Europe is a trap, a siren calling you towards her from the shores. There is more to see and do and experience here than can ever be done in one three month long meander. And yet the beauty, mystery and allure of this place and its people pulls you in with every step and makes you attempt to experience it all nonetheless.
During the time we spent across France we really put in a solid effort, packing in as much sight-seeing, museum-traipsing and city-hopping as was physically possible. Don’t get me wrong, we also had plenty of time to truly savour the moment and appreciate every day, but following a week of training through Switzerland we decided that we needed more opportunities for quiet contemplation of life and our place in it.
Italy was the perfect place to slow down the pace, put the guidebooks to one side and simply live la dolce vita. And the sweet life it has truly been … waking up not to alarm clocks but the sound of a farm stirring to life, letting lunches linger for an hour or two (like the locals here do even in the big cities) and taking time to really converse with the people around us and adopt our own little grocery, café etc. It was about turning our focus away from the destinations and towards the journeys each day brought.
We are currently so astute at slow living that most of the time our efforts cannot be easily distinguished from sleeping, and we have regularly found ourselves in states of such severe relaxation and oneness with the universe that one of us had checked the other’s pulse. Joking aside, slow living is not about doing nothing and needs to be spiced with fun, crazy, memorable moments and we have been blessed with many of these too.
The next few blog posts will do their best to give you a glimpse into the last two weeks of slow living across the countryside of Tuscany, Umbria, Lazio and Campania.
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