Well, if you've been following my current Story Hour you will see that a lot of the detail is role played. In this module we've now covered exactly one week of character time in nine three-hour game sessions, so it isn't every winking moment.
As for the passage of time, for the first decade of our group we kept a 1 year player time = 1 year character time ratio, so that player and character memories of who long ago something took place would be the same. We did that by having the characters adventure from late spring until early fall, and staying home and relaxing on their island the rest of the year.
We then did a campaign restart, with a second group of characters on the same continent, and playing alternating groups then slowed down the timeline. The groups are also now doing far more adventuring off-season. Last year we began a third campaign, which has slowed things even further. It's now taken us 12 years of gaming to cover the past 5 years of character time.