Our Experiences As Slow Travelers
Darren and I are early retirees who left corporate careers in our late 40s. We are nomadic except for three months a year when we spend time in our tiny home in the Great Plains of the United States. We spend 40-120 days per year thru-hiking in the EU and about 90 days per year in the Caribbean and Central America. This blog documents our journey to nomadic living and financial independence.
Before embracing slow travel, we were scientists and executives at large multinational companies. Having spent most of our 20s and 30s traveling at a fast pace, we wanted to slow down, avoid mass tourism, and stretch our travel dollars.
What Is Slow Travel?
There’s no official definition of slow travel. On several blogs, vlogs, and travel websites, we find that “Slow Travel” includes one or more of the following themes:
Staying in a home or hostel for weeks, months, or longer rather than a few hours or days in a hotel, resort or other mass tourism venue
Choosing or incorporating travel methods that have a lower environmental impact (e.g., by foot, cycling, train, bus) rather than higher environmental impact travel (e.g., cruise ship, plane)
Like “slow food,” taking time to enjoy the planning, preparation, and execution rather than outsourcing to logistics to a third party
Travel to learn other ways of living, culture, cuisine, and values
What Does Slow Travel Mean To Us?
For us, slow travel is taking time to research a destination and then making a one-to-three-month itinerary to explore a country or a region of a country. Our aim is to take in the foods, drinks, music, arts, outdoor activities, and museums while incorporating a healthy diet, exercise, and downtime.
Our Previous Fast Traveler Lifestyle
We spent a lot of our career—especially the last 10 years—as fast travelers, both in our corporate and private lives. We participated in two types of fast travel: corporate travel and traditional vacation travel.
What Type of Corporate Travel Did We Do?
When we were in corporate management positions, we spent 25% or more of our work year traveling to meet with employees, customers, and other stakeholders. This type of fast corporate travel typically lasted from a couple of days to one week or maybe two, but never more than three weeks at a time.
What Type of Vacation Travel Did We Do?
When most Americans take vacations, it is typically to escape from the demands of work, home, and family, emphasizing decompression and rest. The focus isn’t usually on learning and exploration. On vacation, American travelers typically spend time sightseeing, shopping, dining out, or perhaps camping or hiking.
We were employed in the United States, where two weeks of vacation is the norm for salaried employees, with up to three weeks of vacation after working 10 years or more at one company. Since we lived over 1000 miles from family, our vacation allotment was split up between trips to see family, a few long in-state beach weekends per year, and one week-long vacation between Christmas and the New Year.
Having known only fast travel, we didn’t know what to expect from slow travel. After traveling slowly since September 2021, we’ve learned a few things about the pros and cons of slow travel.
What Are the Pros of Slow Travel?
When people see how much we’ve traveled since September 2021, they may view our travels through the lens of a typical “vacation.” While most vacations are about spending time and money away from work, letting off steam, and getting outside of one’s regular routine, slow traveling offers a different perspective and experience.
Slow Travel Accommodations
For starters, slow travel is significantly less expensive than fast travel. Lodging may be the same as you’d use for a typical vacation; however, by staying more than one week, typically one month or more, you can negotiate rates that are 30-50% less than the nightly rate.
In addition to better rates for longer stays, visiting a destination’s shoulder season can mean saving 70% or more of the peak season’s nightly vacation rate.
Living Like A Local
When we live in a home, room, or hostel for weeks or months, we get to know people in the neighborhoods where we are staying. We can become friendly with the local baker, the grocery store clerk, a waitress at a nearby restaurant, and the residents of the area. This always us to live more like a local and less like a tourist.
Live A Normal Lifestyle
By avoiding mass tourism destinations or seasons, it becomes easy to live a normal life in some truly memorable places.
While the backdrop may be someplace exciting like an island or Alpine village, the day-to-day life while slow traveling starts to resemble our day-to-day life in our village of 800 people in the Great Plains of the US (where we have a “tiny home” base).
A typical day may be making and eating breakfast at our lodging, going for a two-hour walk, having a simple lunch at a local cafe, working for two hours on our blog or planning a long thru-hike, and hten watching a movie online or enjoying a glass of wine while watching some logs burn in the fireplace.
Since we’re not rushing to see the maximum number of sights per day, attend all the events, and shop for souvenirs, we can engage in our usual routine of exercise, sleep, and cooking most meals at the home where we are staying. This allows for a much more relaxing and sustainable pace of life.
