How Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year ‘Lockdown’ Changed My Approach to Travel

✈️ The bus pulled away from the curb—and I stood there, backpack at my feet, watching dust rise behind its rear tires. That was the moment I understood: lockdown wasn’t just a dictionary definition. It was the silence between departures, the hollow echo in an empty station, the weight of a ticket you couldn’t use—but also, unexpectedly, the quiet before a recalibration. How to travel meaningfully after Collins Dictionary named ‘lockdown’ its 2020 Word of the Year wasn’t about bouncing back. It was about learning to move differently: slower, locally, with more attention to rhythm than itinerary. This is how that lesson unfolded—not in theory, but on cracked pavement, in shared kitchens, and on trains where every seat felt like a small act of trust.

I’d booked the trip in late February 2020: a three-week solo rail journey across northern Portugal and Galicia, timed to avoid peak season crowds and stretch €850 over 21 days. My plan was precise—train schedules cross-referenced with regional bus timetables, hostels pre-booked using a mix of Hostelworld and direct email confirmations, and a notebook filled with local phrases scribbled in shaky pen. I’d spent months studying Collins Dictionary’s announcement of ‘lockdown’ as their 2020 Word of the Year—not as linguistic trivia, but as a cultural marker I wanted to interrogate firsthand. Not the crisis itself, but what came after: how people rebuilt mobility, redefined proximity, and relearned the grammar of departure.

🗺️ The Setup: A Departure Before the Pause

Lisbon’s Santa Apolónia station smelled of diesel, warm pastry, and damp wool coats. Morning light slanted through high arched windows, catching dust motes above the platform where a vendor sold pastéis de nata from a steaming cart. I boarded the 9:15 AM Alfa Pendular to Porto with a reusable water bottle, two guidebooks (one printed, one downloaded offline), and a low hum of anticipation—not excitement, exactly, but the focused calm of someone who’d rehearsed contingency plans for rain, missed connections, and language gaps. My route traced the Douro Valley by rail, then crossed into Spain via Vigo, looping inland through Ourense and Lugo before returning east along the coast to Santiago de Compostela.

This wasn’t escape travel. It was observational travel. I’d read academic papers on post-pandemic mobility shifts 1, interviewed urban planners via Zoom about transport equity, and tracked regional tourism recovery dashboards—but none of that prepared me for the texture of change on the ground. The ‘why’ wasn’t abstract: I needed to see how ‘lockdown’ settled into infrastructure, behavior, and daily negotiation—not as a rupture, but as sediment.

🌧️ The Turning Point: When the Train Didn’t Leave

It happened in Pinhão, a riverside village where the Douro’s terraced vineyards fold into steep, sun-baked hills. I’d arrived mid-afternoon, intending to catch the 5:30 PM regional train to Régua. The platform was empty except for two elderly women sorting grapes into wicker baskets beside a rusted freight cart. No announcements. No digital display. Just a handwritten sign taped crookedly to a lamppost: “Serviço suspenso até nova ordem.” Service suspended until further notice.

I sat on the bench, checking my phone. No signal. No updates. My offline map showed no bus alternatives within 15 km. That evening, I walked the 4 km uphill to a guesthouse recommended by a hostel owner in Porto—my boots crunching on gravel, the air thick with the scent of crushed rosemary and woodsmoke. At dinner, the host, Marta, poured vinho verde without asking and said, “They stopped the train because only six people bought tickets yesterday. Six. The conductor asked if we wanted him to run it anyway. We said no. Better to save fuel. Better to wait.” She paused, wiped her hands on her apron. “Lockdown taught us to count passengers—not just numbers, but names.”

The next morning, she handed me a folded sheet of paper: hand-drawn bus routes, handwritten notes on which drivers accepted cash, which ones waited for latecomers, which stops had shade. “The timetable,” she said, tapping the paper, “is now a suggestion. The real schedule lives here.” She tapped her temple. “And here.” She tapped her chest.

🤝 The Discovery: What Slowness Revealed

That paper became my compass. In Ourense, I waited 47 minutes for the 11:20 AM bus to Lugo—not because it was late, but because the driver, Javier, was helping an older woman load groceries onto the roof rack. No rush. No apology. He offered me a tangerine from his lunchbox. “We used to drive faster,” he told me, peeling the skin slowly. “Now we watch the road, not the clock.”

In Lugo, I stayed at a converted convent where guests shared meals in a stone-walled refectory. One evening, a retired schoolteacher named Rosa joined us, carrying a cloth bag full of dried figs and a thermos of mint tea. She spoke little English, but drew maps on napkins—where to find wild strawberries near the Roman wall, which baker opened earliest, how to ask for tap water without sounding demanding. Her gestures were economical, deliberate. She didn’t point to landmarks; she pointed to thresholds: “Here, the light changes. Here, the cobblestones soften. Here, you smell the river before you see it.”

