The Cost of Waiting: Why Delaying Travel Can Cost More Than Money

I recently attended a women’s speaking event created to give women the opportunity to share their stories, practice using their voices, and take a stepping stone toward larger platforms like TEDx. I sat in awe of the confidence it took for woman after woman to walk onto that stage, many for the first time, and share some of the hardest and most vulnerable moments of their lives. I had done something similar only a few days earlier, so the timing felt almost poetic. I needed to leave a little before the event ended because, well, motherhood calls first.

On my way out, I struck up a conversation with one of the women helping facilitate the operations side of the event. I introduced myself and told her about my travel business, and immediately, I watched her eyes light up. She began telling me how much she loved to travel, about some of the incredible places she and her husband had experienced together before having children, and how much she missed skiing. Their twins were now heading off to college, and the plan had been to start traveling again. Then she said, “My husband recently had a stroke, and now I’m his caregiver.” Everything about the conversation changed.

I kept thinking about her story because it touched something I have seen from several different sides of my own life. We are often taught to live as though we have more time than we actually know we have, while also accepting the idea that having children means certain parts of our lives must be placed on hold. Raise the children. Handle the responsibilities. Get them through school. Send them off into the world. Then, finally, return to the things you once loved. Of course, I am not suggesting we ignore our finances, ditch our responsibilities, and go completely mad in the name of living for today. I am asking something different: What if travel is meant to adapt alongside our lives? What if becoming a family changes how and where we travel without requiring us to eliminate it altogether?

When I think about my own childhood, travel certainly looked different. My father is a country boy from North Carolina, a Marine, and a hard worker. We never flew anywhere, which I still tease him about. I tell him he is so loyal to his country he cannot even bring himself to leave it. He insists his military years count as international travel. I still think that is debatable, but I digress. In those days, the minivan was king. Somehow there was always room for all of us, and my grandmother, Polly, always made sure there was fried chicken for the ride. We weren't waiting for some future season when family travel would become easier. We simply traveled in a way that fit the family we were at the time.

When my dad chose to get a minivan, it wasn't a lesser version of travel. It was the version that worked for that season. Living in Connecticut, travel looked like our annual family reunion in North Carolina, driving to Wildwood, the Poconos, and Cape Cod. Those places became staples, timestamps of expectation throughout my childhood. You knew we were going down South for the summer. You knew to expect either the summer version of Cape Cod or the winter version, and the Poconos meant snow. Traveling with children in different seasons requires different adaptations. What a toddler needs versus what a teenager needs when it comes to pacing, accommodations, and activities can be vastly different. The way you travel may change. The places you go may change. That doesn't mean travel itself has to disappear.

What happens, then, when the children come with us? There is plenty of research around child development, the brain, and the naturally high levels of curiosity children possess. Travel gives us another way to nurture that curiosity, opening the door for out of the box thinking and helping shape perspectives beyond what children encounter in their everyday environments. I think about my mom planning weekend trips to the next state over, taking us to Boston where we visited science centers and museums and somehow, ended up walking around the campus of Harvard. Funny enough, that's probably part of the reason I felt perfectly confident at seven years old that I could become President of the United States. No one had told me yet that certain rooms weren't meant for me, and perhaps being brought into spaces beyond my immediate world helped make possibility feel normal.

Now, I must be honest. I grew up with these experiences as a normal part of life. It's probably why many of us in New England don't even think to describe them as travel. They were simply "what you do" around here. It wasn't until I was in my mid to late twenties that I began to understand them as a privilege and recognize that not everyone has access to the same opportunities. Financial hardship is real. Disability is real. Caregiving is real. Work constraints are real. I am not suggesting that you must check the travel box every year or somehow you don't count among the population of worthy human beings. What I dare to challenge are the linear societal structures that take us straight to "no" before we have explored possibility, adaptation, innovation, and intentionality.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is where I put my nurse hat back on. My years as a nurse have made it impossible for me to assume that the body I have today is the body I will have when "someday" arrives, especially if I am not doing the work to preserve and optimize for that outcome. There are things we simply cannot control. Illness happens. Accidents happen. Bodies change, genetics matter, and sometimes life alters our abilities despite doing everything we thought we were supposed to do. There is another side of waiting, however, that I think we talk about far less. Sometimes while postponing the experiences we hope to have someday, we are also postponing caring for the person we expect to enjoy them. We work too much. We normalize exhaustion. We stop moving. We become comfortable in routines that no longer require much from us. We tell ourselves we will take better care of our bodies when work slows down, when the children get older, when life becomes less demanding. There goes "someday" again.

I don't know what body I will have at seventy, but I do have some responsibility for how I care for the body carrying me toward her. There are seasons when sacrifice is necessary. There are seasons when slowing down is itself part of the preparation. There is wisdom in preparing for tomorrow. The danger begins when preparation becomes perpetual postponement.

Somewhere in all of this, I keep returning to the woman I met that evening. I keep thinking about the way her eyes lit up when I told her what I did for a living. Before she told me about the stroke, before she told me she had become a caregiver, she told me she loved to travel. She told me about skiing. She told me about traveling with her husband and the life they shared before raising their twins. I don't know whether she would have done anything differently, and it isn't my place to decide that for her. What I do know is that our brief conversation forced me to confront something about the way we plan our own futures: we make plans for "later" while quietly assuming that the people, bodies, relationships, and circumstances we have today will still be waiting for us when later finally arrives.

Perhaps the question isn't whether we should abandon responsibility in pursuit of experience. It is whether we have left enough room for living within the responsibility. Travel may look different in each chapter. Sometimes it may mean crossing an ocean. Sometimes it may mean loading the children into a minivan and driving a few hours from home with your grandmother's fried chicken packed for the ride. There may even be seasons when travel needs to wait. The future deserves our preparation, but the present deserves our participation. Maybe we don't need to hold our breath for twenty years waiting for life to begin again. Maybe we need to become better at asking what living fully can look like in the life we have right now.

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