You Can't See Everything (And Maybe You Shouldn't Try)

Learning to travel with intention instead of urgency.

Kraków’s Planty Park, where I spent hours wandering without an itinerary.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the push and pull that shapes how I travel. The need to feel a place deeply, to stay long enough to get a sense of it and not just drift by, and at the same time the urge to see everything, to do everything, the feeling that there’s so much to see and so much to do. How do you balance the two?

A lot of the posts I read here on Substack about slow travel talk about spending weeks or months in a city, learning its rhythm, becoming a regular somewhere, letting the place unfold. But that’s not where I’m at in my life right now. Most people are not full-time travelers or digital nomads. Most of us travel in short bursts — a week here, 10–14 days there.

In the U.S. I had to plan my travel around the limited 15 days of PTO and few public holidays. So how do you reconcile the desire for depth with the reality of limited time?

I would love to spend a month exploring Thailand. But then the thought creeps in: if I’m already there, shouldn’t I also see Laos? Cambodia? Maybe squeeze in Vietnam? Who knows when I’ll be back.

That is the mental tug-of-war I constantly find myself in. Wanting to commit to a place, but feeling the pull to maximize the opportunity. Trying to be intentional, but also not wanting to “miss out.”

I remember one trip through Northern Italy where we changed cities and hotels almost every two days. Once we even switched hotels within the same city just to experience different neighborhoods. It was exciting, but by the end I felt like I had spent as much time packing and unpacking as actually experiencing the places themselves.

Milan’s Duomo, one stop on a very fast-moving Northern Italy itinerary

For the longest time I assumed that because I couldn’t spend weeks or months somewhere, slow travel simply wasn’t possible for me.

But I’ve started to realize something else.

Slow travel isn’t really about time. It’s about intention.

So how do you incorporate “intention” into short trips? These are things that have helped me:

• Fewer must-see checklists per city. Not rushing from landmark to landmark, trying to optimize every minute.

• Leaving space for the unexpected. I now plan one main activity/attraction per day, and let the rest of the day unfold.

• Spending longer in cafés, parks, and neighborhoods instead of rushing to the next thing on the itinerary. I carry a book with me and read in a park, or just walk through a new neighborhood.

• Not spreading myself too thin emotionally, even if the geography is ambitious. I might still do 3 cities in a week, but intentionally.

I am trying to make peace with the constraint of time. Maybe this season of life isn’t about choosing one extreme, but choosing balance. About learning to live with the tension.

A beautiful evening in Lake Como, and a reminder that sometimes a place deserves more time.

I am still negotiating this push and pull.

Still figuring out what balance looks like for me.

And trying to embrace the trip I can take — not the one I wish I could.

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