Where Travel and Life Intersect

You Are Not Staying Long Enough.

The Week Three Effect is real. You just have to stay for it.

To every colleague who once got a raised eyebrow from me for booking two weeks away, or, gasp, three: I was wrong. You had it right. There is something far better about going away longer, and it took me too many years to see it.

Almost everyone who has stayed somewhere a while tells the same story. The first few days, you are a tourist. You visit the obvious sites and eat where the guidebook sends you.

By the second week, you have a coffee place. By the third, the person behind the counter starts your order before you reach the register. I call it the Week Three Effect, the week a place starts to feel like yours.

The numbers

This is not just my conversion talking. A recent Vrbo survey found that 91% of travelers want slower, simpler trips, and Google’s travel data shows searches for slow travel at an all-time high this year.

The booking data agrees. A study of six years of United States Airbnb reservations found the share of month-long stays nearly doubled during the pandemic and never fell back, as more people chose to settle in one place. Among travelers over 50, AARP reports that nearly two-thirds expect to travel this year, averaging nearly 4 trips each.

A century of this

Writers have made this trade for a century. Hemingway’s Paris in A Moveable Feast is all regular cafés and daily walks, the years he learned his craft. Peter Mayle did not tour Provence. He moved into a stone house in the Luberon and spent a year there, which became A Year in Provence.

Frances Mayes bought a crumbling villa near Cortona and wrote Under the Tuscan Sun about fixing it up, one shutter and one long meal at a time. James Baldwin spent years in Paris and the south of France, and that distance is part of what let him see home so clearly. Anthony Bourdain went looking for the market and the long table, the things you only understand once the tour bus has gone.

Long enough to belong

I heard a present-day version of this recently. I was invited to moderate a panel of alumni from The Good Life Abroad, a program that prepares adults to live for a month or more in European cities such as Lisbon, Florence, and Paris.

What stayed with me was how many of them, having spent a month somewhere, said a month was not enough. The phrase that kept coming up was living abroad without moving abroad. You will hear from them later in this issue.

I know the feeling firsthand. My wife and I have kept a home in Mexico for almost thirty years, and the word visit stopped fitting long ago.

The children of our friends have grown up and had children of their own. The friends we made early are the friends we still have. There is a cook whose kitchen I would cross the city for. I know the streets no guidebook lists, and which of the famous places earn their crowds. All of it came from showing up, year after year, long enough to be known.

The costs

A long stay has its costs. You see fewer places, and the ones you skip stay skipped. The thrill of the first days wears thin, and some afternoons drag. Time away is time missed at home. There is paperwork, too, the visa limits, and health insurance that mostly stops working once you land somewhere else. Anyone selling a long stay as pure magic has never taken one.

However, if your calendar has any give in it this year, the longer trip is worth real thought. Pick one place, stay past the restless stretch, and find out what the third week holds. A few starting points are in Further Afield below.

Destinations worth traveling for, and understanding once you arrive

Évora, Portugal

The case for going inland

When Americans start thinking about a longer stay abroad, Portugal tends to come up first, and usually it’s Lisbon or Porto. A month in either costs less than most of Western Europe. The weather is mild for much of the year. Portugal’s long-stay visa is one of the easier ones for a retiree or remote worker to qualify for; the cities are made for walking, and plenty of people speak English.

Their popularity is the catch. Lisbon and Porto are filling with other long-stay visitors who reached the same conclusion. The popular lookout points now draw crowds, and the apartments worth renting book months in advance.

As you get away from Lisbon, the crowds thin out. This is the Alentejo, Portugal’s wide, rural interior, and its capital, Évora, is where we would send you instead.

The town

Évora is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A Roman temple from the first century stands a short walk from a twelfth-century Gothic cathedral, with sixteenth-century mansions and a long stone aqueduct in the streets between them. It is also a university town, home to one of Portugal’s oldest universities, so it stays busy year-round and does not empty out between tour seasons.

The center is small, and you can cross it on foot. You learn it in a few days. Within a couple of weeks, you know your way around and have places you go back to. That kind of familiarity is the point of a long stay, and Évora still has room for it while the big cities are filling up.

