Nomadic Spirit is a weekly newsletter for travelers who care as much about the why as the where.
In this issue
This week’s Dispatch asks what happens if something goes wrong far from home. It starts with a grandfather’s fall on a Serengeti safari and ends with five questions worth answering before you leave. In A Chosen Place, we go to Terceira in the Azores, where roughly seventy brightly painted chapels sit locked most of the year, many of them built by people who had already left the island. In The Journey, reader Kim Iskyan walks an empty street in Monterrey after a World Cup loss and works out what he and his son have been chasing across four tournaments. And Further Afield has what Medicare will not cover once you leave the country, new AARP research on how travelers over 50 are planning this year, and two good reads on the Azores.
The Dispatch
Where Travel and Life Intersect
What If Something Goes Wrong?
Preparing for trouble without letting it decide where we go.
Years ago, my wife, Diane, and I took our kids on a rustic safari in Tanzania’s Serengeti. At one of our camps was a grandfather traveling with six grandchildren, roughly the same ages as ours. What a special gift for all of them, I remember thinking.
On the second day, the grandfather had a nasty fall.
We were deep in the bush, and he had to be driven to an area where a plane could land and then be flown out for medical care.
Now there were six frightened kids, thousands of miles from home, without the adult who had brought them.
We worked with the safari guides and the older grandkids to reach their family. Our own kids stayed close to the younger ones. Eventually, plans came together to get everyone to a safe place until a parent could fly over. It shook all of us.
We figured we’d figure it out
Oddly, this episode didn’t diminish our commitment to adventure travel. We had already taken our kids to remote parts of the U.S., Africa, China, Mexico, and Central America. Our plan, to the extent we had one, was simple: We’d figure it out.
Looking back, I wonder what in the world we were thinking.
Today, traveling mostly as a couple, we think more about the risks. What medications should we bring? What does our health insurance cover if one of us needs serious care? What happens, in other words, if something goes wrong?
We’re hardly alone. In AARP’s 2025 travel survey, 29 percent of travelers over 50 cited health as a barrier to travel, second only to cost. A study of more than 7,000 older travelers, drawn from a worldwide network of travel-medicine clinics, found that those who became ill abroad had higher rates of certain serious problems than younger travelers, including heart disease, lower respiratory infections, blood clots, and injuries.
Yet older Americans aren’t giving up travel. Nearly two-thirds of adults 50+ plan to travel in 2026.
Preparing for travel today
I’m less willing to rely on improvisation now.
One thing I’ve learned is not to assume that the health coverage we have at home will work the same way overseas.
Employer and private coverage vary by plan. Even when overseas care is covered, many foreign hospitals don’t accept American insurance directly and may require payment upfront, leaving you to seek reimbursement later.
Medicare is clearer. Original Medicare generally doesn’t cover care outside the United States, except in a few limited circumstances. Some Medicare Advantage plans offer international emergency coverage, and several Medigap plans provide foreign emergency benefits.
And if local care can’t handle your problem, getting somewhere that can may be the bigger challenge. The CDC says a medical evacuation can run from about $25,000 within North America to more than $250,000 from distant or remote locations.
Then there’s travel insurance, which I’ve discovered is really several products. Trip cancellation, overseas medical coverage, and medical evacuation are different kinds of protection, and some premium credit cards quietly include a piece of each. There is more to say here, and we will.
The grandfather in the Serengeti looks different through 2026 eyes.
Now, before we head somewhere unfamiliar, I want to be able to answer five questions: Where would we go if one of us became seriously ill? Who would we call? How would we get out if local care wasn’t adequate? Do we have the medications and medical information we’d need? And would we be covered financially?
Then put the what-ifs away.
Preparing won’t eliminate uncertainty. We couldn’t manage that at 40, and we can’t now. Preparation keeps uncertainty from making our world smaller.
I still believe in the philosophy we carried around the world with our kids: We’ll figure it out.
