Have any of you guys wandered between cities and dungeons without fast traveling sometimes? I only rode across the eastern border to Wayrest now myself and rode up to a Manor. That was kind of cool. So I was wondering if any of you have running or riding in the vast world itself?

I've tried it, but there's no point. You can't see very far, the terrain doesn't hide anything, and there's nothing to find that isn't on the map, except some dungeons that are rare enough that it will never happen. The only time I ever really go out in the wilderness is when I decide I want to cheat and train up some backstabbing skill. Just face north when you rest and the enemy that inevitably spawns will be facing away from you.

I've traveled to a coven that way. You need extraordinary luck to find a map to those places, but you can always ride there if you have a hint of it's whereabouts. Same thing with your favourite training dungeon, if you're memorized it's location.

The only travel in real time that I do is Privateer's Hold -> Gothway Garden.
It's always nice to see the village slowly appearing in the distance.

But, otherwise, the lanscape is bland and generic and I do not find it interesting to travel in real-time from one part to the other. But I will travel in real-time if my destination is one square away from my position.

I've run across the wilderness a number of times. Looking for a known coven is the usual excuse. Other times I've been too sick and couldn't survive the fast travel to a nearby temple, so I had to travel there manually. Or it's a mountainous region and I just enjoy launching myself off the ridiculously pointy peaks for a while (not as much as roof-jumping, of course).

Or there's the silly bits where you run across the gameworld just to see how long it takes (~25 hours with perfect stats, FYI), or go looking for odd topographical anomalies (Gorge of Lysandus).

Funny. Think how it would look with some infinite view distance mod, in Dragontail Mountains. Maybe you could see locations as flat objects in middle of ridiculous teeth of mountains

I am so looking forward to DaggerXL.. Hopefully it makes wilderness exploring better!

I have considered doing it more sometimes. If I'm in a town or something and I see on the map that the next town or farm is very, very close to my own teen-tiny dot, then I am tempted to have a go. But it still take ages.

Not really. I actually played one game in which I found maps to 13 of the 14 covens. (Admittedly though, it was a loooong game).
The thing to remember is that any map you find is always (except in very rare instances) to a dungeon NOT already on your game map.
Thus, if you are in a kingdom (which has a coven) that doesn't have very many dungeons, your chances of finding a map to a coven aren't all that bad. And with each "new" dungeon you find, the chances of finding a coven map increases.

One way to find "new" dungeons is to accept a quest to that dungeon.
Obviously another way is to find a map (most likely as random loot).
Because dungeons have the most random loot, the best way to find a coven map is to start dungeon crawling in a kingdom with only a few dungeons. (I have found as many as 7 maps in one dungeon, but the average is probably closer to 1 - 1.5 maps per dungeon).

Yeah, that's easily been the main reason for me to not use fast-travel. Sometimes I done it for fun though, but those times has been extremely rare.

I tried going for a ride on a horse from my ship. I found the other ship.

Daggerfall could have been a great traveler and explorer game if it had been more developed. I was a great disappointment when i brought a ship to find i couldn't travel with it to explore the sea to the west.

I have done this several times. on my original character i traveled to the island off the coast of sentinel that you can't fast travel to and went there to find the one duengeon there. That took nearly an hour on horseback which i cheated to walk arcross the water.

The only other time i tryed this is my most recent character. I traveld from privateers hold south to the town there then tryed to go anywhere else but got bored soon enought and resorted to fast travel again.

Indeed!
Actually, simply having roads between the main villages and settlements would have helped a lot. I have a better time exploring Arena's wilderness than Daggerfall, simply because of the roads and random small settlements and inns on the way.

With DaggerXL though, simply seeing a town in the distance will prove excellent for traveling in real time.