Nomadic Spirit is a weekly newsletter for travelers who care as much about the why as the where.
In this issue
The Dispatch makes the case for seeking discomfort when you travel. The Vantage looks at what Nomadic Spirits want out of adventure travel, and why it’s a disconnect with the industry. A Chosen Place takes us to Hanoi, where the discomfort is cultural rather than physical. Further Afield closes with five recent reads, including new data on women over 50 driving adventure travel and a book on what they’re doing about it.
Dispatch
Where Travel and Life Intersect
Look for the Discomfort
Look for the Discomfort
The trips that asked something of you are the ones you remember.
Look for chances to be uncomfortable when you travel. They often become your best memories.
Discomfort is particular. What’s a stretch for me may be routine for you. What you do without thinking might keep someone else awake the night before.
It might be ordering the dish you can’t pronounce. Or taking the local bus when a taxi is right there. Saying yes when a stranger invites you in for tea. A hike longer than any you’ve done before. Sleeping in a tent in a forest with a hundred grizzly bears.
My son owns a sweatshirt that says SEEK DISCOMFORT. He wears it without irony. I love that he does. The phrase comes from a young Montreal collective that built a whole brand around the idea that the best parts of life sit outside the comfort zone. I had absorbed the lesson before they put it on a hoodie.
For ten years, while my two sons were working toward Eagle Scout, I camped six to eight times a year. On the ground, in a tent, sometimes frozen, often a little uncomfortable, and loving every minute of it. We always came home with a story of what we overcame. The night the temperature dropped to fifteen. The day it rained sideways for nine hours. The river crossing.
I don’t remember the trips that were easy.
So when I planned a big birthday, I wanted that. Not the camping itself. The other thing.
Bear Camp
I rented out all of Bear Camp on Chilko Lake in British Columbia for a week. Eight platform tents, a dining hall, and a hangout room. The camp is built on stilts because it sits in the middle of grizzly country.
I invited my adult children and their partners, my wife’s and my siblings, and their spouses. Everyone needed the right gear. LL Bean had a very good month.
I was the only one who looked happy about it.
The early reactions were not encouraging. Bears? Tents? A seaplane? One sister-in-law was clear: a bathroom in the woods was a non-starter. Another agreed to come on one condition. No horse. My wife broke her foot a month before the trip. Doesn’t matter, she said. I’m going. Her sister volunteered to stay back at camp and keep her company. She was so visibly relieved at having found a lifeline that I almost laughed.
I arranged a call with the camp’s owner. I gave him notes on the group’s anxieties. He answered them all. Real beds. Real toilets. Good food. A different adventure every day. Yes, the Grizzlies were close. No, no one had ever been hurt. And, he added, all the booze was included.
That last part sold it.
The night before we flew north, my brother-in-law looked across the table at me in a Vancouver restaurant and said, “You really had to do this for your birthday, huh?” The wine was excellent. Everyone had put on a game face.
We landed at the airstrip and drove an hour on rough roads. We arrived in the dark and pouring rain. The guide led us up the stairs to the tent platform. A hand-painted sign at the top read No Bears Allowed. He told us a group of nervous tourists had asked for it one year ago. Everyone relaxed after that.
Day Two
By the second day, all but two of us were in kayaks.
On a stretch of rapids, my son went over and stayed under longer than felt right. When he came up, he was grinning. The guide made him do a shot of vodka up his nose at dinner that night, in honor of being the first to flip. He cheered along with everyone, eyes streaming.
The sister-in-law who had refused to ride was, by Wednesday, urging everyone to ride faster. The one who had volunteered to babysit my wife at camp went out every day, on every activity. My wife, broken foot and all, did not stay behind once.
By the end of the week, everyone had a story. The most hesitant of them were the loudest. We tell those stories now, every time we get together, and they get bolder with each telling.
The travel industry, especially the part aimed at people our age, sells comfort as the goal. Smooth roads, soft beds, gentle pace, no surprises. There is a place for that. But comfort is not what people remember. And it is not what binds a group together when they come home.
What gets remembered is what was asked of you. What you weren’t sure you could do.
So look for the discomfort. Yours, not someone else’s.
— Paul M. Rand, Founder, Nomadic Spirit
A Chosen Place
Destinations worth traveling for—and understanding once you arrive
HANOI, VIETNAM
A City That Won’t Meet You Halfway
Discomfort doesn’t have to be physical. It can mean going somewhere so different from your daily life, and from the way you usually travel, that it pulls you out of your habits. That kind of trip is available to anyone who can walk a few hours a day. Hanoi is one of the best places to find it.
Hanoi is not designed for you. That is the most useful thing to know before you go.
The Old Quarter is part traffic, part market, part improvisation. The sidewalks are full of motorbikes, plastic stools, and women cooking, so you walk in the road. The motorbikes don’t stop. They go around you. The first time it happens, you flinch. By the second day, you don’t. You walk at a steady pace, and the drivers adjust around you. That’s the first thing you learn.
Most eating happens at plastic stools on the sidewalk. There’s no menu in English. You point at what someone else is eating. A glass of bia hoi runs less than a dollar. A meal is a few dollars more. The food is excellent.
