttes-Chaumont on a Sunday morning was the highlight.
Prague, solo traveller, mostly by train
The Vienna to Prague route with the longer way round was exactly the kind of thing I keep meaning to plan and never do. Telc was worth the awkward connection. Two extra days, much better trip.
Manchester, family of four
Useful without being overwhelming. I liked that the planning pages tell you how much time a detour actually eats, because with kids that matters more than the scenery. We cut one stop and the trip worked much better for it.
Rotterdam, weekend traveller
I live half an hour from half of these places and still found two towns I had never bothered with. Deventer on a market day was a small revelation.
Milan, photographer
Used the northern Italy scenic route as a loose frame rather than a strict plan. The stop suggestions between the lakes and Verona were solid and not the usual copy paste list you see everywhere.
Vienna, retired, slow travel
The One Destination, Three Ways idea changed how I look at a map. I now sketch the classic line first and then deliberately break it. Some routes still end up direct, and that is fine, but at least it is a choice now.
34 guides published by ZGLOBTROTER LLC. Editorial only: no paid placements, no bookings, no straight lines.
Pick a city you already know, then find the loop around it. That is usually where the trip gets interesting.