Slow Walks, Sunny Days: A Thames -Side Staycation and What It Taught Me About REST!

I've just had a week off. Not a flight, not a suitcase living out of the boot of the car, just... home. A staycation here in Oxfordshire, close to the Thames, my own bed, and no itinerary beyond "see what the day brings." I'll be honest, I went into it half expecting to feel restless by day three. I didn't.

Walking the Thames Path instead of driving to find it

Most of my "getting out" usually involves a car journey to somewhere picturesque: a viewpoint, a river spot, somewhere worth the drive. This week we parked and walked from a local spot, nothing more than twenty minutes away. No destination in mind, no beauty spot to tick off, just putting one foot in front of the other and seeing what was there.

And what struck me was how much I noticed when I wasn't trying to get anywhere. The hedgerows changing over the week. The light at different times of day. A field I must have driven past a hundred times that I'd never actually walked the edge of. There's a difference between moving through a place to reach a view and moving through a place as the point in itself. The second one is quieter, but it gives you more.

We're lucky, admittedly, living so close to the Thames, and with the weather being as glorious as it's been this summer, we made the most of it. No destination in mind, just a few local beautiful walks to enjoy: Sonning to Shiplake and back, passing Wargrave along the way. Goring to South Stoke and back. Henley to the lovely Flowerpot pub in Remenham and back, stopping along the way at the pop-up cafe, The Lockdown Lodge. The dogs came with us every time, running, diving into the water, splashing about and behaving more like otters than canines. Different stretches of the same river, each with its own character, and every single one of them made us turn to each other and say we could quite happily live right there. Funny what a slow walk does to you: it doesn't just show you a place, it makes you fall a bit in love with it.

Learning to let rest in

Over the past few years I've learnt to allow rest in, to reframe the word rest into more the word res(e)t. And this week felt just like that: a reset of focus, of energy, and of priorities. The peaceful moments, morning coffee outside, sitting with my husband with nowhere to be, a slow walk with no podcast in my ears, weren't empty at all. They were full, just full of very little. That's a different kind of nourishment to the one I'm used to chasing.

There's decent evidence behind this too. Time spent in green space and unstructured, low-stimulation activity is linked to lower cortisol and better parasympathetic recovery, the "rest and digest" side of the nervous system that so many of us barely visit in a normal week. It's not a game-changer or anything dramatic, it's just quietly doing its job in the background.

How slowing down changes what you actually see

The beauty spots were still there, they didn't go anywhere. But I found I didn't need to drive to them to feel like the week had been worthwhile. Slowing down meant I actually saw what was close by, properly, rather than glimpsing scenery through a car window on the way to somewhere else. It made me wonder how much I miss in an ordinary busy week simply because I'm moving too fast to notice it.

Time with my husband, unrushed

A lovely shift was just being with my husband without either of us checking the clock. No "right, we need to leave by ten." Just conversations that ran long because they could, and silences that weren't awkward because there was nowhere else to be. It's easy to forget how much of togetherness gets squeezed by logistics until, for a week, the logistics disappear.

What I'm carrying back into everyday life

I'm not about to claim one staycation has cured me of rushing, old habits are stubborn. But I've noticed something worth holding onto: peace doesn't have to be scheduled somewhere far away. It can be a walk from a spot twenty minutes down the road, a slow morning, a conversation that isn't hemmed in by the next thing. The beauty spots along the Thames will still be there for another day. This week, the joy was in not chasing them, and in feeling that quiet sense of vitality that comes from simply slowing down.