COULD YOU ENJOY
THE BORING DAYS TOO?
When people picture full-time travel, they usually picture the days when something is happening. They think about arriving in a new city, going somewhere for lunch, seeing a market, taking a train to another town, or finding a place they had been looking forward to seeing.
Those days are part of it, but there are plenty of days when nothing much happens at all.
We go grocery shopping. We do laundry. We pick up something from the pharmacy. We stay home because it is raining. We make dinner, watch TV, and go to bed without having done anything that would look particularly interesting in a travel video.
On a short trip, it is easy to keep busy because you know you only have a limited amount of time. You make a list, go out in the morning, and try to see as much as you can before you leave. When you are staying somewhere for a few weeks or a month, there is enough time that you do not have to treat every day like a sightseeing day.
There are days when we have nothing planned and do not feel like planning anything. We may walk to the same grocery store we have already been to twenty times, stop at the same bakery, come back to the apartment, and spend the rest of the day there. Sometimes the only thing we accomplish is getting the laundry done.
That would probably feel disappointing on a one-week vacation. On a longer stay, the break is welcomed.
Part of what makes slow travel work for us is that we don’t need every day to feel special. We like having enough time in one place that we can have an ordinary day without feeling like we wasted it. If we don’t see something today, it will still be there tomorrow.
Loving travel is one thing. Living this way also means being comfortable with the days when travel is not really the focus at all. It means being happy enough with the apartment, the neighborhood, the routine, and each other that an uneventful day still feels like a perfectly good day.
That has become one of the better parts of staying somewhere longer. We just aren’t trying to turn every day into an experience. Sometimes we are just living there.
And that is probably the better question to ask before making travel a bigger part of your life: not whether you enjoy going somewhere new, but whether you would still enjoy it once being there starts to feel ordinary.
Sometimes the clearest way to understand what staying still gives you is to experience what happens when the pace never lets up.
Before we left, we worried we'd run out of things to do — and a year in, the ordinary days turned out to be the ones we like best.
Scott & Liza