We just do a little more of the figuring before we leave home.
by Paul M. Rand, founder and editor of Nomadic Spirit
A Chosen Place
Destinations worth traveling for and understanding once you arrive
Terceira, Azores
The island that people never really leave
The Azores have been getting a good amount of attention lately, and if you're not familiar with them, you'll soon understand why.
With nine volcanic islands in the middle of the Atlantic, the Azores are closer to North America than any other part of Europe. There are crater lakes, hot springs, whales offshore, and hydrangeas blooming along the roads. Three new airlines began flying there this summer, bringing the total to sixteen carriers on more than thirty routes. Flying from Boston is about five hours nonstop.
Most of the attention focuses on one island, São Miguel, which accounts for about seven out of every ten overnight stays in the Azores.
Terceira is the second-most-inhabited island in the Azores. Azores Airlines flies there nonstop from Boston and offers seasonal nonstop service from New York, so reaching it does not require a connection through São Miguel. Its capital, Angra do Heroísmo, is the oldest city in the Azores and a UNESCO World Heritage site, noted as a port of call for the Africa and Indies fleets from the fifteenth century until the arrival of steamships.
Terceira is a farming island, mostly dairy. The interior is pasture divided by black stone walls. The coast is black rock, with pools where other places have sand. Everything is small and close and green.
The dish everyone tells you about is beef: alcatra, braised for hours in a clay pot with pepper, bay leaf, and wine. People stay in Angra, in converted farm estates, or in village guesthouses.
Drive ten minutes in any direction, and you will pass a chapel, a small one at the edge of a village or a larger one mid-block in the city. Most are brightly painted, with a crown or white dove on the roofline and wrought iron over three openings, a door and two windows for the three persons of the Trinity.
They are called impérios, and most of the year they are locked. Inside is an altar where a silver crown and scepter are displayed during the Holy Spirit festivities.
The first ones were wooden. A village put one up for the festival and took it down afterward. Permanent stone impérios began appearing in the second half of the nineteenth century, many of them paid for by Terceirans who had emigrated and sent money home, sometimes fulfilling promises made to the Holy Spirit before they left.
Leaving is one of the great stories of the Azores. Generations went to New England, California, Canada, and Brazil, driven by land scarcity, poverty, and, at times, conscription. Today, roughly a quarter of a million people live on the islands, and more than a million of Azorean descent live abroad.
The week the crown comes out
From after Easter through the summer, the impérios begin opening.
The crown comes out, processions move through the villages, and the community halls fill. Bread, meat, and wine are prepared and shared. The celebrations have been part of Azorean life for centuries, and on Terceira, with roughly seventy impérios, they stay visible all summer.
Families who left return, and others who have never lived on the island arrive because their parents or grandparents did.
Then February
Summer gets the most attention, but February is also worth the trip. Amateur groups spend months writing plays, building costumes, and rehearsing songs for danças and bailinhos, a popular theater form particular to Terceira, then travel from hall to hall over several days, performing comedy and satire for local audiences.
Terceira is usually sold as a three-day add-on to São Miguel, and the direct flights suggest the reverse.
The chapels are there either way. Whether they are open depends on when you come.
We want to hear from you
Two ways to be in Nomadic Spirit
Kim’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. Length is flexible. 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 21,000+ 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 who have been changed by where they went.
Finding My Tierra
A father, a son, and a team neither of them has any claim to.
by Kim Iskyan
We left the stadium with the crowd in Monterrey, Mexico. It was the World Cup (soccer), and the Dutch had just lost on a penalty shootout, the kind of loss that turns on a coin flip.
My son Steve and I ran through the what-ifs as we walked back through the June evening heat: the late equalizer, a substitution that came ten minutes too late. Block by block, the crowd thinned, fans peeling off toward their own hotels, until it was just the two of us on an empty, quiet street. We'd run out of words because defeat had had the last word, so we walked in silence, sharing the specific, deflated quiet of watching something end.
It was our fourth city in two weeks, after Dallas, Houston, and Kansas City, following the Oranje: the Dutch national team, named for the orange of the House of Orange-Nassau. We're fanatics: four tournaments across half a dozen countries over the past four years. It's a team, though, that neither of us has much claim to.
