Much as I sympathize with emphasizing the spiritual, otherworldly aspect of Valinor and the journey there (of which
Legate's earlier post was wonderfully evocative), I think
Puddleglum has a good point here. Faery doesn't reckon in hours and kilometers, but neither is it some sort of non-spatial/non-temporal Nirvana. Valinor used to be an
earthly paradise, and even when it no longer inhabited the same physical plane as the rest of Arda (whatever that may mean), I think it remained somehow analogous to what it was like when it did; meaning there were still mountains and rivers and plains, and the Pass of Calacirya and a sea between Tol Eressëa and the mainland (otherwise where would be the fun for the Teleri?), and it would still have taken time to get from here to there - although I'd agree that time probably didn't matter for the people there in quite the same way as it does for us on this here side of the Great Sea. And I guess the same applies for the journey as for the country itself.
That quote from the
Akallabęth about the Straight Road and the ship on it passing through air and space like on a mighty bridge is a wonderful mythical image, and I feel that trying to translate it into rational terms ruins it somehow. Never mind that this is what Tolkien himself apparently attempted in those letters
Zil quoted, for the benefit of 20th century readers presumably unfamiliar with mythical thinking - but when he wrote that quote down, he was thinking like a poet, not like a metaphysicist (or is it metaphysician?).
So what would the journey have been like for those on the ship? I can't see them as entering spiritual hyperspace through some gate or metaphysical wormhole and being zapped to Valinor in no time, like the USS Enterprise with streaming stars blurred into stripes behind them. Rather I'd imagine they would have the experience of sailing on all the way through, first on the bent Sea, then through the air, finally through the region of the stars,
until at last, on a night of rain..., they reached that other sea and approached the shore of the Blessed Land. Note there are were obviously still nights and days (even rain!), so the passengers would still have the experience of time passing - even if they'd grow less and less concerned with the
reckoning of time during the course of their voyage, so they probably wouldn't have asked Gandalf whether they were going to arrive by tea-time (although with hobbits, I'm not even sure of that
.)