Stop trying to see everything. Walk in circles instead.

Open any travel forum and you'll find the same itinerary: a morning in Neighborhood A, lunch across the river in B, an afternoon in C, dinner back near the hotel in A. By day three these travelers are exhausted, they've spent a ninth of the trip on platforms, and they can't remember which church was which.

The problem isn't ambition. It's geometry.

Two hours a day on transport, gone

I did the math on one of my own old itineraries recently — three days in Lisbon, sights spread across Alfama, Belém and Sintra, because a guidebook said they were all must-sees. They are. But strung together in one day, they cost me close to three hours on trams, trains and platforms. That's a full afternoon of a short trip, spent standing. Nobody comes home telling stories about the number 28 tram being crowded. Well — everyone does, but it's the same story.

How to build a loop that works

• Pick one district per day, and pick it because it hangs together — old town, harbor, hill, museum quarter. Not because it has the most stars on the map.
• Order stops by geography, not by priority. The best restaurant in the city is useless if it's a forty-minute detour in the wrong direction at one p.m.
• Leave one gap. A loop with no slack breaks the first time a gallery captures you for an extra hour.
• End each loop near where dinner should be. The walk to dinner should be part of the evening, not a commute.

The point of a loop isn't to tick boxes. It's that a city reveals itself on foot in a way it never does from a bus window. In a walkable cluster, you notice the bakery you'll come back to tomorrow. You find the street that's worth a photograph at night. You pass your own footsteps from an hour ago and feel oriented instead of lost.

That feeling — knowing where you are, having a street you recognize — is what people actually mean when they say a trip was relaxing. You can't get it from a checklist. You get it by going in circles on purpose.