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.