I've lived in nine countries over the course of my life, but none of them has really been home. Steve, who is 20, was born in Ireland and grew up across four other countries; his claim is even thinner than mine. (I'm named for Kipling's Kim, a homeless orphan belonging to two worlds and neither, a name my parents chose without knowing how well it would fit.)
None of those thin claims to the Netherlands has ever mattered inside a fanwalk or a stadium, though. During this year's World Cup, Steve and I fell in with a few thousand strangers trailing an orange double-decker bus, blasting fight songs, dancing and singing along; inside the stadium, we hugged whoever was sitting next to us and high-fived strangers up and down the row every time the Oranje scored. You're wearing orange, you're a fan, and how you got there doesn't count.
Somewhere as we were walking down those dark blocks in Monterrey, though, I realized I was happy, not despite the loss, but because I was there with my son. That was where I belonged.
Maybe Steve is looking for the same thing I've spent a lifetime looking for, without either of us saying so out loud. If I'm lucky, he'll keep looking with me.
I didn't fully understand why that happiness made sense until I talked about it with my father. He's 86 and has been an outsider everywhere he's ever lived, never really home, not where he was born, not in the places he settled afterward, and not in Arizona, where he lives now. He's told me about a recurring nightmare of being buried in Spain, where he lived for years: some argument playing out, cell by cell, between his body and the Spanish soil, over whether he belonged there. He'd always reached for the term tierra to describe what he was missing, the Spanish word for something closer to homeland than dirt.
Recently, though, he'd landed on a better term: emotionally invested. That's what explains why Steve and I care so much about a team that isn't, by blood, ours. It was never about the land. It's about who you've thrown your lot in with.
We'd found our tierra, that night in Monterrey: not a place, but each other, and, for a few hours at a time, everyone else wearing orange. Steve and I will be back on the road, following the Oranje, in search of it again.
Kim Iskyan is a Nomadic Spirit reader who may have found his tierra near Charlottesville, Virginia.
Further Afield
Reading worth your time.
What Medicare Covers When You Travel in the US and Abroad
Kiplinger
Published in April 2026, the clearest plain-English account of a gap most travelers do not know they have. It covers what Original Medicare pays for outside the country, which is close to nothing, and what the Medigap foreign travel emergency benefit does before it hits its $50,000 lifetime cap. Also useful on the older Medigap plans that are no longer sold but still carry the benefit for anyone who bought one before June 2010.
AARP Survey: Adults 50+ Prioritize Travel in 2026
AARP
Published in March 2026, this is the research behind several of the numbers in this week’s Dispatch. Nearly two-thirds of travelers 50 and over expect to travel this year, down six points from 2025, and more than half of their domestic trips were already booked when the survey closed in December. AARP’s own reading of the findings is that health and accessibility needs change the shape of a trip without stopping it.
Portugal’s Wildest Islands Have Volcanic Hikes, Black-Sand Beaches, and Natural Hot Springs
AFAR
Updated in May 2026, this is the clearest current introduction to why the Azores are drawing so much attention. It moves past the familiar crater-lake photographs into Pico wine, São Jorge cheese, hiking, local food and the islands’ growing collection of small eco-lodges. It also makes the case that a seemingly remote archipelago is easier to reach from the United States than most of Europe.
The Best Things to Do on Terceira, the Azores’ Most Historic Island
Condé Nast Traveler
A companion to our Chosen Place, published in July 2025, making the case for Terceira specifically: Angra do Heroísmo, volcanic landscapes, natural swimming pools, local wine and alcatra. Its premise is close to ours. Terceira lives in São Miguel’s shadow, and travelers who stop there find a richer cultural island than they expected.
The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores
Diana Marcum, Little A
A Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter stumbles onto a community of Azorean immigrants in rural California, then follows them on their annual return to the islands. The book takes its title from what Azoreans call the tenth island, the one made up of everyone who left. Published in 2018 and still the best thing written about why a million people keep going back.
To avoid corners altogether is, after all, to refuse to live.
Freya Stark, The Journey’s Echo: Selections from Freya Stark (1964)
