Especially for Seniors: Some Nuts and Bolts of Travel

We two intrepid travelers are still coming to grips with the fact that we’re senior citizens. Some days we still catch ourselves wondering what we're going to do when we grow up. Every so often, a kind fellow traveler reminds us of our advancing years by offering to help us stow our rollaboards in the overhead compartment. Occasionally we even accept.

We first need to remind ourselves of all of the advantages we traveling geezers enjoy.

First, we can total up our travel budget without feeling guilty about spending money that should be reserved for our children’s food, clothes, or education. Our three middle-aged children and their spouses are all productively employed college graduates and are supporting themselves quite nicely. Our only self-imposed rule is that travel funds, like other niceties, come out of income and never out of principal, i.e. we're not spending our kids' inheritance. We hunt for bargains and the vast majority of our trips are based on some kind of deal.

Speaking of family, we’re able to use our airline “points” (air miles) to provide flights to family and friends, and have similarly booked hotels over the years. We’ve also experienced the incomparable joy of taking all eight of our grandchildren on their own first trips to Europe.

Second, we can book trips without any reference to job schedules and vacation time, having been gainfully unemployed for more than 20 years at this point. We tend to stay home from June to October, when Northwest  coastal weather is at its best, and when we can enjoy our garden and the immediate area. When our hometown climate is at its darkest and wettest (from November to the beginning of March), we’re off seeing the world.

Third, after visiting more than 80 foreign countries, as well as most American states and Canadian provinces, we don’t feel we have to live up to anyone else’s expectations of what or where constitutes a worthwhile travel experience.  If we skip a museum visit in favor of a long and leisurely lunch, that’s our choice to make. It’s between us and our waistlines. We recently wrote about the art of leisurely senior travel here.

Finally, there are very occasionally discounts at attractions for senior citizens, although those are commonly reserved for local residents. We did score a magnificent discount in 2013 to visit Hong Kong Disneyland, paying not much more than ten bucks each for a day pass.

As to the factors we keep in mind…

We simply don’t have as much energy as we did in our early travel days, when we would fly in United’s economy class between, say, San Francisco and Hong Kong (SFO-HKG) earning a bunch of cheap miles. Hey, those BIS (Butt in Seat) miles are what made us UA “Million Mile Flyers” in less than a decade of serious post-retirement flying. 

The days of flying in economy over the water are now behind us. We did manage a daytime FRA-SEA (Frankfurt to Seattle) flight in Condor’s Premium Economy as recently as this past March with grandson Jace, but that’s our absolute  limit. Otherwise it’s lie-flat or no-go for us. We suffer from jet lag even when we stay home, and we're not going to add to it by sitting up overnight in a cramped airplane seat for 10-14 hours. 

We will also include a hotel night layover to our itineraries rather than flying and connecting all the way to our destination when it’s practical. For example, we’ve been known to overnight in SEA (Seattle) and fly onward to BLI (Bellingham) the following morning, rather than take the flight that lands at Midnight after 10-12 hours flying back from Europe.

Travel by public transit has pluses and minuses. We ourselves more and more utilize rideshares such as Uber, Lyft, or Bolt to travel between airport and city, or even around a city, as opposed to navigating the local bus system. We still travel by subway in cities that have them. 

We hate to admit it, but geezers like us are potential targets for thieves. For example, Brian was pickpocketed on the Paris Metro a few years ago, and earlier this year we were both hoodwinked by a young woman who showed us the way to an elevator at our Rome subway stop, managing to pull Kathy's wallet out of her bag without our noticing. Brian now utilizes a dummy wallet (he was actually using one in Paris but made the mistake of stashing an ATM withdrawal in it temporarily) and he now wears pants with secret inside zipper pockets made by an outfit called Clothing Arts.

We've always enjoyed planning trips, but we now plan them meticulously, documenting every detail on our invaluable TripIt app (we enjoy the extra features of the paid version). We research in advance how we're going to travel from Point A to Point B, an airport or train station to our hotel. If it's an airport hotel with a shuttle, we'll call the hotel in advance to request details of where we find the shuttle, its hours of operation, and whether or not we need to call the hotel for a pickup. We document virtually everything, including prices, on TripIt. We also carry paperwork with us, rather than simply relying on what's stored on our phones.  

While getting there is not always half the fun, it's a necessary part of the travel experience and we do everything we reasonably can to smooth out the bumps on the journey.  

A Few More Nuts and Bolts

We limit our luggage to a rollaboard and a smaller bag that attaches to the handle and sits on top. It's within legal carryon luggage limits for US airlines and we haven't experienced any recent problems boarding foreign carriers that sometimes enforce weight limits. Some folks find backpacks even handier, but we'll stick with our spinner rollaboards. We buy cheap ones at Costco, e.g. Ricardo of Beverly Hills. Furthermore, we "test drive" them in the store's aisle, making sure the four wheels track on a straight path, rather than curving one way or the other (we've learned through experience that's worth checking). We carry electronics, liquids, and meds in the small bags, making for easier access when needed at airport security checkpoints or elsewhere.

Our U.S. T-Mobile Cellular senior plan enables us to make phone calls and to access data in most countries in the world for US $80 monthly (for two lines). The price has increased since we signed up, but it's still an excellent deal. We can also access WiFi for free aboard Alaska, American, Delta, and United Airlines. This phone plan has literally changed our travel lives.

T-Mobile charges us 25 cents a minute for foreign phone calls, but we load a few dollars on the Skype app and make most of our foreign calls through the app for an average cost of 2 cents a minute.

We find that foreign guides and taxi drivers use WhatsApp, owned by Meta, for communicating so we reluctantly keep that on our phones. We ourselves prefer the Signal App. As PC Magazine put it in a recent review, "Signal has no incentive to sell your data... Competitor WhatsApp is also free but tied to Meta's data-mining empire."

We carry a variety of  Visa, MasterCard, and AMEX credit cards that have no foreign exchange fees.

We carry bank ATM cards that minimize or even eliminate withdrawal fees on the ATMS of domestic and foreign banks.

We always seek out actual bank ATMs, and avoid such ATMs as Euronet and Travelex, which offer terrible exchange rates.

No!

We always complete credit card and ATM transactions in the local currency, and decline the invitation to make the transaction in US dollars. If you have doubts, just read up on the Dynamic Currency Conversion scam. 

Credit cards have become even more widely accepted post-pandemic, and the exchange rates are ordinarily good - sometimes better than ATM cash - so we use them freely. Our cards generally offer instant email confirmation of transactions, a useful safeguard.

We keep a separate record of our plastic cards and know exactly what our wallets contain, just in case we lose them.

We also keep photos of our main passport pages and of our rollaboards in our cell phones, so we can show them at a consulate or the lost baggage counter.

Our great clarinet teacher, Mitchell Lurie, used to say "When I perform, everything leaves me but my preparation." Likewise, our travel preparations support us through our trips, while allowing us room to improvise when needed as we enjoy each day to the maximum. 

Happy travels!