Nomadic Spirit is a weekly newsletter for travelers who care as much about the why as the where.
In this issue
In The Dispatch, we look at SKI, short for spending the kids’ inheritance. It’s an old bumper-sticker joke that is back in the news, and we make the case that deciding what to leave behind frees up the rest for travel. A Chosen Place goes to Scotland, the place new readers name most often when we ask what has stayed with them, though almost never the same part of it twice. In The Journey, Helen Manzano and her boyfriend, two teenagers in 1989, take Nevada’s loneliest road in search of the biggest truck in the world. Further Afield closes the issue with the BBC story behind the Dispatch and the survival guide Nevada hands out on Route 50.
The Dispatch
Where Travel and Life Intersect
The Joy of Spending the Kids’ Inheritance
An old joke, a new trend, and a case for the trip.
More people are in their sixties and beyond than at any point in history. A U.S. Census Bureau report released in August found that, sometime between 2020 and 2025, people 65 and over outnumbered children five and under for the first time in recorded history. The World Health Organization expects 1.4 billion people over 60 by 2030, up from 1.1 billion in 2023.
Bet you know where this is going, and you're right. A good number of these folks are spending their discretionary funds on travel, lots and lots of travel. The media has noticed and is having some fun with it.
A recent finding by Squaremouth, a travel insurance marketplace, shows couples over 65 spending an average of $9,960 a trip, about 50 percent more than couples under 50, on trips that run longer and go farther. Last month, the BBC ran a feature on Sarah and Geoff Moorhouse, a Yorkshire couple who take four or five holidays a year because, in Sarah's words, "you only have one opportunity at life." In Australia, Intrepid Travel saw its passengers over 55 rise 52 percent last year.
SKI Season
The coverage keeps landing on one acronym, SKI: spending the kids' inheritance. The phrase is old. "We're spending our kids' inheritance" has been on the backs of motor homes for decades, usually just above the bike rack. The difference now is how many people live it.
Reactions to SKI are across the board, as you'd expect. Some swear by Bill Perkins's 2020 bestseller Die With Zero, which argues for using your money while you can still enjoy it. Others tie their legacy to how much they leave behind for family and the causes they believe in. The same goes for the children and others who stand to inherit, though I suspect many of them would prefer at least some money come their way. If your kids are reading this over your shoulder, now's a good time to change the subject.
More Left Behind Than Expected
For all the jokes, plenty of people with savings aren't spending them down. Many hold on to more than they ever expected to.
Part of the reason is that we overestimate what retirement will cost. Researchers who track real spending find it drifts down through our late 60s and 70s, even for people with plenty put away. The other part is habit: we spend the pension check and leave the savings alone. Economists call what's left an accidental bequest, money handed on because nobody decided otherwise. I understand the instinct. A steady balance feels safe, but it also makes a dull travel companion.
This is a privileged problem to have, and I don't want to skip past that. Many people reach their sixties without enough saved. Plenty are working longer than they planned or watching every expense. In the United States, half of retirees say they saved less than they needed. What follows is for those who have more than they will need, and none of it is financial advice.
If you are one of them, decide on purpose. Sit down, with an advisor if you have one, and work out what you want to leave and to whom, including the causes you care about. Then write the number down. Everything beyond it, once your own needs are covered, is yours.
Once the legacy is settled, spending on yourself takes nothing from anyone, and the trip becomes part of the plan.
For people who read Nomadic Spirit, I suspect a good share of that money belongs to travel. Perkins has a name for why that money is well spent. He calls it the memory dividend: a good trip keeps paying out long after you're home, every time you tell the story, or something brings a place back to you. I can't name anything I've bought that stayed with me as long as a few weeks in a new place.
Perkins also makes the case for giving while you're alive, when the money helps more, and you get to see it land. Travel companies report a rise in trips with three generations together. If the kids still want their share, take them. Someone has to carry the bags.
by Paul M. Rand, founder and editor of Nomadic Spirit
A Chosen Place
Destinations worth traveling for, and understanding once you arrive
Victoria Street in Edinburgh's Old Town
Scotland
We asked new readers which place stayed with them. Scotland won, one corner at a time.
Every new Nomadic Spirit reader gets one question in the welcome letter: what’s a place that’s stayed with you? Scotland is by far the most named.
