The Lost Appeal of Far Travels

[mustachian816]

I've found its best to go to the national forest and top state parks that are next door to popular Instagram worthy national parks and you can avoid the crowds even in high season. If you search "alternative to X National Park", you can usually find a list of great alternatives.

As for international travel, the 2nd tier cities in foreign countries usually have far fewer crowds, chain stores, tourist traps and have more cultural immersion opportunities and can cost half the price of the more famous cities.

As someone with kids who lives in "flyover country", I used to spend thousands of dollars flying to coastal and mountain cities and on excursions going to all the usual hotspots, but I've found that just adding bikes to a road trip around cheaper places closer by in the midwest/south can make the somewhat "boring" places much more exciting.  My kids find mountain biking in lesser known parks around the midwest way more exciting than some of the famous national park hikes and tourist attractions that we've done with them.  When we did more air travel, we could usually only afford to rent bikes for a day or two for the whole family but now that we travel more locally we can go on 1-2 week trips and bike every day. Our local mountain biking road trips re 80-90% as enjoyable as the farer flung air travel trips we used to do but cost 1/5 of the price so we can afford to do them much more often now that we have more time. 
Another benefit of doing more local trips is you can do them more spontaneously than the far flung trips.  When it gets close to a kids school break, I track the weather of a few places we like to drive to within 4-8 hours and if one of them has significantly better weather than our home, we'll book a last min trip there.

[itchyfeet]

I am very curious to see what travel looks like for me and DW in retirememt.

When my DW and I were young we backpacked Asia, Europe and South America in the pre internet days. We were obsessed with travel and back then. We would just turn up in a town, walk around to find a hostel to sleep at, and talk to other backpackers there to see what was worth seeing and where to travel to next and how best to get there. Times have changed.

Then my career took me overseas and we lived in Dubai for 6 years which was an incredible base to see Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. We have great memories from travel out of Dubai. We saw so many incredible places.

Currently I am living in Paris, and winding up my working life there, but am travelling all over the world on business. We travel a lot through France and Europe on weekends, but often it feels more through obligation to take “advantage” of our situation, rather than any real desire to visit yet another gothic cathedral and yet another crumbling medieval old town.

Travel does feel like it’s lost its allure a little at the moment. We just want to spend time at home in Australia, camping under blue skies or hanging around at our home there.

We have a large sum set aside for travel in our post fire life, which should allow for several months of travel every year. But I’m really not sure we will use the funds. I have no idea.

But, like others have said, there is a huge range of travel experiences to had, and whilst travelling to destinations to see tourist sites or museums doesn’t excite me, i love the outdoors and I think I will always be excited by the chance to visit the incredible national parks everywhere in the world.

Rambling a bit here, and shifting topics, but several years ago I had a brief conversation with friends where we discussed whether you would extend your career by an extra year if it meant you could fly business class instead of economy in retirement. The responses were mixed, reflecting the personal nature of personal finance, but for me I felt it was worth it and have now worked that extra year. Funnily my DW was on the other side of the fence and still feels that business class seats are a total waste of money. I look forward to our first post retirement trip where I fly in a lie flat bed from Sydney to Europe or the US, whilst DW is flying downstairs in cattle class. Haha. I’m sure she will change her tune.