Where Travel and Life Intersect

The Case For Wasting A Day

We finally have more time to travel. We're still acting like we're running out of it.

I've always been a planner when it comes to travel. But I was never particularly good at vacation.

On a seven-day trip, my brain started plotting reentry on day five (okay, day four). Every moment was planned, and a free window felt like a wasted opportunity.

I've been wondering whether some of us are still traveling with habits we developed when vacation time was scarce. So I went looking to see whether anyone had studied what happens when we overplan our time away.

They have. In 2024, researchers at Breda University of Applied Sciences and James Madison University published a study in the Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research titled “The Best Experiences Cannot Be Planned.” They surveyed 376 working Germans and interviewed twelve at length. People inclined to maximize their vacations could end up less satisfied with them. The searching and comparing created doubt and raised expectations, both of which worked against satisfaction afterward.

It's possible to try too hard to have a good time.

A week in Italy

For most of our working lives, maximizing a vacation made perfect sense.

Vacation days came in tightly rationed blocks. If you had a week in Italy and didn't know when you'd be back, you wanted to make it count. Rome, Florence, and maybe Venice. Book the restaurants and get the museum tickets.

Many of us are entering a different stage of our traveling lives. We have more control over our calendars now, and we can stay another night or come back. I'm not sure we've changed the way we travel. We've gained time and filled it with more things.

The two-hour window

Gabriela Tonietto and Selin Malkoc, marketing professors who study how people spend their time, published thirteen studies in the Journal of Marketing Research on what happens when we schedule leisure. In one, they gave students cramming for finals a ticket for free coffee and a cookie. Half the students picked a time. The other half got a two-hour window. The students with a window enjoyed the break more. The students with a set time were nearly twice as likely to show up. Everything they tested was short, a movie or a coffee break, and they are careful to say the effect may not hold for a whole trip.

That's not an argument against planning. Some things must be booked, and I'm still going to make the dinner reservation and buy the museum ticket. It's an argument for leaving some unplanned time.

The armrests at Café Sperl

On our last day in Vienna this summer, we had tickets to tour the Austrian Parliament. There was a special session, and public tours were canceled. We got as far as the entrance, were asked to leave, and started walking back toward the hotel to decide how to fill an afternoon we had not planned for.

On the way, we passed Café Sperl. A friend had recommended it weeks earlier, and we had skipped it because the reviews were mixed. We went in this time.

Café Sperl opened in 1880 on Gumpendorfer Straße, and the room has changed very little since. Parquet floors, marble tables, milk glass lamps, red damask banquettes gone soft in the seats. I sat in a chair whose Thonet bentwood arms had been worn through the varnish to bare wood.

We stayed two hours, reading about noted painters and artists who started frequenting the spot in 1895, some of whom went on to form the Secession. The owner gave them a marble tabletop to draw on. The drawings were wiped away each night when the tables were cleaned.

We hadn't planned a minute of it. It's the afternoon I remember best.

We flew home the next morning.

Now I'm reminded to keep at least an afternoon empty and not reserve every meal. If we're somewhere we don't want to leave, we won't head out just because the itinerary says it's time.

For much of our lives, the scarce resource in travel was time. Now I'm beginning to think the scarce resource may be empty time.

by Paul M. Rand, Founder and Editor of Nomadic Spirit

Destinations worth traveling to and understanding once you arrive

Asturias, Spain

A part of Spain you probably haven't thought about, but should

Over a two-week period in late 2024, Asturias collected two recognitions that most European regions wait a very long time for. Casa Marcial, in the countryside outside Arriondas, became the first restaurant in Asturian history to hold three Michelin stars. Days later, UNESCO added Asturian cider culture to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Many American travelers know Spain well. Most would still struggle to say where Asturias is.

Americans go to Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Granada, and the Mediterranean coast. Northern Spain has become better known through Bilbao and San Sebastián. Asturias sits farther west along the Atlantic coast and has been a Spanish holiday destination for generations. The region’s airport handles about two million passengers a year, almost all of them arriving from elsewhere in Spain.

Spaniards call this area Green Spain. The Cantabrian Mountains run almost to the Atlantic, and the Picos de Europa are their highest peaks. The valleys below are apple country, and the coast is cliffs and fishing harbors.

Oviedo, the regional capital, has a compact old town and a group of ninth-century pre-Romanesque churches, several of which are UNESCO sites. Gijón, half an hour north, sits directly on the Bay of Biscay. Villaviciosa anchors cider country. Cudillero is a fishing village stacked up the walls of its harbor.

The cider

Asturians drink cider daily. It is dry, cloudy, low in alcohol, and made from native apples. The region produces about 80 percent of all the cider in Spain.

Serving it is a learned skill. The pourer holds the bottle overhead and the glass near the waist, sending a thin stream through the air to break against the glass. Only a couple of inches go in at a time, a measure called a culín, and it is meant to be drunk immediately, before the next pour. The practice is called escanciar. Traditionally, everyone at the table drank from the same glass.

Liliana Ausín, an Asturian guide, told Travel + Leisure she learned it as a small girl by practicing in the bathtub with a bottle of water.

UNESCO recognized everything around the drink, the orchards, the native apple varieties, the cider houses, and the pouring itself, because Asturians were already doing all of it.

The food

Asturias is known for fabada, a heavy stew of white beans, pork, and sausage, and for Cabrales, a blue cheese aged in mountain caves in the east of the region. Gamonéu, made from a blend of cow, sheep, and goat milk, is one of several dozen cheeses produced here.

Casa Marcial is not alone; a region of about a million people holds fourteen Michelin stars. Nacho Manzano cooks his own region at Casa Marcial, in the converted farmhouse where his parents once fed neighbors.

Why it stayed quiet

Asturias has its own explanation for why it stayed off the American itinerary.

Esther Manzano, Nacho’s sister and part of the family that runs Casa Marcial, told National Geographic that the weather was unreliable, flights were scarce, and getting there was difficult. Asturians reached the obvious conclusion themselves.

“We just assumed nobody would want to come.”

Trains from Madrid had to climb the Pajares Pass, a slow, twisting route over the Cantabrians. Spain spent twenty years digging a tunnel underneath it. Since it opened in 2023, the crossing has taken about fifteen minutes.

There are still no nonstop flights from the United States, and connections run through Madrid or another European hub.

Asturias is not undiscovered. What has changed is that getting there is no longer the obstacle it was.