As my boyfriend and I have aged, our physical world has gotten smaller. Now in our 80s, we don’t have the energy for travel that we used to. In addition, my boyfriend has health problems that require continuous medical monitoring (Despite this, he’s doing fine and has a great attitude. Thanks for asking!).
In contrast to us, many people our age and older are still engaging in impressive travel adventures, including ecotourism, volunteer work, safaris, and vacations to far-flung places. For example, my 89-year-old friend recently returned from a tour of the Greek islands. We, on the other hand, are enjoying what looks to be a lifelong “staycation.” Are we missing out?
Travel Benefits
Recent research indicates that travel has benefits beyond fun and sightseeing. According to research that focuses specifically on older people (50+), these benefits include:
- “Improved brain health, cardiovascular well-being, and overall vitality.”
- Reduced mortality risk. “Regular travel has been shown to reduce mortality risk by 36.6%.”
- Reduced dementia risk. Regular travel, according to the same report, “can lower Alzheimer’s risk by up to 47% through culturally enriching activities like museum visits, attending live music performances, and exploring historical landmarks.”
- Sense of connection with others. Traveling with others can provide a check against loneliness and isolation.
- Happiness. According to this article, focusing on the general population rather than just older adults, travel not only promotes health, but also happiness and a good love life.
Although some of these benefits could reflect the fact that healthier seniors travel, not that travel creates healthier seniors, it makes intuitive sense that the stimulation, pleasure, and problem-solving of travel would be good for you.
Will we miss out on those benefits? No! We’ve figured out our own way to glean many key travel benefits right in our own hometown. In-town tourism, like its exotic cousin, foreign travel, is fun and satisfies our need for adventure. And if “culturally enriching activities like museum visits, attending live music performances, and exploring historical landmarks” are good for you, we can easily do those in our own hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. If, out of inertia or sheer laziness, we often don’t do these things, knowing how helpful they can be to our well-being can be an additional prod to get out of the house and get moving.
23 Ways to “Travel” in Your Own Hometown
The ideas below can help you become a tourist in your own hometown. Most require little time or money; better still, no packing or extensive travel arrangements are involved. And whether you live in a rural area, small town, or city, you can approach daily life as a travel experience. After all, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes”, as Marcel Proust famously said.
In that mindset, try one or more of the activities below:
- Visit a Cat Café. Or a Dog Café. Or even a Capybara Café, as described here. Although there’s a cat café just three blocks away, I’ve never been there. It’s now #1 on my list. (Note to self: Practice what you preach.)
- Visit a bookstore. Books open doors into the experiences and minds of other. That’s traveling!
- Go on a “safari.” Is there a drive-through animal park near you? We drive through our own “Lone Elk Park” frequently, spotting not just elk, but also deer, bison, raccoons, fox, and birds without even emerging from our car.
- Choose a park. Sit on a bench or walk. Watch people, birds, animals. Breathe deeply.
- Go to a sidewalk café. Drink coffee, watch people, read, talk, do the crossword.
- Become an expert on neighborhoods. A great way to do this: Pair a meal at a new-to-you restaurant with a stroll around the block.
- Walk through a botanical garden or garden center. Gain the many benefits of being in nature while looking at beautiful flowers and plants.
- Walk through one or more of these: a home improvement store, a camping store, an athletic store. While my boyfriend goes to a home improvement store almost every day, the home improvement superstore is a foreign country to me. Walking in these giant stores is healthful and fascinating (especially if you don’t need anything).
- Take a cooking class. I’ve noticed that many people travel to Italy to take a cooking class. But you can take a variety of cooking classes at your local community college or YMCA.
- Spend the night in a hotel. If you can afford it, why not take a “mini-vacation” in a well-located hotel? Have dinner in their dining room or nearby, and explore the environs.
- Go to a farmer’s market. You may find music and crafts, as well as vegetables and fruits.
- Drive through a car wash. It may sound silly, but I always get a little thrill when I “drive” through an automatic car wash, not to mention the morale boost of a clean car.
- Try specialized and/or quirky museums. Our hometown has, among others, a telephone museum, a museum of transportation, a chess museum, a motorcycle museum, music museums, sports museums, a museum of miniatures, a photography museum, and military museums, among many more.
- Go to special exhibits at the big, well-known museums. Even if I don’t think I’m interested in the special exhibit, I usually find myself fascinated by whatever is on offer. Plus, just being in the massive museum spaces expands one’s sense of possibility.
- Take a short bird walk. Do it yourself. Or, sign up for a beginners’ walk with the Audubon Society.
- Go to a sports bar or a Sports Bra. The latter is a new chain of bars that play only women’s sporting events.
- Walk in the mall. In weather that’s too hot or too cold for a normal human, the mall is a place of refuge.
- Attend a concert or musical event. Music stirs the soul and enlarges the emotions.
- Go on a one–tank trip—a short car trip to a nearby park, town, or any appealing destination.
- Visit a historic house.
- Try a citizen science project. For example, join the Great Backyard Bird Count.
- Chat up the other “tourists” you encounter, just as you might converse with the locals in a foreign country.
- Make a photo album of your adventures.
The possibilities are endless. No doubt you already have dozens more ideas just from reading this list.
Takeaways and Souvenirs
Though older people may find their outer world shrinking, even modest excursions like those above can expand your inner world. “Looking with new eyes” and enjoying the present moment, wherever you may find yourself, are skills that make for both happiness and health.
