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.