• Home
  • keyboard_arrow_right Motivation
  • keyboard_arrow_right Resources
  • keyboard_arrow_right Avoid Stale Travel: Slow Down & Mix it up.

Motivation

Avoid Stale Travel: Slow Down & Mix it up.

Contributing Author September 29, 2021


Background
share close

Travel (we’re talking non-business) is almost always fun, except on the rare occasion when things go wrong. But anything that’s fun can always be cranked up to more fun if you put some effort into it. Even if you love the trip you’re on, it can sometimes get a little repetitive or boring if you feel like you end up doing the same things again and again. Traveling should be enjoyable, not stressful or boring. So if you’ve found that you’re stuck in an un-fun rut where trips aren’t as amazing as you thought they would be, it might be time to mix things up a little. Doing some new things or approaching your travel in a different way can make it more of a blast. You can shake things up by using a few different approaches and enjoying your travels in a different way.

a street with buildings and people walking on it
Stay in a different part of town. – Jake chose Tsim Sha Tsui over Central Hong Kong on this trip.

 

Try Slow Travel

Do you tend to try and check off a list of activities when you travel? If you’re always rushing from one thing to the next, you might not have time to stop and really take anything in. Slow travel takes a different approach, focusing on the enjoyment of taking things at a steadier pace. Instead of filling up your itinerary with activities and trying to cover as much ground as possible, you get to take everything in as you go. Slow travel is best done on foot, bicycle or other more sedate forms of transport. It focuses on connecting with local people and culture, as well as the environment.

 

When you choose slow travel, you can wander down a street and choose a restaurant or cafe that takes your fancy. You might decide to attend a local festival or event to take in some of the culture. It’s all about getting to know the place you visit and all of the places you might miss if you were more focused on trying to do lots of things and visit lots of places.

 

Use a Different Mode of Transport

How you travel can make a big difference to any trip. Transportation doesn’t just have to be the fastest way to get you from A to B. Enjoying the journey can be part of your travels. Slow travel can involve transport like trains, which get you where you’re going but a little slower. Of course, there are plenty of other types of transport to explore if you want to try out a few different things. If you want to fly, you might consider chartering a private plane (we know: $$$) or even a helicopter to the airport. You could take a train or bus to get where you’re going, or there might even be the possibility of a boat trip or cruise. When you’re traveling by road, you have different options too, from motorcycles and cars to motorhomes.

Try a different way home from the airport. Jake skipped NYC traffic using Blade’s Helicpoter from JFK:

 

If you want a mode of transport that you have to operate under your own power, you might want to get on a bicycle or something similar. Then there are some ways you can travel through water, such as rowing or paddling in a kayak or canoe. Of course, these methods can be a lot slower, so they’re best suited to shorter journeys or when you have a lot of time.

 

Book Somewhere Interesting to Stay

 

Your choice of accommodation can make a difference to the enjoyment you experience when you travel. Some people don’t give a lot of thought to where they stay because they’re not planning on spending a lot of time there. Perhaps you mostly sleep and eat breakfast in your hotel, but otherwise spend your days out and about. But choosing something different for your accommodation can help to offer something interesting when you travel. It could be as simple as choosing a hotel with a spa or themed rooms. Or it might mean looking for an apartment or house to rent in an interesting area or with some fun amenities.

a person's feet on a glass floor looking down at a model of a city
Check out hotel features. While Hotel AlaGare in Lausanne, Switzerland isn’t posh by any means, they’ve got a great breakfast and this working model train set built into the floor.

If you want to get very creative, there are all kinds of other accommodation options to explore. You could look for agricultural stays on farms and even find opportunities to stay overnight in old churches. There are different camping or glamping options, and accommodations such as cabins or huts. You can explore lots of different types of accommodation to find something interesting and fun.

 

Make an Effort to Document Your Trip

Documenting your trip in detail can be a fun way to change the way you approach your travels. When you’re keeping track of what you’re doing and making memories, you can start to look at things in different ways. There are different ways you can document your trip and have something great to look back on.

 

The easiest way to document your travels is probably to take photos. You can easily take lots of photos without it really cutting into your time or distracting you from other things. And when you have your phone camera or a digital camera, you can take video with it too. With a few accessories, you can make it even easier to photograph and film your travels. An OM 5 gimbal from DJI can immediately give you more tools. It will allow you to position your phone away from you, stabilize the image it captures and provide you with other tools to get better photos and video.

 

You could also document your travels by blogging, writing in a travel diary, or collecting things as memories of your trip.

 

Enjoy the Local Food

 

One of the best things about traveling is the food. In fact, some people focus purely on trying new food when they travel. But when you’re more focused on trying different activities, you can end up taking the easy option of restaurants aimed at tourists or fast food places. These can be ok in a pinch, especially if you’re traveling from one place to another, but they also don’t give you a huge amount of enjoyment. Why have something that you could easily have at home?

a plate of spaghetti with sauce
Order something new. It’s a tuna spaghetti that Jake found in Florence, Italy.

 

The better way to enjoy your food as you travel is to look for local options. You can research possibilities online before you travel, but you can also just try wandering around. See where the locals go for food and drop into different places to check them out. You can check reviews and ratings, but sometimes you can discover somewhere amazing by taking a risk.

 

Try Something New

 

If you usually focus on doing fast-paced or outdoorsy things, you might like to try slowing down a little. You could explore the arts and culture of the place you’re visiting, or even check out some of the usual tourist sights that you might not have otherwise. If you usually choose a beach vacation, you could choose to visit a city instead. Or if you tend to prefer self-guided trips, you might think about joining a guided tour and even meeting new people.

 

If you feel like your traveling is starting to bore you, changing things up a bit could help to make it more exciting again. How do YOU get out of a travel rut? Let us know in the comments or @modhop on Twitter, Instagram and even TikTok!

Tagged as: .

Rate it
Author

Contributing Author

General travel tips and advice on destinations, hotels and flights.

list Archive

Background
Previous episode

Post comments

This post currently has no comments.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *