How to Embrace the Joy of Slow Travel in Europe with Renee Hannes

Well, you brought up slow travel, the art of practicing slow, slow travel, as you said there.

And I know that that's something that you and I both really believe in, you know, and, and as somebody who also, you know, you're planning trips for folks, you know, you're helping people plan out itineraries.

You know, most people in places like the US and Canada, Canada might get, I don't know, you guys might get a little bit more time off than we do.

Um, but how do you, you know, I always feel like it's hard to, to tell people to slow down when they want to, you know, when they go to Italy or they go to France and they want to see this and they want to see that and they only have a certain amount of time.

So how, like, what are some of the tips or some of the suggestions that you have for people who maybe do only have two weeks, maybe 10 days, two weeks in a certain place, you know, how do you get them to slow down? What are, what are suggestions and tips that you would offer out?

Yeah, I think that because I say it's, you know, it's the art or the practice of, it's not something that you can just say, okay, I'm going to slow travel on this trip.

Right.

To me, you know, I've been doing this since I've been a teenager.

This, this way of traveling has been you know, something I've kind of always done, but I've always perfected it with every trip as well, right? So there's been lots of times where, you know, first of all, I would have traveled only to a week for a place or two weeks to a place when I was working, you know, for many years, I only had that two weeks that I could kind of give up.

And, you know, the other week was for family time or whatever it happened to be.

So I never have kind of viewed travel as it's the length of time that you have to be in a place.

To

me, it's more about how are you going to approach that place while you're there? And so I really feel it's kind of the mindset that you have before you go and travel to that destination.

And the mindset really is about being intentional, right? Being intentional with what do you want to do or how do you want this trip to feel? So when I kind of talk to clients or even when I'm planning it for myself, I really think about it's knowing yourself and it's knowing your interests and letting your interests kind of guide what you want to do on your trip and maybe where you want to go and the type of trip you want to have.

Because when you're doing that, you're not just randomly picking a destination because you think everybody has to go to Rome and that's just a place that you need to go and see.

But you're actually kind of thinking, OK, why is it that I want to go to Rome? Like, what is it that's drawing me there? other than kind of the social media pressure of it's a beautiful city, historic city that, you know, everyone has to see in their lifetime.

Agreed.

But, you know, when you're kind of choosing your next destination, it's maybe being more intentional about what is it that you like to get out of that trip.

And those trips could be different from year to year to year.

So it could be very much focused on one trip being about you know, learning history or learning the culture.

And maybe that is because you want to go to Rome.

And so then you're focused on that time around what are those things that I'm going to do while I'm there that I'm interested in that drew me to Rome.

And so you're going there with an intention.

So you're not kind of going there just with this long checklist of, okay, I'm going to Rome.

I need to see everything on this list.