I began noticing patterns I’d previously filtered out: how shopkeepers lingered at doorways, watching passersby instead of scanning phones; how café tables remained unreset for 20 minutes after patrons left, preserving the imprint of conversation; how children played street games that required no equipment—just chalk, stones, and agreed-upon rules shouted in overlapping voices. These weren’t relics of pre-pandemic life. They were adaptations—practices honed during months of enforced stillness, now translated into civic tempo.

🌄 The Journey Continues: From Suspension to Synchrony

By Santiago, I’d abandoned my original return route. Instead of taking the express bus to Vigo, I accepted an invitation from Rosa’s nephew, a forestry technician, to ride with him to Pontevedra—two hours along forest roads where he stopped twice to check trail markers and once to photograph a nesting pair of red kites. He carried no GPS device, only a laminated topographic map and a pocket notebook where he logged soil moisture readings, bird sightings, and road conditions. “Before,” he said, “I drove to get somewhere. Now I drive to know the land between points.”

We stopped at a roadside stall selling chestnuts roasted over charcoal. The vendor, a woman in her seventies, gave us each a paper cone and refused payment. “You’re slow,” she said, smiling. “That means you’ll remember the taste.”

In Pontevedra, I met Ana, a community librarian who coordinated a ‘book exchange bus’—a repurposed municipal vehicle that circulated between villages, stocked with donated novels, repair manuals, seed catalogs, and blank notebooks. “People don’t want more things,” she explained, handing me a notebook bound in recycled denim. “They want more ways to connect what they already have. Lockdown didn’t shrink the world. It made us map the spaces between us more carefully.”

📝 Reflection: What ‘Lockdown’ Taught Me About Motion

I returned home with no souvenir T-shirts, no Instagram grid, and only seven photographs—each chosen for its ambiguity: a half-open shutter on a Galician farmhouse, a single glove left on a train seat, rain streaking a bus window in Vigo, a chalk drawing of a compass on a Lisbon sidewalk, a stack of library books tied with twine, a close-up of calloused hands folding a paper map, and the final image: my own boots, covered in dried mud from the Camino’s lesser-known Camino Inglés branch, resting beside a worn copy of Collins Dictionary’s 2020 Word of the Year announcement.

‘Lockdown’ wasn’t the opposite of travel. It was its negative space—the absence that revealed what motion truly requires: coordination, consent, shared attention, and tolerance for unplanned duration. Budget travel isn’t just about spending less. It’s about accepting that time isn’t a resource to optimize—it’s a medium to inhabit. The cheapest fare isn’t always the fastest connection. Sometimes, it’s the one where the driver knows your name after three days. Or the hostel where breakfast is served at 8:17 AM because that’s when the baker delivers the bread.

I stopped measuring trips by kilometers covered and started tracking them by agreements honored: the promise to wait for someone crossing the street, the understanding that ‘open’ doesn’t always mean ‘immediately accessible’, the mutual acknowledgment that arrival includes settling in—not just stepping off the bus.

💡 Practical Takeaways Woven Into the Journey

What worked wasn’t a hack or a discount code. It was behavioral calibration:

• Timetables are living documents. In rural Portugal and Galicia, official schedules often reflect pre-2020 demand. Verify same-day service at stations or with local shops—even if signage appears unchanged. Marta’s hand-drawn sheet included asterisks next to stops where buses sometimes diverted for festivals or harvests. That detail wouldn’t appear online.
• Cash remains functional—and sometimes essential. Javier accepted euros in all denominations, including coins, but his card terminal hadn’t been repaired since March 2022. When paying for lodging in smaller towns, carry €20–€50 in small bills. Confirm acceptance methods before booking, not upon arrival.
• Shared meals are intelligence hubs. Refectories, communal kitchens, and village cafés function as informal transit centers. Rosa didn’t give me directions; she gave me context—when bakeries restocked, which buses ran extra trips during market days, how weather affected mountain passes. This isn’t ‘local insight’ as marketing jargon. It’s practical, time-sensitive data exchanged without transaction.
• Language gaps narrow through repetition—not fluency. I never mastered Galician verb conjugations. But I learned three phrases that unlocked access: “¿Pode esperar un momento?” (Can you wait a moment?), “Non teño prisa” (I’m not in a hurry), and “Grazas polo tempo” (Thanks for your time). They signaled patience, not ignorance.

⭐ Conclusion: Travel Is Not Recovery—It’s Recalibration

Collins Dictionary didn’t choose ‘lockdown’ because it was dramatic. They chose it because it named a condition that reordered priorities—not just for governments, but for individuals moving through space. My trip didn’t ‘recover’ pre-pandemic travel. It engaged with what remained: slower cadences, heightened awareness of interdependence, and a renewed literacy of pause. Budget travel, done well, doesn’t chase scarcity. It works within it—using constraint not as limitation, but as lens.

I still carry Marta’s hand-drawn sheet, now laminated and folded into my passport sleeve. Not as a relic—but as a reminder: the most reliable itinerary isn’t printed. It’s co-written, in real time, with everyone who shares the road.

❓ FAQs: Practical Questions from the Journey