In a Fast World, Slow Travel is the Answer

Slow travel can mean a relaxed breakfast of oatmeal with local apricots and homemade hot chocolate overlooking the sea from a balcony in Taormina.

Your boss wants you to work faster, your life commitments expect speedier responses than ever, and the news is constantly giving you newer news.  Everything is fast or faster.  You decide you need a break to get away from your day-to-day by travelling somewhere to get a change of scenery and just have fun.

You schedule a two-week trip to visit six different European capitals to escape your fast-paced life.  While you may acknowledge that the schedule is ambitious, you justify it because you only have a few weeks of leave each year to use for fun travel experiences.  Then, you schedule long days to make sure you do not miss anything because you do not know when you will be back to Paris since there is so much world to see and only 20 days of annual PTO!

Two weeks later, you come back to work exhausted and in need of a vacation after your vacation like so many other adventurers trying to fit a year’s worth of memories into less than 4% of the days in a year.  Your next burnout is closer than it should be, and you barely have time to enjoy the memories of your travels.

There is a Different Way

I have lived that travel life.  In 2019, before I had unlimited leave, I was in a different location almost every weekend of summer.  Outside of a ten-day trip where I visited both Florence and London, all of my travel was confined to long weekends where I tried to cram in as much life as possible.  I usually left the office and went straight to the airport on Thursday evening, teleworked on Fridays wherever I was spending that weekend, made memories on Saturday and Sunday, flew back early Monday morning, and changed into my work clothes in the Reagan National Airport bathroom before getting on the metro and going straight to the office for a workday starting at 7:30 a.m.

My 2019 lifestyle was unsustainable, and I was destined for burnout.  In some ways, I was saved by the global COVID-19 pandemic because I was forced to slow down significantly before I crashed.  Not everyone experiences a timeline where they are naturally forced to adopt a slower speed, but it does not make going slower any less important.  Your body will eventually force you to slow down through illness, injury, or burnout.

In 2022, we travelled to Crete for two weeks with my parents.  We stayed in one location for the entire two weeks and lived slowly.  There were days where we woke up early to get the best seats at Elafonisi Beach and Balos Beach or visit the Palace of Knossos and Phaistos before the tour groups arrived.  But there were also days where we enjoyed morning runs, went to the beach across the road from our apartment, and prepared dinner at home with the wine we purchased from a local vineyard.

Going to one place made it feel more like home.  I felt like I lived a life with inexpensive and delicious Greek food around every corner, where I could wander down and scoop up a chair at the Atlantica Kalliston (for free!) and read a book for a few hours while listening to the waves gently crash into the shore.  I had a better feel for local cuisine and flavors because there was enough time to try a couple variations of popular dishes and recognize subtle differences.  Most importantly, I returned from vacation relaxed enough to reflect on the memories made on the trip and refreshed enough to go back to a fast day-to-day.

You Won’t See it All

Slow travel means seeing fewer pieces of the world, and that can be difficult to grasp.  My mom always worried about not having enough time to see everything she wanted to see.  Sadly, she ended up being correct.  Her first flight across an ocean was also my first flight across an ocean when we visited England for eight days when she was in her late forties.  She was usually a fast-paced traveller and the most dedicated student of world history that I have ever known.  This quality made her interested in seeing every historic and cultural site one could possibly visit.  Given that she only had the money to travel globally for the last 25 years of her life, she lived a rich life of travel and saw much of the world she studied and loved.  But life also stole the last 20 years she expected to have in this world, and she still had a long list of destinations to see.

I am lucky that I got on that plane to London with my mom and dad to start my global travels at age 10 and have already seen so many life-changing times and places in this world.  I recognize that when I suggest embracing slow travel, I do so as someone who has already seen the Pyramids of Giza, Taj Mahal, Hermitage Museum, and Roman Colosseum.  I have looked back at South Korea from one of the meeting rooms that crosses into North Korea within the Joint Security Area, sipped champagne from the top of the Eiffel Tower, watched more than a million protesters fill the streets from a balcony overlooking Tahrir Square, taken a long bus trip from Belgrade to Sarajevo, admired the Gaudi architecture of Sagrada Familia, and seen the sun set at Nacpan Beach.  When people ask me what I wish I could see most in the world, I no longer know what to say because I have seen the places that used to be my answers.

But I still will not see every place I want to see.  If I live a long life, I will still run out of time to fully see the world.  I love gorgeous beaches, but there will be a beach I would find more beautiful than all the others that I will never even know exists.  There will be a hike to an overlook with the most breathtaking view on a Greek island that I will never visit because even though I go to new Greek islands every five years, there are 227 inhabited Greek islands, and I will never see them all.  There are beautiful pieces of history I will never see because of global wars and poor timing of life commitments.

Despite this, I would still encourage you to travel slowly.  If there are major sites you want to see more than any others, use them as anchors to plan a travel journey that still allows you to travel slowly.  You should see the places that interest you the most, but you should also honor them enough to enjoy the moment in which you are seeing them.  Making peace with the fact that you will not, you cannot see everything allows you to more fully appreciate what you can see with the time you have.

Let What You See Reshape Your Life

In 2025, we visited Sicily for one month.  One island, one entire month.  We stayed at different locations, but we also chose to enjoy three long-term home bases with a couple brief stops along the way.  This allowed us to live slowly for three weeks of the month while still getting all the experiences we wanted.

Not only did this travel style lead to some true recovery, it also let us get to know Sicily well enough to add our favorite parts of Sicily to our daily life.  I tried pesto trapanese in multiple locations across Sicily, and trying different variations of the dish let me explore variations of the recipe and recreate the dish at home in a way that replicated my favorite version of pesto trapanese.  We now regularly enjoy pesto trapanese, Palermo-style cutlets, and lemon granita at home, instantly bringing us back to Sicily.

Our actions during more restful travel can carry into our regular lives as well.  Since our long trip, I better recognize when I need a slow morning where I need to get outside early to regulate but take the day at a slower pace than usual.  This was a regular practice of ours in Sicily, particularly when we could eat oatmeal with the most delicious local apricots on our balcony in Taormina overlooking the sunrise or drink hot chocolate with a beach and mountain view in San Vito Lo Capo.

While it is easier to establish these recovery habits when we travel for longer durations, you can teach yourself to bring travel habits back after a slow two-week adventure.  Two weeks still gives you time to have a few adventurous days mixed in with plenty of days spent strolling a new city, relaxing and enjoying the local atmosphere, and eating a new dish.  For many individuals, travel has become more about getting every perfect photo for Instagram to show off the exciting experiences you had.  By slowing down instead, travel becomes part of who you are when you go back home.  When we slow down, travel changes us in ways we cannot predict.  When we let our new experiences change us, we get to bring those experiences home.  Bringing those experiences home lets us become the happier and more complete people we are on vacation so we can enjoy our daily life rather than wishing to escape it.