You Don’t Have to See Everything When You Travel

Learn from my experience and opt to slow-travel instead

My husband and I currently live in England. We know this is a temporary posting. In fact, we are due to move back to Canada next summer.

I am originally from France. Despite that, I have never lived there and, while I have traveled a lot in my life, I have seen very little of Europe.

It was always a regret of mine to not know my home continent more. I met people in Canada that had seen much more of Europe than I have.

Therefore, when we learned of our posting in England, I had one objective: to see as much of Europe as possible.

After a year of living here, we have visited several different places in England and in France. We have also visited Scotland.

Recently, we came back from our honeymoon, which we chose to spend in Croatia and Italy.

Because I didn’t know if we’d ever get the chance to go back to these countries, I planned to see as much as possible during our trip.

We were gone for 22 days.

During this time we saw: Zagreb, Plitvice Lakes National Park, Krka National Park, Split, Dubrovnik, Bari, Naples, Pompei, Almafi, Rome, Florence, Venice, Murano, and Milan.

It was great. But it was a lot.

Not only did we see all of these destinations but we made sure to see everything there was to see in each of them.

Every museum, every lavishly decorated church, every historical building, every statue.

We came home exhausted.

Not only that but, midway through our trip, we were exhausted and we were ready to go home.

We had to drag ourselves from incredible thing to incredible thing to make sure we could check them off our list.

We came back to our hotel tired and achy every night.

We stopped appreciating the beauty of what we were seeing. It felt more like a chore to have to see the Milan Duomo or the Palazzo Ducale.

While I keep incredible memories of this trip and I am thankful for all the things we were able to see, experience, and eat, I would definitely do things differently.

I would have reduced the number of destinations so that we didn’t feel pressured to see a maximum of things in very few days.

I would have pre-selected the things we wanted to see without fail and stuck to those. It is not because the guide said that we had to see this or that thing that we had to go there. We should have selected our destinations based on the things we truly enjoy doing.

I would have built in some rest days. Days with nothing to do and nothing to see. We tried to do that, telling ourselves we would just wander around. But, eventually, we always found ourselves visiting things.

I still feel the pressure to try to see a maximum of Europe. I know that our time here is limited and my husband doesn’t have a lot of holidays.

But I am learning from our experience in Croatia and Italy and rethinking how we approach travel.

Rather than planning a long trip with multiple destinations, I am planning shorter trips focused on one place.

I am also letting go of the idea that I need to see everything a city or a country has to offer to have “done travel right”.

My husband and I care about specific things. Incredible food. Fun experiences. Being in nature. In the future, I’ll tailor our trips towards what we care about rather than what the travel says is a “must-see”.

It’s up to you to decide how you want to travel. I understand the pressure to want to see everything and do everything and eat everything.

But there are other ways to travel, ways that might feel more rewarding, less stressful, and less tiring.