Simply Stephanie Denise

A mix of adventure on the go, slow days, time with the culture, and a loose grip on the plan.

My first solo trip I had a loose plan, ideas of what I wanted to do and see. I was traveling to NYC from Southern California, a longtime dream. I was barely old enough to drink and hadn’t explored on my own before. That trip was life-changing. I saw Rent during its final days on Broadway, my favorite band played in Central Park, and I got to tour the original Yankee Stadium. Most of that was not in my original itinerary. Being able to wake up and pivot to a whole new plan each day was liberating.

After a decade of travel in many shapes, this is how I actually move through a place: adventure on the go, slow days that let a place soak in, real time with the culture, and a loose grip on the plan. Here is what that looks like when you try to live it.

The short version

My travel has four threads. I weave them together on almost every trip. The first is adventure, the real kind, done with a map and good shoes. The second is slow time, long meals and no alarm, for at least a day or two in every trip. The third is culture, meaning food, music, neighborhoods, history, language I will butcher anyway. The fourth is openness, a daily willingness to scrap the plan when the day points somewhere better.

You can travel with only one of these threads, and plenty of people do. Adventure-only travel tends to miss the softness. Slow-only travel tends to miss the thrill. Culture without adventure stays too close to the guidebook. Openness with no structure burns out your decision-making by day four. The combination is what I keep coming back to.

Adventure, on the go

I am not a person who sits at a beach for seven days. My body and my brain both need a day of effort somewhere in a trip: a trail, a coastline, a volcano, a long bike ride through a valley. I book those days in first.

Adventure, for me, is not a summit bag. It is a way of seeing a place from a perspective the plane did not give you. The ridge above the old town. The harbor from the water. The river that cuts the city in half when you walk along it instead of driving across it.

A few rules I have learned. Do not save the adventure for the last day of a trip, because weather and jet lag will steal it. Do not book more than one big outing in a row. Always carry water and a snack, even in cities. The adventurous part of a trip should leave you tired and cheerful, not wrecked.

The slow day that earns everything else

For every day of effort, there is a day that looks like it is doing nothing. That day is the whole point.

I will sleep in. I will spend an hour at breakfast. I will pick one thing in walking distance and let that be the whole plan. A park, a bookstore, a small museum, a cafe with good light. I will write for a while, read for longer. Maybe I will get lost on the way home and turn that into dinner.

Slow days are where the trip consolidates. All the sensory information you collected in the first forty-eight hours has to land somewhere, and the slow day is where it lands. You come out of it with a clearer sense of where you actually are, which shapes everything that follows.

If you are someone who thinks slow days are wasted days, test this once. Put a slow day in the middle of your next trip, not at the end. Watch how differently you move through the second half.

Learning from the culture

Travel is worth more when you treat the place like a teacher and not a backdrop.

In practice, that means two small habits.

I learn enough language to be polite. Hello, please, thank you, excuse me, a handful of nouns. People will meet you where you are if you come in through their words first.

I eat where locals eat. The line out the door at the neighborhood place is almost always better than the restaurant at the top of the search results. I will sit at a counter by myself without a book so I can actually pay attention.

Staying open to where the day leads

Every trip has a moment where the plan would have been fine, and the alternative turns out to be better. The alternative almost always comes from someone you just met, or from a door you noticed while walking to something else.

The discipline is not spontaneity. The discipline is holding the plan loosely enough that you can walk through the door when it opens.

I will scrap a museum for a pop-up event on the street. I will skip an itinerary stop because I wandered into a park I was not planning to visit. I will take a two-hour drive to a fair that someone told me about that morning.

The trick is leaving enough blank space in the days for this to be possible. If every hour is booked, the door stays closed.

Travel is a practice. How you travel changes how you come home. Slow days, real adventure, time with the culture, and the willingness to let the day redirect you will, over a decade or so, turn into a life that feels bigger than the miles on paper.

I am glad you are reading.

— Stephanie Denise