Slow Travel Allows for Flexibility
In researching destinations, we typically select a place with good walkability, where we can get to most destinations on foot or by bike. This makes it easy to follow our whims without having to worry about parking, maps, or traffic.
When we’re not pressed for time, we can be flexible when planning outings with guides for kayak, wildlife, or fishing tours. Planning these tours on weekdays during shoulder season means we can often get tours that are just with the guide or with a fraction of the other participants.
Finally, when slow traveling, we can often schedule around the weather. For example, during a recent monthlong stay in Madiera, Portugal, it rained for 13 days—nonstop! Most people vacationing in Madiera—a popular mountain biking destination— have only three to ten days. We felt bad for people who had booked a weeklong vacation during this long rainy spell. They had no choice but to bike in the rain or to skip their outing entirely. By staying a month or more, we were able to pick and choose which days to ride the trails between the rain showers.
Slow Travel Reduces Transportation Costs
One of our favorite aspects of slow travel is paying less for daily transportation costs. The longer you stay in one spot, the lower your average daily cost of transportation! Since we are not trying to cover a lot of ground in a region, we can walk or take public transportation from our accommodations to various places, including grocery stores, restaurants, bars, and attractions. When we need to rent an automobile, we’re often able to save money by working with our host on transportation recommendations. Often hosts have a spare vehicle (or know someone who does), and they will rent it to you at a significantly lower price than a multinational car rental service.
Slow Travel Leads to Food Discoveries and Reduced Costs
By cooking at home for most meals, we are able to take advantage of batch cooking when we slow travel. When exploring an area, we like to select a fish, fruit, or vegetable we have never tried and ask for advice from someone from the market on how to prepare it.
When slow traveling, we do go out to eat a couple of times per week, typically for lunch. It’s less crowded at lunch and typically costs less. Also, the staff is usually full of energy earlier in the day, and you may see the owner or chef. By staying in a place for a while, one can try different dishes from the same restaurant later in a visit. We often ask when the weekly specials are and when there might be live music.
Slow Travel Reduces Packing and Unpacking Logistics
One of the pain points of any travel is packing and unpacking. While we typically travel with our backpacks and one checked suitcase, it takes precious time to unpack and pack if one is changing accommodations frequently.
By staying in one spot for weeks or a month, we can settle in and fully unpack our belongings. Selecting a rental with a washing machine or within easy walking distance of a laundromat saves significant time in dealing with dirty laundry.
Fewer travel days during a lengthy stay also means reduced stress!
What Are the Cons of Slow Travel?
Slow travel can be a wonderful way to see the world, but it is not all a bed of roses. There are some downsides to slow travel that we have experienced.
You May Not See All the Sights While Slow Traveling
While traditional vacationers may spare no expense on a trip to reach a sightseeing destination or a maximum number of sights per day, as slow travelers, we’ve adopted a JOMO (joy of missing out) approach to seeing sights. Conventional mass travel marketing is aimed at passing the maximum number of people through turnstiles to get the most commission, ticket sales, and free advertising through Instagram posts. Those who travel on the slower side are not as lucrative a clientele as fast travelers.
When we travel, we get a lot of recommendations from well-meaning friends and family on all the things to see. However, if it is too expensive, too time-consuming, logistically difficult to fit in, or not aligned with our interests, we opt out.
We’ve decided not to cram everything in. If it is a place where we connect with people, cuisine, outdoor pursuits, and the climate, we consider returning to the location sometime in the future. If a site is easily approachable by the masses, we typically pass up the experience. If we feel compelled to come back in the future, we could do those activities in our slow-go years.
Group Slow Travel Can Be Challenging
We’ve slow traveled solo and as a couple. We sometimes meet people attempting to slow travel in a group of three or more. We’ve observed that slow traveling as a group is challenging and stressful. It is very difficult for a group of adults to agree on accommodations, activities, meals, bedtimes, and downtime. We’ve seen travel groups get into arguments that end up damaging or ending their relationships—no fun!
Traveling as a couple or group can also dampen your experiences. As a ready-built unit of two, you’re less likely to interact with locals in social situations like bars, the market, or on a walk. By traveling solo or splitting up for the day in a location, you may have more intimate connections and conversations with locals than you do as part of a couple or group.
It takes a very special bond or friendship to travel together for weeks or months at a time. If you’ve not traveled with your partner or friend group for more than a couple of days, consider a practice run before taking a longer trip.
