Nomadic Spirit is a weekly newsletter for travelers who care as much about the why as the where.
In this issue
This week's issue makes the case for going while your body still says yes — and backs it with data on what travel actually does to your health over time. One of our Nomadic Spirits, Jonathan Copulsky, takes it into the field with twelve days on foot in New Zealand and Tasmania. And Further Afield has five pieces worth your time, including one on why the world is getting harder to navigate and another on why difficulty might be the point.
Dispatch
Where Travel and Life Intersect
Go While It’s Good
The trip you’re saving is a bet on a future self you haven’t consulted.
Recently, I had dinner with a friend. He’s still working — lighter than it used to be, the hours more his own. I asked what he and his wife had coming up travel-wise.
“A week somewhere,” he said. “Maybe a river cruise.”
But the real travel, the long trips, the ambitious ones, the places they’ve always talked about, was waiting. Waiting for him to fully step back from work. Waiting for the right time.
I understood the logic completely.
And then I thought about standing on a trail in Portugal last spring with very tired legs, and said nothing.
The Douro Valley
We were hiking above the Douro Valley. Long days. Cold wine at the end of them. The kind of trip where you’ve earned dessert. About twelve miles in one afternoon, I stopped walking and just stood there.
The view was extraordinary. But that wasn’t why I stopped.
My wife was a few steps ahead. She turned around and gave me the look. The “that was really freaking hard” look.
We’ve done trips like this before. But something felt different this time. Not in the landscape. In us.
We felt it the next morning. And the morning after that.
On the flight home, we both said the same thing:
We need to keep doing this. Now. While we can.
The Window
The trip you’re saving is a bet on a future self you haven’t fully consulted.
We assume that later will simply be now, just with more time. But that’s rarely how it works. The knees that carried you fourteen miles at 54 aren’t guaranteed at 60. The appetite for early mornings and long days on your feet changes. Not for everyone, and not on the same timeline. But it changes.
Some travel asks almost nothing of the body. That kind will likely be available for a long time. Comfortable hotels. Short distances. Afternoons in cafés. There’s nothing wrong with any of it.
But the travel that costs something, the hike that genuinely tests you, the day that leaves you pleasantly wrecked, that has a window.
And the window isn’t labeled.
You don’t get a notice when it starts to close.
My friend isn’t being foolish. He’s worked hard. He’s earned what’s coming. I’m not suggesting he’s wrong.
But I’ve known people who deferred the ambitious trip and discovered, when the time finally came, that their ambition had outpaced their bodies. The long walk across Spain. The trek they’d always talked about.
Later arrived.
The trip didn’t.
After Portugal, my wife and I made a list. Not a bucket list, but something more pragmatic. A simple accounting of what we want to do that requires the bodies we have right now, before the window narrows.
It felt slightly uncomfortable to write down. A little like appraising a car you’re not ready to sell.
But it was the most honest travel planning we’ve ever done.
The places aren’t going anywhere.
But the version of you who can walk to them might be.
— Paul M. Rand, Founder, Nomadic Spirit
A Chosen Place
Destinations worth traveling for—and understanding once you arrive
Isle Royale National Park, Michigan
More people come back than come for the first time.
Most national parks are working hard to get you back. Isle Royale doesn’t bother.
It’s one of the least-visited national parks in the lower 48 and one of the most returned to. On most ferries, a striking number of passengers have been here before. Some have been coming since the 1970s and still book the first boat of the season.
The places that absorb millions of visitors a year are often extraordinary. But something changes when a place has been visited that many times. Isle Royale hasn’t been smoothed. The crossing alone tells you that.
The Crossing
Isle Royale National Park sits in Lake Superior, roughly 45–56 miles off Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, closer to Canada than to the nearest American shore. From Grand Portage, Minnesota, it’s about an hour and a half by ferry. From Copper Harbor, Michigan, about three hours. From Houghton, about six. Lake Superior is more than 1,300 feet deep in places and doesn’t behave like a lake. The crossing can be calm enough to read or rough enough to have people holding plastic bags. Veterans bring Dramamine whether they think they need it or not. As one regular puts it, the unpredictability is part of the charm.
When the island appears on the horizon, low and dark, a long ridge of boreal forest, the returners put down whatever they’re doing and watch it come.
