“Traveling slowly gives you a more mindful connection to the place you’re visiting.” (Natalie Gale, The Good Trade, 9 February 2024.)

Recently, while reading my daily dose of the New York Times that comes each morning to my email inbox, I stumbled across something that was truly an “aha” moment for me.

It was the phrase “slow travel.”

And I realized that this is exactly the thing I’m doing with the retreats I’m organizing as well as in my own personal travels. There it was, in an article about using a sketchbook to document your travels rather than just an iPhone to snap feverishly away*, which is one of the many things I already do and encourage my participants to do as well. Other tenets of the concept are: Staying in one place for longer (check), traveling via methods other than air travel such as trains or cycling or even walking (will definitely work on the walking and cycling bit), and consuming less while there. I definitely would love to embrace the idea of staying in one place for an extended period of time even more fully… Paris for 3 to 6 months, anyone?

But I love it when I find out that something that has been percolating in my thoughts is an actual thing already.

You see, I don’t want just to view the world as someplace to consume, to grab as much as you can get so you can hurry to the next place to grab more while loudly insisting that the culture that you’ve entered be just like the culture that you left. Rather, I prefer to take my time and savor moments and places, to let the essence of a new city or location unfold itself to me and reveal its treasures to me quietly and in its own time. I like to stay in one place long enough to really get to know it well.

And I’ve been fortunate to have had blocks of uninterrupted time in a handful of my favorite places. I’ve stayed in southern France for extended periods of time as well as Burgundy for an entire fall semester with my kids as part of a homegrown, homeschool immersion program. And twice now, I’ve stayed for several weeks in Arles, France, once with a woman who preferred to sleep till noon every day. What her unusual sleeping habits gave me were unhurried mornings to watch a city waking up and beginning its quotidian activities. I would rise early, get dressed and head out in search of a café crème and a pain au chocolat, usually ending up at Café de la Roquette, one of the city’s many “third places”** where locals gather each day to connect with each other. I got the pleasure of observing les arlesiens as they greeted one another and interacted and just enjoyed time together. After my coffee, I’d go for a walk around the city. There’s nothing quite like an early morning walk through narrow streets replete with Roman ruins, church bells tolling in the background, mist still rising off the Rhône river.

No shopping, because nothing was open yet.

No hurrying, because the French don’t do that and also I had quite literally hours until my travel companion would awaken and we would meet for lunch.

Just me and a beautiful place awakening around me. I did make notes of shops that I might want to circle back to later in the day; please don’t misunderstand me- I do adore shopping, ESPECIALLY in France and I absolutely live for the crush and rush of a good outdoor market, but on those mornings I just walked. And listened. And observed, and took photos of what I would want to sketch later in the day, when rather than café sitting with a cup of coffee I was café sitting with a glass of wine. And absorbed the intricacies and subtleties of life in a world so different from my own.

We became close friends, Arles and I, over the weeks I spent there. I got to know her narrow and winding streets very well through my morning meanderings. And I can’t wait to visit my dear friend again soon. Even more, I can’t wait to introduce my new friends to this old friend. I think you’ll love her as much as I do.

Slow travel. Now I have a name for it.

*I do plenty of feverish snapping away with my iPhone, for sure. I tend to take a photo and then work from photographs, both in my oils on canvas and in my travel sketchbook. Though I aspire to be a plein air sort of girl.

**A third place is a sociological term for a social environment that is separate from your home (your first place) and your work (your second place). The concept was first presented by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the 1980s. And we all need one.