Planning Slow Travel Is Time Consuming
One of the upsides of fast travel is that you can obtain a fully planned itinerary in advance from a tour operator or travel agent. With slow travel, having someone else plan a three or six-month itinerary can get quite expensive.
To slow travel economically, you will need to plan your itinerary by yourself. The upside is that minimal planning will allow you to be flexible as you learn about yourself during travel. By not planning every day or hour, you open yourself up to impromptu experiences and interactions that often don’t happen while fast-traveling.
If you are traveling slowly as a solo traveler, you may get burned out on travel planning if you are changing locations every week or so. If you are partnered up and only one person is doing the planning, resentment can build that the other person is not pulling their weight in the planning department. It’s a good idea to be clear about who is responsible for which aspects of your slow travel planning.
You Might Get Bored or Frustrated With Slow Travel
Nothing can prepare you for a change of pace when jumping into slow travel. If you’ve just left the hot seat of a fast-paced corporate life, this new lifestyle might feel too slow. If you’ve just finished caring for a loved one and are embarking on travel in a new phase of life, you may feel like you are not “maximizing” your time because your day is not jammed with activity. Fast traveling can provide many thrills per hour or day. When slow traveling, unless you have unlimited funds, you’ll need to plan fewer activities in order to stay within your budget and avoid activity burnout.
If you do get bored when slow traveling, consider going for a walk to places where there is a lot of activity, like the community marketplace where local products are sold. Not only will you get to taste the local fare, but you’ll also often meet outgoing English-speaking staff who will give you all sorts of insider tips that can be used as a springboard for an excursion or experience.
You might also try searching the Events section of Facebook as well as meetup.com for the region where you are traveling.
You Might Get Homesick While Slow Traveling
You may find that after a few weeks or months of slow traveling you feel homesick. Homesickness can come from missing your routine, your loved ones, or your pet. It can also come from a feeling of not having a “home.” Others may love the nomadic life but feel homesick around the holidays and the business of “merry-making.”
Before you discard slow travel, try to take some time to understand what the source of homesickness is. Perhaps you need to incorporate more of a routine in your day-to-day life. If you feel lonely, do you feel more or less lonely while on the road?
We’ve found that we enjoy having a tiny home base for three to six months of the year. This allows us to have a place to go to if we tire of slow travel, get injured, and need a place to recuperate and have a sense of belonging to a small community for at least part of the year.
You Might Get Sick While Slow Traveling
Let’s face it, you are going to get sick while slow traveling. There’s not a lot you can do to plan for this. People can and do become gravely ill—not necessarily because we are traveling—it just happens that we get sick while on the road.
The only thing you can do to prepare for sickness when traveling is to carry travelers insurance or have a dedicated fund set aside for repatriation to your home country. If you don’t have a home base, think about where you would like to be once you are back. Is this a short-term rental or with friends and family? In advance, plan where you would like to be if you need to recuperate from a broken leg or back surgery. Would this be in a home, hotel, or AirBnB? While you don’t need to have all the minute details planned for any scenario, it’s a good idea to document your options in case you need to activate a repatriation plan for an illness lasting over two weeks.
You Might Have Lousy Accommodations While Slow Traveling
Noisy Rooster Curry, a Slow-Travel Specialty!
You can spend hours researching accommodations. Still, there is no guarantee that any accommodation will be free from inconvenience. These types of inconveniences can include a noisy rooster crowing at 4:00 every morning, bad smells, thin walls, an uncomfortable bed, getting lost, or communication challenges that are even greater than you expected.
In a nutshell, you will learn to become flexible when you slow travel. As you build up experiences, such inconveniences become … less inconvenient. You learn that places have their own unique smells, noises, and safety issues. Eventually, these inconveniences can make for great travel stories, like how that noisy rooster tasted great in a homemade curry the following weekend!
On the upside, know that you don’t live here and that you will be moving on. If you are in week one of a multi-month stay, reach out to your host to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Our Slow Travel Wrap-Up
We hope you enjoyed learning about what we have experienced as slow travelers in the past year-and-a-half. It’s true that we have experienced a lot of ups and downs, but the ups have definitely outweighed the downs.
We are more flexible and patient with ourselves and others as we slow travel. We have incorporated new ways of thinking and learning into our daily lives. We learn what things we value (and don’t value) the longer we do this. We learn that we can live with less the more we travel.
Last but not least, we’ve made lifelong friends in just this short amount of time—other people who have embraced the slow travel ethos.