The Island’s Terms
At the dock, a ranger meets the ferry. Rules first. Leave No Trace. What to do when you encounter a moose: step behind a tree, don’t run, wait. And then, almost as an aside: you probably won’t see a wolf. But they’re out there, about 30 of them now, up from two a decade ago, subjects of the longest predator-prey study in the world, running continuously since 1958. The ranger says this the way someone might mention the weather.
You pick up your backcountry permit. You write down which campgrounds you’re aiming for — Moskey Basin, Chickenbone Lake, Todd Harbor — knowing you can change as you go. Then you walk.
There are 165 miles of trails and 36 primitive campgrounds. Treated water at the two developed ends; otherwise, you filter or boil. Everything you need, you carry. The terrain is wetter than people expect, with boardwalks over marshy sections that submerge after heavy rain. The lowlands are stamped with moose prints the size of dinner plates. Ferns grow chest high. The basalt ridges are bare and windy, looking out over water with no visible shore. On a full day of hiking, you might pass four other people.
The moose appear without warning. On a portage trail, in a marshy cove at dusk, wading through shallows with their heads down. They’re enormous and don’t particularly care about you. Wolves take the old ones, the arthritic ones, the calves born in hard winters. The island is strewn with bones that hikers find off-trail. A pelvis here, a cracked rib. This is not a curated wilderness experience.
What People Come Back For
Jim DuFresne has been writing Isle Royale guidebooks for forty years. He says what draws people back is harder to package than scenery. They fall in love, he says, with reducing life to what fits in a pack. He calls it spiritually refreshing, not language you’d expect from a trail guide writer.
The online community of regulars sounds the same way. They post trip logs in shorthand that reads like a private language: shelter numbers, trail junctions, the names of inland lakes. First visit 1982. Last visit August 2024. Planning the next one now. Some bring their children back to trails they first walked as kids. The weight on your back, the permit you file with a ranger who asks where you’re going, all of it asks something before it gives anything back. The people who return figured that out early.
Isle Royale closes every November. Wolves and moose have it to themselves until mid-April. The regulars are usually on the first boats back.
One family that has been coming long enough that the island shows up in their dreams put it simply: if I dream of someplace, I dream of Tobin’s Harbor. Yes, it’s home.
The ferry home is different from the ferry in. The island recedes slowly. People watch it go the same way they watched it arrive. Some are already planning the next trip before the boat docks.
The Vantage
What the travel industry is getting right — and wrong — for Nomadic Spirit readers.
The Body Has Its Own Timeline
And the travel industry hasn’t built for it.
The Dispatch this issue is about time. This is about something adjacent — the body, not the calendar. And it doesn’t sort neatly by age.
What you can do physically isn’t fixed. It changes, and it changes differently for everyone. The traveler who hikes fourteen miles at 54 may find that harder at 61. Or not. Someone else hits that wall at 48. Another person is trekking seriously at 72. The timeline is personal. What isn’t personal is that the window exists for all of us, and none of us gets a notice when it starts to close.
A condition that wasn’t a factor at 55 becomes one at 62. It doesn’t announce itself.
What the numbers say
AARP’s Destination Aging report puts numbers to this. Twenty-nine percent of travelers 50 and older are already managing a disability or condition that makes travel difficult. Mobility is the most common issue. Two-thirds have changed where they go, opting for closer destinations or places that demand less on foot. Nearly half are traveling less frequently than they’d like. The trails become lobbies. The long days become half days. The trip they imagined has become the trip they can manage.
The industry hasn’t kept pace with any of it. According to MMGY Global’s Portrait of Travelers with Disabilities, 96% of travelers with mobility disabilities have faced an accommodation problem while traveling. Eighty-one percent have dealt with inaccessible showers or tubs. More than half have encountered hotel beds too high to use. The travel industry is celebrating a booming market while underserving a significant share of it.
This isn’t an argument about age. It’s an argument about honesty — with yourself, about what your body can do right now, and what that’s worth acting on.
The Journey — Voices of the Nomadic Spirit
Stories from travelers who have learned that the journey matters as much as the destination. If you have one worth sharing, please write to [email protected] for submission guidelines
by Jonathan Copulsky
Soaking It In
A shared interest in hiking brought Kathy and me together. Her dating profile photos from Mt. Kilimanjaro convinced me she was a serious hiking devotee. I guessed right. Over the past five years, our hiking trips have taken us from Big Bend National Park to El Camino Santiago.
Our most recent adventure was a month-long journey through New Zealand and Tasmania — an ambitious undertaking, even for us — but one memory stands above the rest.
