Travel
This is a guest post by Lauren D. Please see the author’s links if you enjoyed this piece.
I used to think slow travel meant fewer stamps in a passport. Staying places for weeks at a time. But I’ve realized that you could spend five days in one city and still consume it the same way you’d rush through three countries in five — checklist in hand, camera up, moving from…
…the thing you’re supposed to see to yet another “can’t miss” location.
When I moved to Luxembourg and started sharing my experiences travelling Europe on Substack and on Instagram, I didn’t have a point of view yet. I knew that Luxembourg was under-appreciated and I realized that I gravitated more toward the quieter, less “trendy” destinations than many mainstream travel. But I didn’t know what it was I really wanted to say.
I found the term “slow travel” and thought it sounded like how I approached my trips. Not rushing to “see it all” or feeling the need to make the most of a trip. Embracing stillness instead of trying to see everything. Problem was, I was rarely able to travel anywhere for more than a few days at a time. My partner and I like to do lots of little trips now that we’re based in Luxembourg; a long weekend in Paris, a 4-night getaway to Mallorca, driving trips to parts of Belgium I’d never heard of before moving to Europe. But could we call ourselves “slow travellers” if we weren’t staying that long?
I had a Note blow up here on Substack for the first time last week, about how I didn’t want to see 3 countries in 5 days. This wasn’t an arbitrary number, either; my partner’s colleague told us about a trip he’d planned to do just that. And for him, it was exciting— the prospect of checking all of these places off his bucket list so quickly— but to me, it sounded exhausting. And not very fulfilling.
But on the surface, his trip and my trips aren’t actually that different in length. A long weekend here, four nights there. If slow travel were really about how many days you stay somewhere, neither of us would qualify. So why did his trip sound like a checklist, and mine didn’t?
And that’s when I finally found the words for how I define slow travel. It’s not about how long you stay, but how deeply you let yourself connect to a place.
It’s getting to know one neighbourhood instead of skimming a whole city. People watching instead of photo-taking. It means going back to the same coffee shop three mornings in a row, not because you ran out of new ones to try, but because you liked how it felt the first time.
It’s following your senses instead of using Google Maps to map the shortest route, letting the smell of bread pull you down a side street you hadn’t planned to walk down. It means trusting your instincts over whatever’s ranked #1 on a list some algorithm decided you should see.
To me, slow travel is an approach: letting a place reveal itself instead of walking in with a fully formed idea of what it’s supposed to be and checking it against the postcard in your head. It’s choosing to be a guest in a place, rather than a consumer of it.
Lauren D. is a travel writer with several works and articles that you can read online at her substack here. Please be sure to check out her other work there if you enjoyed this piece.
Leave a Reply