Where Travel and Life Intersect

The Places That Still Knew Her

My mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. My father’s response was to start traveling. Not to new places, but to the ones that had made my mother who she was. He wasn’t following a guidebook. He was following the map of her memory.

Kingsdown, Kansas

Their first trip was to Kingsdown, Kansas, a town so small it barely appears on a map. My mother had lived there as a teenager while her father, a Presbyterian pastor, held a post in the area. She’d left as a junior in high school, leaving behind her best friend, Doris Marie, and a place she always said made her feel like she belonged.

By the time my parents arrived, decades later, Kingsdown had lost its post office and most of its population. A few houses and a grain elevator were about all that remained.

But Doris Marie was still there. She’d married a classmate, raised a family, and lived on a large farm. Her husband had passed. The two women were thrilled to see each other.

My father drove my mother past her father’s church, past the house where they’d lived, to the places where teenagers used to gather. Each one brought something back. My mother recalled stories she hadn’t told in years, and she told them with delight. My father watched, visibly moved.

Toccoa Falls, Georgia

The second trip was to Toccoa Falls, Georgia, a small city in the Blue Ridge foothills where my mother’s parents had met as students at a Christian college. Both had enrolled planning to become missionaries. Instead, they found each other and eventually became pastors together.

My parents visited the campus, drove past my great-aunt Elsie’s house, where she’d lived her whole life, and walked through places that were meaningful not to my mother directly, but to the people who shaped her. If Kingsdown held her own memories, Toccoa Falls held her parents’ story.

Scotland

The third trip reached even further back. My parents joined my sister and her husband on a visit to Scotland, where my mother’s relatives had once lived. In Braemar, a village in the Cairngorms, they visited a cottage that had belonged to family. Robert Louis Stevenson stayed in that cottage in 1881, writing Treasure Island.

Then they traveled on to the Isle of Skye. My mother stood in that landscape and told my father it was the most beautiful place she had ever seen, that she would have been happy to live there for the rest of her life. She said she felt closer to her family than she ever had, that she understood her relatives in a way she hadn’t before.

The Art of Travel

I wasn’t on any of these trips. I know them through my parents’ telling and my sister’s, through conversations that gathered weight each time they were repeated. What I know most clearly is what my father said afterward. He told me, more than once, that those trips were the most meaningful travel of their lives.

In his 2002 book The Art of Travel, the writer Alain de Botton observed that we have no shortage of advice on where to travel but hear almost nothing about why we should go or how we might be changed by going. Most of the travel industry has never caught up, but my father, late in his life, didn’t need the book. He wasn’t seeking novelty or luxury or escape. He was doing something more deliberate: using places to reach the person he loved.

Each trip moved further back in time. My mother’s own girlhood, then her parents’ youth, then the ancestral landscape of Scotland. And at each stop, something came through. The places held what she needed, even as the disease was working to take it away.

Paul M. Rand, Founder, Nomadic Spirit

Destinations worth traveling for—and understanding once you arrive

KŌYASAN, JAPAN

A Monk Sat Down to Meditate 1,200 Years Ago. They Still Bring Him Breakfast.

The town sits on a plateau half a mile up, ringed by eight peaks, most easily reached by cable car. There are no hotels. There are a hundred and seventeen temples, hundreds of monks, and a cemetery with 200,000 graves winding through cedars so old they block out the sky.

It is not trying to be found.

Kōyasan is a working Buddhist town. Guests who come here stay in the temples themselves, sleeping on futons, eating vegetarian meals prepared by monks, attending morning prayers if they choose. The lodgings are plain and you are clearly a guest in someone else’s home.

The Candle Festival

My family came here a few summers ago during the Candle Festival, Rōsoku Matsuri, when thousands of candles line the mile-long cemetery path for the Obon holiday. There were few Western visitors.

We booked a room at one of the temples, ate meals the monks made entirely from tofu, course after course, each one different. None of us expecting what they could do with bean curd and sesame.

At night we slept together on mats on the tatami floor, the whole family side by side in one room. In the morning, we sat with the monks for prayers, still half-asleep, in a language none of us understood.

Okunoin

Okunoin is why most people come. It’s Japan’s largest cemetery, and a stone path runs about a mile through ancient cedars, past more than 200,000 graves: feudal lords, monks, samurai, Panasonic employees.

A pest control company erected a memorial to the termites its products killed.

The path ends at the mausoleum of Kūkai, the monk who founded this place in 819. Shingon Buddhists don’t believe he died. To them, he sat down to meditate and never stopped, and so every morning at six and again at ten-thirty, monks carry wooden boxes of rice and vegetables to his tomb. They’ve done this every day, rain or snow or summer heat, for nearly 1,200 years.

Stone Jizo statues line the path in red knitted caps and bibs, placed there by parents. Jizo protects the souls of children who died too soon, and the bibs are a way of saying: keep them warm.

The Hall of Lamps

The Hall of Lamps holds more than 10,000 lanterns donated by worshippers over the centuries, and the monks keep every one of them lit. Two are said to have burned without interruption for nearly a thousand years.

We stayed longer than we planned. The cedars, the moss on the graves, the smell of incense caught in wet bark.

On the night of the festival, we walked the cemetery path with hundreds of others, the candles low to the ground on both sides, the only light for a mile. Nobody spoke much. We didn’t need to.

Tomorrow morning a monk will carry breakfast to a man who has been meditating for twelve centuries. The meal will be warm.

Ideas, research, and stories shaping the future of intentional travel

1. Travel May Be Medicine

Research is starting to make the case. A 47% reduction in Alzheimer’s risk. A 36% drop in mortality risk among older travelers. Industry insiders are calling longevity travel the trend to watch in 2026. You’ll finally have an answer when someone asks if the trip is worth it.

TravelPulse

2. The Train Is the Point

Rail travel is back, not as nostalgia, but as a legitimate alternative to flying. New luxury lines, restored vintage carriages, routes built around the journey rather than the destination. For travelers who’ve always suspected that slower gets you somewhere better, the options are finally there.

National Geographic

3. Before the Last Person Who Remembers Is Gone

Ancestry travel, journeys built around tracing family roots to the villages and streets where the story started, is one of 2026’s fastest-growing travel categories. DNA testing and genealogy apps are part of it. But the quieter driver is simpler: the people who carried these stories are gone, or nearly so. Someday has become now.

Yahoo Travel

4. Where Not to Go

Fodor’s annual No List isn’t about avoiding crowds. It’s about what it says when you choose not to add to them. The argument isn’t about a boycott; it’s about awareness. Where you don’t go reflects how you travel as much as where you do.

Fodor’s