The South Island
The heart of the journey — and the part that stayed with me most — was a two-week hiking tour of New Zealand’s South Island. The tour included four other guests in our age cohort and an extraordinary guide who whisked us across the South Island while ensuring that we were well fed and well informed. We learned, for example, that the proper New Zealander term for hiking along trails is “tramping on tracks.”
The Inland Pack Track
My favorite hike was on the Inland Pack Track in Paparoa National Park. Our route was not especially challenging: three hours covering seven miles with less than 1,000 feet of elevation gain. The plan called for us to begin hiking immediately after breakfast and wind up in Punakaiki in time for lunch.
The first drops of rain appeared shortly after we disembarked from our van and gathered for our morning briefing. We pulled on our foul-weather gear and began our hike hoping that the light drizzle would quickly end.
But as we wound our way through the lush rainforest, the drizzle quickly became a downpour that accompanied us through much of the hike. The muddy portions of the track were unavoidable. We soon realized that the morning would end with mud-encrusted shoes, as well as damp clothes.
In his pre-hike briefing, our guide cautioned us to remember to look up as we trekked along the river. He wanted to make sure that we did not miss the impressively shaped, towering limestone pillars that rise from and frame the lower Pororari River canyon.
Another memorable aspect of the trek was the birdsong that enveloped us throughout the walk. New Zealand’s birds evolved in a predator-free world, although significant portions of the native bird population have been decimated as a result of humans and their introduction of mammals. Nevertheless, melodic birdsong, from species like the Tui, Riroriro, and Korimako, pervades Paparoa NP and its karst landscape creates natural echoes and resonance.
The steady, relentless precipitation saturated us, chilled our bones, and tested our resolve, seeping through our clothes and into our boots.
But the rain also brought out the scents of the forest, as well as birdsong, and instead of diminishing the experience, it seemed to deepen it. Our hike gave me time to reflect on how privileged we were — not just to endure the rain, but to be there together, able to take it all in.
Something to Be Lived
During our trip, our guide shared the reflections of British fellwalker A. Wainwright, which express for me what it means to fully immerse one’s self in another place: “The joys of a walk over country such as this; the scenes that delight the eyes, the blessed peace of mind, the sheer exuberance which fills your soul as you tread the firm turf. This is something to be lived, not read about.”
I am deeply thankful that Kathy and I had the chance to live this one.
Further Afield
Ideas, research, and stories shaping the future of intentional travel
THE CASE FOR TRAVEL
“How Travel Can Help You Live a Longer, Healthier Life” | AFAR
The case for travel isn’t just emotional. It’s measurable. Research continues to show links between travel and improved health outcomes, including lower mortality and dementia risk. The benefits come from movement, connection, and exposure to new environments — all of which compound over time.
THE NEW BORDER REALITY
“Traveling to Europe? Here’s What to Know About New Entry Rules” | National Geographic
Europe is changing how you enter. The Entry/Exit System replaces passport stamps with biometric tracking across the Schengen Zone. It’s designed to streamline borders, but it introduces a new layer of friction, especially for travelers encountering it for the first time.
THE POLITICS OF TRAVEL
“War is only the starkest way that politics is disrupting tourism” | The Economist
Travel isn’t just shaped by curiosity anymore. It’s shaped by geopolitics. Wars are the most visible disruption, but they’re not the only one. Visa restrictions, diplomatic tensions, and shifting alliances are quietly redrawing the map of where people go — and where they’re welcome. Tourism is increasingly downstream from politics, with conflicts and policy shifts altering routes, demand, and perception far beyond the places directly affected.
THE VALUE OF DIFFICULTY
“In Botswana, Tracking Lions and Elephants — By Bike” | AFAR
There are easier ways to see the Okavango Delta. This is not one of them. Moving through the landscape by bicycle removes the buffer. You’re not observing from a distance. You’re part of the environment. The animals don’t adjust for you. You adjust for them. A reminder that difficulty, chosen deliberately, often brings you closer to the thing itself.
WHEN REMOTE TRAVEL BREAKS DOWN
“‘It was too much to handle’: What happens when remote travel goes wrong” | BBC Travel
The idea of going farther still carries weight. More remote. More meaningful. But the reality doesn’t always hold. This piece looks at what happens when isolation, logistics, and expectation collide — when the distance that was supposed to deepen the experience instead overwhelms it. A useful correction: remoteness isn’t the point. Fit is.
"The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately."
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
