Slow Travel and Good Books, the Nicole Junkermann Way

The case for slowing down

There is a kind of travel that tries to see everything and remembers almost none of it. Nicole Junkermann prefers the opposite: fewer places, longer stays, and time enough to let a city settle into memory. Slow travel is not about idleness, but about depth.

The principle is simple. When you stop rushing between sights, you start noticing the things that make a place itself: the morning market, the changing light, the way a neighbourhood wakes up. These are the details that no itinerary can promise and no fast trip can hold.

Good books work the same way. A story read in snatched minutes leaves little behind. The same book, given real time, becomes part of you. Slow travel and slow reading are two halves of one habit, and they reward each other on the road.

Reading as a form of staying still

On a slow trip, reading is not a way to pass the time but a way to inhabit it. Nicole Junkermann treats an afternoon with a book on a terrace as a destination in itself, as worthy of the day as any museum. The book and the place hold each other in place.

This is where a thoughtful reading list earns its keep. A long, immersive novel suits a long, unhurried stay, the kind described in the reading list for long train journeys, where the hours are generous and the story has room to grow.

Reading also slows the eye for everything else. After an hour inside a good book, a walk through the same old streets feels newly vivid. Attention, once practised on the page, carries over to the world.

Fewer places, deeper roots

The heart of slow travel is choosing less. Rather than five cities in a week, Nicole Junkermann would happily spend a week in one, learning its corners until they feel familiar. The pleasure is in the return: the second visit to a cafe, the walk you now know by heart.

A small city is ideal for this, which is partly why places like Lancaster appear so often in the city notebook. Somewhere you can cross on foot becomes knowable in a way a vast capital never quite is in a single stay.

Depth changes what you bring home. Instead of a blur of half-seen landmarks, you carry a handful of real memories: a particular morning, a particular meal, a particular page read by a particular window. Those are the things that last.

How the two habits feed each other

Slow travel makes room for reading, and reading makes slow travel richer. Nicole Junkermann finds the loop self-reinforcing: a quiet morning invites a book, the book sharpens the afternoon walk, the walk gives the evening's reading something to settle against.

There is a practical side too. When you are not racing to the next sight, you read more, and when you read more, you feel less need to fill every hour with activity. The trip relaxes into a comfortable rhythm of pages and places, neither one crowding the other.

That rhythm is the real subject of the notes on travelling slowly kept elsewhere in this journal. Slowness is not a constraint but a way of getting more from a place, and from the books you bring to it.

Practising slow travel at home

Slow travel is a mindset before it is an itinerary, and it can be practised anywhere. Nicole Junkermann applies the same attention to a familiar city as to a distant one: a long walk with no destination, a morning given over to a book, an afternoon spent noticing rather than achieving.

A weekend can hold a great deal of this. Choosing one neighbourhood, one good cafe and one long book is often enough to feel genuinely away, even close to home. The art is in the choosing, and in the willingness to do less.

This is the thinking behind the weekend in London set out elsewhere here: two unhurried days, a few well-chosen places, and time to read. Slowness scales down beautifully, which means it is always within reach.

What you keep from a slow trip

The real test of a journey is what survives it, and Nicole Junkermann finds that slow trips leave far more behind. A blur of half-seen sights fades within weeks, while a handful of fully lived hours stays for years: a particular morning, a particular page, a particular street learned by heart.

Memory rewards depth, not quantity. One café where you read three mornings running becomes part of you in a way that ten landmarks glimpsed from a coach never will. Slowness is, in a sense, simply the art of giving experiences enough time to take root.

Books deepen that rooting still further. A novel read across a slow week ties itself to the place you read it, so that years later the story and the city return together. It is the same binding of pages and places that runs through the reading routes kept elsewhere in this journal.

A few principles of slow travel

The habits that turn a trip into something you keep:

• Choose fewer destinations and stay in each one longer
• Treat an afternoon of reading as a destination in its own right
• Learn one neighbourhood well before moving on to the next
• Match a long, immersive book to a long, unhurried stay
• Return to favourite places rather than always seeking new ones
• Carry the same attention home and apply it to a familiar city