Some trips change where you've been. Others remind you who you are.
A close friend of mine has been spending a few months in Greece writing her PhD. At some point this spring, I decided to go visit. No grand plan, no itinerary to speak of. She was there, I needed to get out of my own head for a bit, and Greece in that context seemed like the obvious answer.
What I didn't anticipate was how much I had missed her. Not in the way you notice an absence, but in the way you only understand once you're actually sitting together at a port watching fishing boats come in, realizing that this specific kind of ease, the kind that doesn't require explanation or performance, had been missing for years.
Hydra First
We started in Hydra, which turned out to be exactly right. No cars, no motorcycles, no noise beyond footsteps and the occasional donkey. The island has a way of slowing your nervous system down almost immediately, as if the absence of engines and screens is its own kind of instruction. By the second day I had stopped reaching for my phone out of habit. That alone felt like an achievement.
We weren't doing nothing.
We were doing the things that tend to get squeezed out by real life: long meals, unhurried walks, conversations that didn't have a point but arrived somewhere interesting anyway. We decompressed, truly.
Then the Peloponnese
Recharged, we made our way to a small enclave in the Peloponnese. The rhythm there was different, more intentional. I read and painted. She wrote. We enjoyed slow breakfast at home, exchanged books, talked about ideas we were each trying to crystallize. There's a particular quality to the conversations you have with someone whose judgment you trust and whose ambitions are as serious as your own. They push you toward the braver version of what you're trying to do, not the safer one.
I came home glowing. Not tired, not overstimulated, not in need of a holiday from the holiday. Calm in a way I hadn't been in months, and with the kind of clarity about my own work that I'd been trying to manufacture at a desk and simply couldn't.
What This Kind of Trip Actually Is
I want to be careful about calling it a girl trip, because that phrase tends to conjure something it isn't. This wasn't a bachelorette weekend or a group holiday with competing agendas. It was two people who know each other well, giving that knowing some actual time and space to breathe.
You don't need a villa or a week or a particularly exotic destination. You need the right person and enough distance from ordinary life that you both actually show up. The trip does the rest.
What I keep thinking about is how long we had let it go. Years passed in the way they do, full of reasonable explanations and good intentions and the general busyness of lives that are full in their own right. And then we were cooking dinner in the Peloponnese, arguing cheerfully about a book, and I thought: we have to stop waiting for the right moment because there isn't one. You make it.
The Thing Women Are Good at Deprioritizing
These friendships don't always ask much of us on a daily basis, which makes them easy to let drift. A voice note here, a catch-up dinner when schedules align. It's not neglect exactly. But it's not enough either.
The women who know us best, who have context for who we were before the current version of our lives took shape, who make us funnier and sharper and more honest just by being in the room: those relationships deserve more than the margins of our calendars.
A few days in the right place with the right person is not an indulgence. It's a recalibration. And the version of you that boards the plane home is measurably better than the one who left.
Book the trip. You already know who to call.
MY HONEST TAKE
The Psychology of Beautiful Spaces: Why Aesthetic Matters in Travel
On Girl Trips, and Why Your Soul Has Been Waiting for One
EB
Eva Baczynska
June 20, 2025 • 8 min read
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