The core of the guide
A detour starts where the guidebook stops. Take a city you have already seen, or one you are about to visit, and add the two or three places around it that change how the trip feels. None of these require a car, most of them fit into a long weekend.
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.
Detours
Skip the Rome-Florence-Venice triangle for a few days and cut across central Italy instead, through porticoes, a mountaintop republic, and three underrated Renaissance towns.
Detours
Vienna sits closer to two other countries than most visitors realize. This route follows the Danube through vineyard terraces, crosses into Slovakia, then ends in a spa town in the hills.
Detours
Bohemia holds a lot more than one castle and one clock. This route runs from a cathedral built partly of bone to a river town wrapped around a fortress, then out to a spa resort in the west.
Detours
Lisbon's hills and light are hard to leave, but the coast around it holds a fairy-tale palace town, a former fishing village turned resort, and a port city most visitors skip entirely.
Each detour is built around a city with good transport links, so you can keep your hotel and travel out and back in a day where you want to. Where an overnight makes more sense we say so in the article.
Pick a city you already know, then find the loop around it. That is usually where the trip gets interesting.