I am surrounded by people who this summer tried holidays in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall. Still soggy from the experience, they are fleeing back to Paxos and Puglia next year and damn the carbon footprint.

I have a modest alternative proposal. Instead of changing the space co-ordinates to travel farther afield, why not change the time co-ordinates and go on lots of tiny trips that add up to something? In fact I recommend an English odyssey.

It took four of us two years in all. We walked the length of the River Thames.

My wife and I and two old friends managed to meet for a day about every six weeks. We walked about 12 miles each time and last weekend completed the 184 miles from the source to the Thames Barrier.

A 40-mile row down the Thames

Novice rower Minty Clinch takes a punt on a skiff adventure around Henley and beyond

Three walks in the Chilterns

To the Chilterns to investigate the mystery of Hambleden Brook, plus three countryside walks

• China in Britain

The river is the spinal cord of southern England. Before the age of the car and lorry, this was the bustling thoroughfare down which people and their stuff moved. To get an impression today of what the Thames was like in, say, 1800, you need to go to the Huangpu river that runs through Shanghai: everywhere you look, ships from huge to tiny, every few yards and in constant motion.

When the Thames was an arterial highway, no one wanted to live on its edge. For Charles Dickens, the Thames was something to which you descended, literally and socially. As his characters struggled to improve their lives, they fought to climb out of the river's dank pollution.

But in 21st-century Britain, you pay six-figure premiums to buy a flat with a view of the water. From Putney to Deptford, apartment blocks line the south bank almost without a break, surely one of the largest changes to the London landscape since the Blitz. To really see the scale of this new geography, you must walk it.

That is the broad river near its urban estuary. At the source, in a field in Gloucestershire, there is only an inscribed headstone under a tree. When we went there, at the end of a drought, there was no water.

All we could see was the indentation across the field where the water had once run. A modest stream began a mile or two farther down.

As we came west we walked through wild flowers sprinkling the broad meadows that follow the river's generous curves. We watched kingfishers, herons and dragonflies (the aristocrats of the river kingdom), snooped into people's gardens and stood in silent admiration as a schoolmistressy Canada goose taught her tiny goslings to swim in a straight line behind her.

Before we reached London, we timed several walks to arrive at the homes of friends near the river and our muddy, ravenous quartet would invade their houses for tea.

I see from the notes that my wife scribbled in the guidebook that we voted the walk from Cholsey to Reading the most beautiful day of all. The date reveals why: November 4.

We walked almost all day in woods shading from yellow to red to brown, shot through with dazzling autumn sunlight. If you want to see your own country, the great river has it all. Virtually no map-reading required. And definitely no hills.

Put “Thames Path” into an Amazon search and you'll get a series of books but we used David Sharp's The Thames Path, published by Aurum Press at £12.99. It's up-to-date: there was a new edition in February 2007.

Times recommends

• Brits in Bangkok furious at lack of rescue
• Britain's 12 best winter walks
• The insiders' guide to bohemian Paris