How to use this field guide

What is fixed. Flights, ferries, transfers and beds are booked. They appear here as facts, and the times are the ones on the booking. Everything else in this book is a suggestion you are free to ignore.

What is not. Most of it. There is no schedule for an afternoon, no ranked list of sights, and nothing here needs to be completed. A day where you sat down and did not move is a day the book was written to allow.

How a day works. Each day gets a spread. Logistics sit where you can find them in a hurry; the writing around them is about noticing rather than doing; and the space left is for you.

Before you leave in the morning. Have the day's tickets somewhere that does not need a signal. Know when the last bus back leaves — on the islands that is the decision that shapes an afternoon. Carry some cash for buses even if you carry a card for everything else.

When something is uncertain, this book says so. Where you see a hedge — is said to, nobody has confirmed, check locally — it is deliberate. It means we looked and the answer was not solid enough to print. That is more useful than a confident sentence that turns out to be wrong while you are standing in front of it.

If there is a code on the page, it points to a longer piece about something on that page. It is not extra instructions and nothing on the page depends on it. Print works alone; the code is there for the ten minutes when you are curious and sitting down.

Write in it. Ticket stubs, corrections, what the wine was actually like. The book is half finished on purpose.