The table and the land

The Alentejo is wine and farm country. It grows more than a tenth of Portugal’s vines, and the reds are good and still underpriced. The food is simple and local: black pork, sheep’s-milk cheese from around Évora, seafood stews, bread and olives from nearby. Many wine estates take visitors in the afternoon. Between the towns, the land is covered with cork oak, olive groves, and open fields.

The Alentejo draws a fraction of the visitors that the coastal Algarve does, though Alqueva Lake alone has a longer shoreline than the entire Portuguese coast. The roads stay quiet, even at night. Guesthouses and apartments rent by the week and by the month, set up for people who plan to stay a while.

The sky

Évora sits about ninety minutes from Lisbon by road or rail, so it works as a base for the rest of the region.

The land around the Alqueva Lake was named the world’s first Starlight Tourism Destination in 2011. The nearby towns dim their street lighting after dark to protect it, and the skies stay clear for more than 250 nights a year. Stand outside after dinner, and you’ll see the Milky Way overhead.

Voices on the art of intentional travel

The Dish. The Place. The Reason to Go.

If you have one you’d like to share, please write to [email protected]

The Spanish Tortilla and the Holy Grail

Photo and article by Scott Salem

Simple. Elegant. Tortilla de patatas. It’s basically just eggs and potatoes. But in this dish, one plus one equals three.

In Valencia, where the cathedral is home to what is said to be the Holy Grail, I was on my own quest to find the perfect tortilla.

On a walk to the local grocery, I eyed La Bodeguita. The tables were full of local businesspeople on a mid-morning break. I hopped on a barstool and ordered a cortado from the man at the bar. I noticed a woman in the kitchen working a large, black skillet over a flame. She beckoned the barista to the galley, where he helped her turn the heavy pan onto a platter. The cook emerged with a large fresh tortilla. By the time I had finished my coffee, it was gone. This might be the one.

I returned the next morning. Same time. 9:00 am. I placed my order before the tortilla came out. Minutes later, it arrived with small cups of olives and peanuts. It had a sweet-and-savory, silky, custard-like center, formed by whipping the cooked potatoes into the beaten eggs at precisely the right temperature. My mouth was having a spiritual awakening. The Holy Grail.

In broken Spanish, I complimented the chef on her glorious creation. She smiled proudly and told me how she used four different kinds of potatoes, sautéed in the finest olive oil.

I returned for that tortilla. On a plate. In a sandwich. Religiously. On my final day in Spain, I came back for a last taste before my flight home. The electricity was out on the entire street, and the kitchen was closed. Like Galahad, I had glimpsed the Grail. And like the Grail, it was gone — leaving only the memory of what I had found.

Scott Salem is a retired TV photojournalist from Jersey City, New Jersey. He and his wife, Kat, are avid slow travelers who share their trips on their Authentic Travel Substack.

Reading worth your time. 

The Part-Time Path to Living Abroad

AARP

A clear guide to the flexible middle ground between a two-week trip and a permanent move, covering tourist-stay limits, non-working and digital nomad visas, and the income rules behind them. The advice the experts keep repeating is to try a place for an extended stay before committing to anything.

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Twenty Trips Built Around Staying Longer

Afar

A practical antidote to the see-everything trip: twenty slow-travel itineraries grouped by interest, from a Maine maritime road trip to an art-history stay in Holland, each built on depth over breadth and an unhurried pace. Good for a reader who is sold on the longer trip and wants somewhere to start.

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The Rise of the Slomads

Tourism and Hospitality

Researchers combed through six years of Airbnb reservations and found that the month-long stay has become a movement of its own: the share of bookings lasting a month or more nearly doubled during the pandemic and has remained well above its pre-pandemic level, as more people choose to settle in one place. There is even a name for these travelers, slomads. The study behind the trend, if you want the numbers for yourself.

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Under the Darkest Skies in Western Europe

National Geographic

A first-person trip through the Alentejo’s Alqueva region, the world’s first Starlight Tourism Destination, with dawn balloon flights, kayaking on the lake after dark, and stargazing led by a local astronomer. A feel for what the area’s slower pace is like.

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Where to Stay Under the Alqueva Stars

Dark Sky Alqueva

The reserve’s official site lists its guided stargazing sessions and night kayaking, along with the certified hotels and observatories around the lake. A practical starting point for planning the nights of a longer Alentejo stay.

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