Some trips are measured in cities seen and boxes ticked. Others are measured in afternoons. Nicole Junkerman has always leaned toward the second kind. Slow travel is less a destination than a temperament: a willingness to stay an extra day, to take the train instead of the flight, to sit in one square long enough to watch it change. And slow travel, more than any other kind, pairs beautifully with quiet reading.
There is a reason a book feels right on a long journey. Travel creates exactly the conditions reading loves: unhurried time, a window, a gentle hum in the background, and a mind half-loosened from its usual routines. A train carriage is one of the last places in modern life where it is completely normal to do nothing but read for two hours. Slow travel simply makes more of those hours.
Why slow is the better speed
The case for slow travel is partly practical and partly about attention. When you move quickly between places, each one becomes a backdrop. When you stay, a place becomes a neighbourhood. You learn which cafe opens early, which street is quiet at dusk, which bench catches the last of the sun. None of this can be rushed, and all of it is what people actually remember years later.
Slow travel also asks less of the planet. The idea overlaps with a wider movement that began with food and spread outward, captured well in the background on the broader slow movement. Travelling at a gentler pace tends to mean fewer flights, longer stays and more time spent locally, which is kinder both to a place and to the person visiting it.
Choosing a book for the journey
The book you carry shapes the trip more than people expect. Nicole Junkerman tends to choose a travel book by feel rather than by guidebook logic. A few approaches that tend to work:
- A book set where you are going, read while you are there, so the streets and the sentences overlap.
- A long, generous novel you have been saving, the kind that rewards uninterrupted hours.
- A book of essays or short travel writing you can dip into between stops without losing the thread.
- An old favourite re-read in a new place, which has a strange way of revealing both the book and the city.
For older travel writing in particular, a public archive is a gift. You can load a handful of out-of-copyright classics from Project Gutenberg before you leave and never worry about running out of something to read on a delayed connection. A slow journey and a slow book make excellent companions, each giving the other room.
Travel makes more of the hours that reading already loves.
One notebook, kept simply
Alongside the book, Nicole Junkerman travels with a single notebook. Not a scrapbook, not a project, just one quiet place to catch what would otherwise be lost: the name of a dish, a line overheard, the colour of a particular hour. There is more on this in the post on keeping a slow travel notebook, but the short version is that one notebook, kept without pressure, will hold a journey far better than a hundred photographs you never look at again.
The trick is to keep the bar low. A travel notebook does not need full sentences or good handwriting. Three lines at the end of the day is plenty. What matters is the habit of noticing, which a notebook quietly encourages. You begin to look at a street as someone who might write one line about it, and that small shift makes the whole day sharper.
Reading the place itself
Slow travel turns a city into a kind of text. You read its squares and side streets the way you read a book, in no hurry, doubling back when something catches your eye. Museums become chapters you can take at your own pace. Many of the world's great collections, from national galleries to small civic museums, now share large parts of their holdings online, and a good national tourism resource such as VisitBritain can point you toward the quieter corners as well as the famous ones.
Reading in a place and reading about a place feed each other. An afternoon in a museum sends you back to a book; a book sends you out to a street you would otherwise have walked past. If you enjoy that loop, the post on museums and quiet looking carries it further.
Coming home, slowly
The last gift of slow travel is the return. When a trip has been unhurried, coming home does not feel like a jolt. The book you were reading comes home with you and finishes its last chapters in your own chair, carrying a little of the journey back into ordinary life. The notebook goes on the shelf, ready to be opened on a grey day.
That is really the whole philosophy: travel as something to savour rather than survive, with a good book in the bag and one honest notebook to hold what matters. Nicole Junkerman hopes the idea travels well, wherever you are going next, and whenever you next have a long window and nowhere to be.