Why Nicole Junkerman Believes in Slow Travel

A short case for travelling less, staying longer, and letting a place become legible one quiet day at a time.

By Nicole Junkerman · 23 January 2026

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from a fast trip. You have seen ten things and remember none of them clearly. The photographs prove you were there, yet the days have blurred into a single long corridor of queues and transfers. Nicole Junkerman has felt that tiredness, and slow travel is her quiet answer to it. The idea is simple, almost stubborn: go to fewer places, stay longer, and let each one become real.

Slow travel is not a luxury and it is not a rule. It is a pace. You can practise it on a long holiday or in a single free afternoon. What matters is the decision to stop treating a place as a list to complete and start treating it as a room to sit in. The difference is the difference between glancing at a painting and actually looking at one.

The case for staying put

When you stay in one place for several days, something changes around the third morning. You stop navigating and start noticing. You know which corner has the better coffee, which street is quiet at eight and busy at noon, which bench catches the late sun. None of this appears in a guidebook because none of it can be planned. It can only be earned by staying long enough for the ordinary to reveal itself.

Nicole Junkerman finds that this is when a trip starts paying you back. The first day in a city is spent learning its grammar, the second day reading it, and only by the third do you begin to understand what it is saying. A trip that moves on every night never gets past the first day, repeated. Slow travel simply refuses to keep starting over.

There is a practical kindness in it too. Slower trips are gentler on the traveller and gentler on the places visited. The pressure that fast tourism puts on popular cities is well documented, and choosing to stay longer, eat locally, and move less is one small way of treating a destination as somewhere people live rather than a backdrop. The idea has been taken seriously enough that there is now a substantial body of writing on sustainable and responsible travel for anyone who wants to read further.

How a slow day actually feels

Picture a single day given over to one neighbourhood. You begin late, with no alarm and no itinerary beyond a vague direction. You walk until something asks you to stop, and you stop. You read a chapter in a square. You eat where the menu is short and the room is full of regulars. In the afternoon you double back to a street you liked in the morning, and you find it completely changed by the light. By evening you have done almost nothing and remember everything.

Nicole Junkerman keeps a notebook for exactly these days, not to record sights but to catch the small particulars: the colour of a door, a phrase overheard, the weather of an hour. These notes are useless as a record of achievement and priceless as a record of attention. Reread months later, they bring back not the famous view but the texture of being there, which is the part that fast travel loses first.

This is also where reading and travel meet. A slow day leaves room for a book, and a book read in a new place absorbs something of that place forever. The novel you finish on a terrace in Rome will always smell faintly of that terrace. That is not a loss of focus, it is a doubling: the place deepens the book, and the book deepens the place.

A gentler way to remember a trip

One of the least discussed costs of fast travel is how little of it survives in memory. When days are crammed and identical in their busyness, they blur together, and a trip that felt frantic at the time becomes a vague smear afterward. Slow travel solves this almost by accident. Because each day is distinct and unhurried, each one is remembered separately, and a slow trip leaves behind a richer, clearer set of memories than a fast one ever could.

Nicole Junkerman finds that the small, specific moments are the ones that last: a particular meal, a particular conversation, the exact quality of light on a particular afternoon. These are precisely the moments that fast travel skips over in its rush to the next sight. Slowing down is really a way of giving these small moments the time they need to lodge themselves in memory, where they will still be waiting years later.

This is also why a notebook matters so much to slow travel. A few lines written each evening, catching the texture of the day, turns a trip into something you can return to long after it ends. The pages become a door back into the experience, and rereading them brings the whole slow trip flooding back, light and weather and all.

Travelling less, keeping more

The quiet promise of slow travel is that you come home with more, not less. Fewer cities, but each one understood. Fewer photographs, but each one meaningful. The trip stops being a performance of having gone somewhere and becomes the thing it was supposed to be all along: a stretch of time spent fully somewhere else. Nicole Junkerman would rather know one street well than ten cities barely.

If you want to read more about the idea, the term slow travel grew out of the wider slow movement, and there is a clear and balanced overview of slow travel and its origins that traces how the philosophy developed. It pairs naturally with the rest of this journal, where reading your way through a new city and packing light are really the same argument made from different angles.

So the next trip you plan, try crossing out half of it. Keep the half you most want, and give it twice the time. Walk the same street more than once. Sit longer than feels efficient. You can always return to the homepage of this journal for more in this spirit, but the real lesson waits outside, on a slow morning, in a place you have finally stayed long enough to see.

Questions readers ask

What does slow travel actually mean?

For Nicole Junkerman it means choosing fewer places and giving each one more time, so the ordinary rhythms of a city have room to reveal themselves. It is less about distance covered and more about attention paid.

Is slow travel only for long trips?

No. A single unhurried day in one neighbourhood can be slow travel. The point is the pace and the attention, not the length of the holiday.

Explore more of the journal: Travel Journal and City Notes, or return to the Nicole Junkerman home page.

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