We were surprised that almost nobody names the same place. One reader says the Isle of Harris. Another says Arbroath. Cari, who has been twice, didn’t pick a place at all. She wrote that her “imagination is always present there.”
The Short Version
For anyone who hasn’t been, Scotland is the northern third of Great Britain, home to about 5.5 million people. Most of them live in the Central Belt, the strip of lowland between Edinburgh and Glasgow. North and west of it are the Highlands, and off the west coast lie hundreds of islands. Scotland has its own parliament and legal system, and three Scottish banks issue their own banknotes.
Edinburgh and Glasgow
Most trips begin in one of the two cities, which are less than an hour apart by train. Edinburgh Castle stands on what’s left of an ancient volcano, and you can climb another part of it, Arthur’s Seat, without leaving the city. The Old Town and New Town together form a World Heritage Site.
Glasgow is the bigger city. It made its fortune on shipbuilding and trade along the River Clyde, and for a long time it had a rougher reputation than Edinburgh, so many visitors skipped it. UNESCO named it a City of Music in 2008, and its main civic museums, including Kelvingrove, charge no admission. Give it at least two nights.
Pitlochry
Lorrie’s first answer was “Scotland, but hard to choose.” Asked for one place, she remembered arriving in Pitlochry, a Perthshire town about two hours north of Edinburgh by train, on the day of its Highland Games. “What a treat! I’ll never forget it!”
The games have run since 1852, on the second Saturday in September, and local volunteers organize them. The day opens with pipe bands parading down Atholl Road, the town’s main street, to the recreation ground. After that come the caber toss, where competitors flip a tree trunk end over end, and a tug-of-war championship nobody treats as a joke. The games need more than 5,000 paying spectators a year to keep going.
The Isle of Harris
Richard’s whole answer was four words: “Isle of Harris, Scotland.”
Harris is in the Outer Hebrides, off Scotland’s northwest coast. The ferry from Uig on the Isle of Skye takes about an hour and 40 minutes. The island is known for its long white-sand beaches, Luskentyre the best known of them, and for its tweed. Harris Tweed has its own Act of Parliament, passed in 1993, which says the cloth must be handwoven by islanders in their own homes. Many weavers work in sheds beside their houses, and some will show visitors the loom.
Arbroath
One reader listed Arbroath alongside Rome, Venice and Tuscany as her best memories. Few lists put an Angus fishing town in that company.
Arbroath is about an hour and a half up the east coast from Edinburgh by direct train. Its claim is a fish. An Arbroath smokie is a haddock, salted, tied in pairs by the tail and smoked over a hardwood fire. Under protected status, it can only be made within eight kilometers (five miles) of the town. In the old harbor quarter, known as the Fit o’ the Toon, some families still smoke them in their backyards. Walk out along the red sandstone cliffs, then buy a pair from a smokehouse on the way back.
Why People Come Back
Ancestry is one reason. Scotland’s tourism agency estimates that at least 40 million people worldwide can claim Scottish ancestry. In its 2023 visitor survey, 41 percent of visitors from the United States, Canada and Australia named that ancestry as a major reason for coming, and the pull was strongest among Canadians.
On the longest day of the year, Edinburgh gets more than 17 and a half hours of daylight, and Shetland, in the far north, close to 19. The weather can change the view several times before dinner.
Then there is the right to roam. Under the Land Reform (Scotland) Act of 2003, everyone has the right to cross most land and inland water, provided they do it responsibly.
The same survey found that 80 percent of visitors were likely to return within five years.
Could I Do This?
Late spring through September is the most comfortable stretch, and September brings the last of the Highland Games. Edinburgh and Glasgow both have international airports, and trains link the main towns. The islands take more planning, particularly around ferry schedules. A week covers two places comfortably. Pick one city and one coast or island, and keep a spare day for the weather.
We want to hear from you
Two ways to be in Nomadic Spirit
Helen’s piece this week (below) is a reader submission. The Journey is open to readers who want to write about a trip that mattered. Personal, specific, in your own voice. 400 to 600 words. We edit lightly and leave your voice intact.
Fork First: One dish, one place, one reason to go. 200 to 300 words. The test: would you go back for this dish? Would you tell everyone heading to that city to find it? If yes, write it up.
If you are interested in sharing your story with our 35,000+ readers, please write us at [email protected], and we’ll send along submission guidelines.
We read everything that comes in.
