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.

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 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.