The city is old in a way most American travelers don’t have a frame for. Hanoi has been the capital city since 1010. The Temple of Literature was built in 1070, before construction began on Notre-Dame in Paris. French colonial buildings, communist monuments, and ancient pagodas sit side by side. None of it has been arranged for visitors. It’s just the city.
The war is here too, but not in the way American visitors usually expect. There’s the prison the pilots called the Hanoi Hilton, the wreckage of a B-52 in a residential pond, and a museum that tells the story from the Vietnamese side. None of it dominates. The war is one of several wars the city has been through over the centuries. The city has moved on. For an American traveler, that takes some adjusting to. It’s worth doing.
By day three or four, you start to know how the place works. You stop being lost. You recognize the women who run the same corners every day.
Most American travel can’t deliver that. A packaged tour can’t replicate it. Neither can a luxury hotel nor a smooth itinerary. You only get it by staying long enough.
Go for at least five days. Stay in the Old Quarter. Walk a lot. Eat where the lines are. Don’t try to make it easier than it is.
Nomadic Spirit wants your stories!
The most useful travel writing comes from people who actually go. Readers like you. People who have been somewhere long enough to know what’s worth coming back for, or who turned down a familiar street and found something they couldn’t stop thinking about.
Two places in Nomadic Spirit where your voice belongs:
The Journey. A trip that mattered. Personal, specific, in your own voice. Debbie’s piece is the model.
Fork First. One dish, one place, one reason to go. The test is simple. Would you go back for it? Would you tell everyone heading to that city to find it?
Write to [email protected], and we’ll send the guidelines.
The Vantage
What the travel industry gets right—and wrong—for Nomadic Spirits |
Pushed, Not Coddled
50+ travelers want to be pushed. The industry is still trying to figure out what that means.
The travelers who write the largest checks in adventure travel are also the ones the industry understands least well.
AARP’s 2024 survey found that the average annual travel spending for 50-plus travelers was $6,659, a figure that has held steady year over year. Boomers spend 20 to 50 percent more on travel than Gen X or Millennials, and account for roughly 80 percent of all luxury travel spending. Recent industry estimates put the 51-to-60 cohort alone at over a quarter of the global adventure travel market.
Nearly 30 percent of travelers in their fifties say they want to go somewhere off the beaten path. The desire to be challenged hasn’t gone anywhere.
What the industry has not yet built is a product shaped to what stretch means at this age.
For the thirty-year-old, discomfort is mostly physical. Cold, altitude, fatigue, distance, exposure. Operators design their trips around that traveler. The marketing follows.
For the fifty-plus traveler, the variables shift. There are physical realities the younger traveler doesn’t yet have to plan around: recovery time, joint load, sleep quality, and daily mileage tolerance. There are also appetite shifts in the other direction. By fifty, most people have done the easy ones. They are not booking adventure travel to do easy again.
What this traveler wants is a real challenge that fits their body. Twelve days of guided trekking with proper recovery time. A demanding river trip with a shorter daily mileage. A deep cultural immersion that asks something of the mind, even when the legs need a day off.
Most operators offer two tiers and miss the middle. The “active” tier is designed for younger travelers. The “easy” tier is built around the assumption that older means less interesting. The traveler who wants the smart hard version, rather than the watered-down version, has to assemble it themselves.
This is the discomfort gap. The operators who close it will earn the loyalty of the largest, fastest-growing, most affluent customer base in the category.
The ones who keep selling them the watered-down version will lose them.
Further Afield
Reading worth your time.
1. Hanoi at #25: Time Out’s 50 Best Cities in the World to Visit in 2026 (March 2026). The publication’s annual ranking, drawn from more than 24,000 residents across 150 cities and 100 city experts, places Hanoi in the top 25. The Old Quarter and the layered architecture are part of why. Pair it with this issue’s Chosen Place. Link here
2. 2026 Adventure Travel Trend Outlook (Backroads, December 2025). The biggest active-travel operator’s annual forecast. Two numbers worth noting: women’s adventure trips projected to grow 100 percent in 2026, and solo travel projected to grow 14 percent over the next five years, with women over 50 driving the momentum. The industry is following the readers, not the other way around. Link here
3. How Travel Affects Mental Health (WebMD, February 2026). Plain summary of the research on why stepping outside your comfort zone is good for you. Useful to send to anyone in your life who thinks you’ve lost your mind for booking the trip. Link here
4. Travel Dreams 2026: From Data to Delight (Amadeus, April 2026). A study of 6,000 travelers. Forty-one percent say they want a “calmer nervous system” by trip’s end. A third describes an ideal destination as one that pulls them off their phone because the world around them is more interesting. Both impulses live inside the same traveler. The question is which one your trip serves. Link here
5. Never Too Late: How Women 50+ Travelers Are Making the Rules (Carolyn Ray and Lola Akinmade Åkerström, JourneyWoman). Thirty profiles of women over fifty who travel with intention, plus contributions from forty-one JourneyWoman readers. First volume published March 2025; the full ebook went wide on Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Indigo on International Women’s Day 2026. Link here
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
— John A. Shedd, Salt from My Attic (1928)
