Slow Travel Isn't About Time
(6 minute read)
The first time I came to Paris I was fourteen, and I remember almost none of it. It was two days tacked onto the end of a week in London, so we tried to cram the whole city into a weekend, which is how you end up seeing it the way a lot of first-timers do: from the top deck of a tour bus, one landmark sliding into the next, a voice naming things over a speaker. I could not tell you a single thing that bus showed me.
Two moments survived, though, and I've carried them ever since. One is a climb, all those steps up to Sacré-Cœur, legs burning, the city falling open behind us as we went. The other is my mother and a gelato vendor. She kept trying to say vanille, and he kept gently, playfully correcting her, again, and again, until she was laughing too hard to get the word out, ice cream melting, the two of them undone over a single syllable.
Neither was on the itinerary. Both took being on the ground, on foot, with time to spare. And that, more than any monument, is what Paris gave me. It took me years to see why: the bus was efficient, and I remember nothing; the two moments that stuck were the two that were slow.
That is what I mean by slow travel, and the phrase gets misread, so let me be precise. It isn't a math problem, months instead of days, a sabbatical you have to earn first. It's a way of being somewhere. It means staying long enough, and paying enough attention, to meet a place rather than tick it off a list. You can do it in a week. You can do it over a weekend. The one thing you can't do is do it from a bus.
The best parts of a trip are almost always the ones you didn't plan. I've built a life and a business around believing that. But belief is cheap, so here's the evidence, all of it mine.
A few years ago Paul and I spent a stretch in Croatia and kept drifting back to the same small cocktail bar in the evenings. By the third night, the bartender clocked us walking in and, before we'd said a word, set down two negronis on the house. He knew us. We'd become people to him instead of a table to turn over. You don't get that on day one, and you certainly don't get it if day one is your only day. It costs almost nothing, a little repetition, a little loyalty, and it's the whole difference between visiting a bar and having a bar.
Another time, in Marseille, I got talking to a man named Thierry in an Irish pub down on the Vieux Port (the Old Port), which is about the most touristy corner of the whole city. He decided I had to see Cours Julien, the convivial, street-art-covered quarter up the hill, and asked whether I'd meet him there a couple of nights later. I did. We spent hours talking and laughing, and Cours Julien has been one of my favorite places in Marseille ever since. It happened only because I was still in town, and because my schedule had a hole in it big enough for a stranger's invitation to fit. A tighter itinerary would have had no room for it.
And that's the part fast travel can't buy. Stay somewhere long enough and the locals start getting curious about you, too. The exchange runs both ways: they ask where you're from and what you've seen, and then they tell you where they themselves go, which is rarely where the guidebook sends you. Thierry handed me a whole neighborhood. Fast travel doesn't just wear you out; it books over the good things before they can arrive.
There's a version of all this that isn't about you at all. When you slow down, your money and your attention settle somewhere instead of scattering. You shop the same market, ride the same tram, tip the same waiter. You stop being a wave that rolls in and back out and start being, for a little while, a regular. And it is harder to treat a place carelessly once it knows your face. When the person pulling your coffee will see you again tomorrow, you carry the cup back. That's the responsible part, and it isn't a rule you follow. It's just what happens when you stick around.
People call slow travel a privilege, and they're not wrong. Time off, a flexible budget, a passport that opens doors, none of it is handed out evenly, and pretending otherwise turns "travel responsibly" into a test most people fail before they've packed. So I won't tell you it belongs to everyone equally.
But here's what the privilege framing misses, and it's the reason I've stopped counting slow travel in days: it's a posture before it's a calendar. If it were only about staying for months, it really would belong to the few. Because it's mostly about how you pay attention, you can bring it to nearly any trip. Choose fewer places and let yourself get a little bored in them. Base yourself in one spot instead of sleeping in five. Leave gaps in the schedule on purpose, and when a gap opens, resist filling it. Walk. Sit. Follow the stranger to the bar. None of that needs a sabbatical. It needs you to stop treating a place like a to-do list.
Which is really the lesson of my own first Paris. We tried to hold the whole city at once and came away holding none of it. If we'd simply planted ourselves in one quarter, Le Marais, say, and let it grow familiar over those two days, I'd have come home with a piece of the map that was mine, a few streets I could still picture, some feel for how Paris fits together. Instead I got a blur. It took me until adulthood, and a lot of slow afternoons in parks and cafés, for the city to come into focus, and the corner I love most now, the 19th arrondissement, sits well off the tourist track, exactly the kind of place a fourteen-year-old on a schedule sails straight past.
None of this is about doing less for its own sake, or being a finer person than the man on the bus. I was the man on the bus. It's only that the bus gave me nothing, and the stairs and the gelato gave me Paris. Everything since, moving to France, building a company around the way people travel, traces back to a fourteen-year-old's two stubborn memories and what they were trying to tell him. Go slow enough to be surprised. The trip you didn't plan is usually the one you keep.
When has slowing down handed you something a faster trip never could? Tell us about the moment you didn't plan.
