Learning to Travel Slowly

When we decided to stay in Budapest for at least another school year, I knew I would have the summer off–and would likely need to leave for the summer due to visa reasons, as I’m switching to a new school (it’s complicated and totally not fun to write about, and most certainly not fun to read about).

It’s been a big transition to Budapest these past six months, and even though I’m so excited to be in a new area of Europe, I’ve been challenging myself to travel more slowly. I’m sure you’ve heard of the “slow travel” movement–and I am fully on board!

Over the years, I’ve gotten worse at traveling slowly. My very first trip abroad was spent almost solely in Switzerland, for almost three weeks–and I loved it. Three weeks isn’t very long, but it’s enough to get a taste of a country. After I moved to Europe, though, I’ve become addicted to fast travel and adding countries to my list. It’s so hard when you can just click to Skyscanner (my favorite tool and also my favorite time waster) to see where is cheap to go this weekend–and how to get somewhere you’ve never been.

Since moving to Europe almost two years ago, I’ve traveled to 19 countries and counting. My husband and I have a fun game going on for him–30 countries by 30!–and I think we’ve gotten carried away. (I only turn thirty a month after him–next summer, yikes!–but I’m over 30 countries already). It’s fun to add new countries, and it’s so easy in Europe that we haven’t been able to resist.

My husband just turned 29 (happy birthday to the best guy!) so we have a year to reach our goal of “30 by 30.” However, this year we are finding ourselves less interested in only going to new countries, but we are aching to go back to countries where we only got a quick taste. In Italy, for example, we’ve only been to Venice and Milan–there is so much left to see there! Or France–just Paris, can you believe? Or even in Hungary, we’ve only been to one town outside of Budapest so far. (#firstworldproblems)

See, the best thing, to me, about living/visiting in a new country is learning all the little customs and quirks of a new culture. You simply can’t experience much of this on a weekend trip, or even in several weeks. It’s been wonderful to spend a year in Prague and now six months in Hungary, getting a true glimpse of life in these countries. Since I find that more fulfilling, I’ve been challenging myself to travel more slowly.

So, this summer, even though I had two months off that I needed to spend out of the Schengen zone, we chose just two countries to visit–one new, and one we’ve been to before. Romania was a treat–although at just under two weeks, I wouldn’t call it slow travel. In fact, the longest we stayed in one place was three nights! Oops. Slow travel fail.

Of course, not only did Romania get busier than I had originally planned, so did our summer in general. We realized that since we are coming back this summer for a wedding, we likely won’t be back in the States for another year at least–which meant we needed to visit important family members, such as grandparents, so we decided to fly to California first before going to Montana for said wedding. Oy vey.

Flying to California to Europe turned out to be cheapest from Norway…which is why we went there (which you may have seen if you follow me on Instagram). The cheapest flight from Budapest to Norway went via Copenhagen for a night…so we went there. We went road-tripping in California, flew to Montana for my family and my friend’s wedding, and drove Washington to visit my in-laws. While here, we popped down to Portland, Oregon, to visit some dear friends. In less than a week, we are flying from Seattle to one of my favorite countries–can you guess??–which turned out to be a shorter trip than anticipated as well because I start work earlier at my new job than I thought.

And so…my quest to travel more slowly continues. Stay tuned.

Do you prefer to travel slowly or more quickly?