The Journey — Voices of the Nomadic Spirit
Stories from travelers changed by where they went.
U.S. Route 50 in Nevada, the loneliest road in America
We Drove the Loneliest Road in America to See the World’s Biggest Truck.
By Helen Manzano
In 1989, aged 18, my British boyfriend and I set out on a road trip in a battered Nissan 200SX around the United States, dreaming of the big skies we would see on our journey from the East to West Coast and back again.
We’d been driving for a few weeks by the time we hit Nevada, sleeping in our car at truck stops next to idling behemoths, awed by the incredible scenery and the adventures we’d had. My boyfriend, obsessed with construction machinery, had read in a magazine about the biggest truck in the world located on a mine just off US Route 50 in the middle of Nevada and he was practically salivating at the idea of seeing it in person. The map confirmed that Route 50 would indeed take us close to where he ‘thought the mine was’ and after that we could cut into California as planned. I wasn’t crazy about the detour but he’d already sold his precious motocross bike to come on the trip with me so I acquiesced. With that decision two teenagers unwittingly set off along the dilapidated stretch of asphalt dubbed by Life magazine ‘The Loneliest Road in America’.
We drove for miles and hours. No other cars passed us. The stark, flat desert stretched on in every direction, the pot-holed road an endless thin, shimmering line in the baking summer heat. The air was charged and at one point lightning hit the dirt not far from the car, scaring us nearly to death. Time and distance meant nothing. We’d been idling away the hours reading Stephen King short stories to each other (bizarrely, King wrote a horror novel about this road a few years later) but we had no appetite for horror now. The radio was only static, no preachers or country music this far into the uninhabited wasteland. Conversation dwindled as our unease deepened. The desert was beautiful but terrifying in its perfect, unchanging isolation.
As the hours slipped past and the gas needle got steadily lower, the day fading into glorious dark blue and purple, we realised we’d reached the point of no return. We were going to have to sleep on this empty road, accompanied by the enormous night sky and the sound of coyotes. We snacked on whatever was in the car (no welcoming Denny’s sign on this stretch of hell) and spent a restless night before continuing the lonely journey at dawn, tendrils of fear tickling my neck knowing we could break down here and our chances of short-term rescue were slim.
The next morning we finally arrived at the mine! My boyfriend leapt out of the car, ready to charm the miners into letting him see the truck, when we realised the gates were shut. It was a Saturday. Being on extended holiday we’d lost track of what day it was. There was a perplexed and understandably incredulous watchman who told us it would reopen on Monday. My boyfriend glanced at me hopefully but one look told him that spending two more days on this accursed road just so he could see the biggest Tonka toy in the world was not going to happen. It was like telling a six-year-old Santa Claus did not exist. Hours later, with overwhelming relief, we pulled into a diner, the creeping terror of that trip dissipating like smoke in the wind.
Those kinds of experiences are hard to find in our digital world, but the bleak beauty of Route 50 still whispers to me and will one day welcome me back for another lonely adventure.
Helen Manzano lives in London and works in IT but plans to be a full-time road-tripper in the near future.
Further Afield
Reading worth your time.
Meet the Pensioners Spending the Kids’ Inheritance
BBC News
The September feature behind this week’s Dispatch, with Sarah and Geoff Moorhouse of the Yorkshire Dales and their four or five holidays a year. Their daughter Poppy says she’d much rather they enjoy it. Sarah says they like going to Scotland.
Die With Zero
Bill Perkins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
The 2020 book behind much of the case for spending on experiences while you can enjoy them. Perkins coined the term memory dividend, and he argues for giving to your children while you’re alive to see it.
The Rules Behind Every Length of Harris Tweed
Harris Tweed Authority
The body created by the 1993 Act explains how the cloth must be handwoven by islanders in their own homes, then inspected before the Orb mark goes on. Worth a read before you buy a jacket on Harris.
Scotland’s Highland Games, Date by Date
VisitScotland
Most of the 2027 games fall between May and late August, from Helensburgh and Inverness to the Isle of Skye. Pitlochry closes the season on the second Saturday in September.
The Highway 50 Survival Guide
Travel Nevada
Life magazine called Nevada’s stretch of Route 50 the loneliest road in America in 1986, and the state answered by printing a survival guide. Collect stamps in the towns along the way and you can earn a certificate saying you survived.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989)
