Planning the slow-travel summer: where I want to go and how I want to get there

Last summer I had a plan. A real one — the kind with a spreadsheet and a column of booking confirmation numbers and a colour-coded timeline. I knew where I was going, when I was arriving, when I was leaving, which days were for seeing things and which were for rest (I had actually blocked out rest days in the spreadsheet, which in retrospect should have told me something about the whole enterprise). I came home in September and needed approximately two weeks to feel like a person again.

I don't regret it entirely. I saw things I'm glad I saw. But I also spent most of it one step ahead of myself — already thinking about the next location while still in the current one, already mentally packing for the 8am checkout while trying to appreciate wherever I was that evening. The holiday looked like adventure from the outside. From the inside it felt like sprinting in a pretty direction.

This summer, I'm doing the opposite. Here's what the slow version looks like.

The itinerary that exhausted me

I want to be specific about last year because I think the specificity is useful. In a twenty-one day trip I had nine different bases. Nine different sets of sheets. Nine different bedside tables on which to put my book and my glass of water and my little lamp. Nine different bathrooms to work out in the dark at 3am. Nine different check-out times to manage and nine different arrivals to navigate, each with the low-grade adrenaline of new arrivals — the finding of the place, the getting in, the orienting, the settling.

The places were all lovely. I was never anywhere bad. But I was never anywhere long enough to stop being a visitor. I didn't find a café to go back to twice. I didn't learn the morning rhythm of any street I was on. I didn't once have the experience of being somewhere for long enough that the locals stopped registering me as a tourist.

That's the experience I wanted, I realised on the flight home. I wanted to know somewhere briefly from the inside rather than everywhere briefly from the outside. The itinerary hadn't bought me that. The itinerary had bought me volume.

What slow travel actually means to me

I've been thinking about this a lot over winter and spring, and I've arrived at a working definition that feels honest. Slow travel, for me, means staying somewhere long enough to develop a small routine in it. Long enough to have a second coffee in the same place. Long enough to know where the market is and what day it happens. Long enough that there are things I've walked past twice and want to go back to.

One base, or two at most. Longer stays. Local routines rather than sight-by-sight tourism. The permission to linger without it feeling like I'm wasting the trip.

There's something about the cozy rv living aesthetic that captures part of what I mean — not the vehicle, but the philosophy underneath it: moving at the speed of actually being somewhere. Waking up and not having a checkout time. Making your own tea in the morning instead of trying to find a café before your train. Having a rhythm rather than an itinerary. I'm not doing it in a camper van but the spirit of it is the same: home-making in motion. Roots, however temporary, put down somewhere.

What I'm loosely planning

Loosely is the right word and I want to hold onto it carefully, because I know myself well enough to know that my instinct will be to fill in the details and before I know it I'll have accidentally made another spreadsheet. So: loosely.

Two places, maybe three. Each for at least a week, preferably longer. I want somewhere with a good market. Somewhere with somewhere to walk in the morning that isn't just walking through streets — a path, a coastline, a park, something that takes me out of the human-built world briefly. Somewhere where I can sit outside with a book in the afternoon and not feel like I should be doing something else.

No 8am checkouts. No complicated onward logistics. No colour-coded timeline. If I end up staying somewhere an extra day because I've found the right café and I'm not ready to leave, that's the plan now. The plan is to let the place find me rather than the other way around.

The cobblestone morning, the straw bag, the lavender

There's a version of this summer that I can already picture, and it lives in a specific image. A small town with cobblestones — I've been to places like this, I know what they feel like. A Saturday morning. Market stalls along one side of the main street. The smell of lavender from a stall run by someone who clearly grew it, bundles of it wrapped in brown paper and twine.

I buy a bunch. I put it in the straw bag with whatever else I've gathered from the morning — a peach, maybe, or a small piece of cheese, the kinds of things you buy from a market when there's no schedule to respect. And I walk that cobblestone street at the pace of someone who has nowhere else to be. No checkout time. No train to catch. The afternoon is entirely mine.

That image is what I'm planning toward. Not a destination, not a set of bookings — a feeling. The feeling of being somewhere rather than passing through it. The feeling of arriving, properly, without the next departure already sitting in the back of my mind.

What I want from this summer

I want a different quality of memory. That's the most honest way to put it. Last summer's memories are vivid and varied and numerous, and when I go back to them they feel a little like slideshow images — separate frames, each from somewhere different, lacking the depth that comes from actually inhabiting a place.

I want the slower memories. The ones that feel textured rather than framed. The kind where I can remember not just the image but the time of day, the smell in the air, what I'd been thinking about that morning, what the light was doing on the wall of the room. The kind that come from staying long enough for a place to stop being a backdrop and start being a setting.

• One week minimum, anywhere I go. Two if it's right.
• A café I can go back to. Not just once — back to.
• At least one morning walk that I do more than once and know the way.
• Something I come home with that I found at a market rather than a shop.

The best travel lets the place find you, not the other way around — and that requires slowing down enough for it to catch up.

The spreadsheet is not open. I'm going to try to keep it that way. I'm going to let this summer unfold at a pace that feels like living rather than achieving, and I'm going to trust that the memories made at that pace will be the ones I come home and want to write about.

What I've learned about travel and myself

The deeper thing I've come to understand, through last summer's experiment in volume and the months of thinking about it since, is that the way I travel reveals how I live. When I was packing nine bases into twenty-one days, it wasn't just a travel style — it was an expression of the same urgency that had me rewriting captions until midnight and staying awake cataloguing all the things I hadn't done yet. The itinerary was a symptom. The same overcrowding of time that I'd been slowly clearing out of my daily life was absolutely present in how I'd designed my holiday.

So this summer is, in a way, another practice of the same thing. The slow-money thinking. The gentler morning routines. The longer walks rather than the tighter schedule. The permission to stay rather than move on. Slow travel is just slow living in a different location — and the reason I know I'm ready for it this year, when I wasn't last year, is that the daily practice of slowness has been going long enough to feel like mine now rather than a discipline I'm trying to maintain.

I'm also a bit less afraid of boredom. That's a real thing. Last year some of the overplanning was about not trusting unstructured time — about needing the next thing to be booked and confirmed so the space between things didn't feel threatening. I've spent enough time in unstructured hours this year to know that they're not threatening. They're the hours things actually happen in. The thoughts you didn't know you were thinking. The walk you take because you're not going anywhere specific and end up somewhere you're glad you found. The two hours in the window seat of a café watching a street and feeling completely at rest.

Boredom, I've learned, is usually just presence in disguise. You're not bored. You're just without a distraction. And without the distraction, the actual texture of the place you're in can finally reach you. That's what I'm planning for this summer. Not the sights and the itinerary and the confirmation numbers. The texture. The cobblestones and the lavender and the sound of a street in a small town on a Saturday afternoon when there's nowhere you have to be.

If you're planning a slower summer too — or thinking about it — I'd love to know what that looks like for you. For me it starts with: no eight o'clock checkouts. Everything else follows from there.