Slow travel is quite simply not being in a hurry. Slow Travel happens when you don’t have a deadline or timeline hanging over you.

It’s about taking your time to get somewhere and when you do, taking the time to appreciate it. It is as a fellow blogger put it “being where you are, not about what you do”. It’s about soaking in the experience because Slow Travel is a state of mind.

Why would someone become a Slow Traveller? In part the perfect response is because they can. The time for Slow Travel is when you don’t have to be somewhere anytime soon. What “soon” means is upto you!

For some that might just be a weekend,  for others a few weeks and for us it was a few months – three infact! It was the time after I completed my career as a professional service provide and before I truly commenced “What’s Next”.

Three months made sense because we could visit Europe (more specifically Italy) for three months without any visa issues and because three months was the period our travel insurance within our credit card allowed. Three also made sense because it allowed as time to get where we wanted to go in a leisurely fashion without really constraining what we could do when we got there.

However, for some three months won’t be long enough. I was a little envious of someone who commented on one of previous posts about their return to Australia after 12 months travel. However for us three months was long enough.

The opportunity to have three months in Italy was a chance to visit places we wanted to immerse ourselves in. It was a chance to more than visit but to live somewhere without the pressure to move on. It was also to live out a dream I’d been nurturing for nearly three years.

I hope you enjoy my reflections on Slow Travel in what I intend to become a series of posts entitled “The Diary of a Slow Traveller”.

Footnote: I took the picture of the disused planter box that is the banner for this post while walking around the island of Ortigia, Siracusa on New Year’s Day 2016.