THE RETIREMENT CAFÉ
                                                                              By Ernie J. Zelinski
 
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 RETIREMENT TRAVEL

Retirement Travel Image 

Travel Is the Second Best Retirement Gift 

for Retirees to Give Themselves

(Health Is the First)

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
— Walt Whitman

The joy of travel is in the wandering.
— Joe Robinson
 
 

Travel can enhance your retirement life significantly since it provides an elevated degree of stimulation, freshness, and pleasure not encountered in your everyday routine and environment or normal activities when you retire.

Of course, travel is a great teacher. Regardless of where you go, you can always learn something new. Learning about the food, the cooking, and the clothing of a country, along with what retirement means to the locals, are just a few things that can broaden your knowledge of the world.

Here are the Top-10 Travel Goals People Posted on 43 Things.com

  1. Travel the world.
  2. See the northern lights.
  3. Go on a road trip with no predetermined destination.
  4. Visit all 50 states.
  5. Backpack through Europe.
  6. Go on a cruise.
  7. Go on a road trip.
  8. Sleep under the stars.
  9. Visit another country.
  10. Leave my city once a month. Also leave my country once a year.

Particularly when you go abroad, travel takes you out of your element and inspires you to new insights about your life in general. It is an effective way to get yourself thinking in different ways about the world and what it means to you.

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”
—Leonardo da Vinci

Above all, travel to other countries can jolt you out of your unconsciousness about how good your life is into a deep, conscious appreciation of all the great things that you have going for yourself in the new retirement.

I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
— Mark Twain

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
— Oscar Wilde

If the travel bug gets the best of you in retirement, you may want to stay close to home and discover your own state or province, or you may want to venture to foreign lands. You may even want to get into writing and self-publishing about your travel experiences.

Four of Fourteen Important Retirement Travel Tips

  • If one of your retirement dreams is relocating to another city or country, then head there and treat your vacation as an adventurous research expedition.
  • When visiting towns and cities, take the extra time to check out the local cafes and diners instead of eating at the restaurants catering to the tourist trade. You will experience cheaper and better food as well as a more interesting atmosphere.
  • To make vacations more affordable, escape expensive hotels and meal costs by finding short-term apartment, villa, or cottage rentals. These can cost less than 50 percent of hotel room prices and be much more interesting to stay in.
  • Take a vacation to a destination that has special meaning to you. Visit a place where one of your parents was born or a place where you used to live but haven’t visited for a long time.

NOTE: The above 4 retirement  travel tips come from the 14 travel tips in the topic "Tips on How to Enhance Your Next Retirement Travel Journey" from "Chapter 7: Travel for Fun, Adventure, and More" in The World's Best Retirement Book: 

How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free

Retirement Wisdom That You Won’t Get from Your Financial Advisor 

Retirement

Here are the travel topics covered in The World's Best Retirement Book that will help you retire happy: 

Chapter 7: Travel for Fun, Adventure, and More

  • Take yourself out of your element and inspire yourself with new insights
  • Spend all the money that you can on travel if travel really turns you on
  • Tips on how to enhance your next journey
  • Use the Internet to make your travel adventures affordable and enjoyable
  • Travel with a difference
  • Implement something unique into your next trek
  • Become an ecotourist
  • You don't have to be rich to spend a month or two in a warmer climate
  • Enjoy yourself in a myriad of ways at a recreational vehicle retirement resort
  • Why travel alone when you don't have to?
  • Swap your house for a neat pad in some faraway paradise
  • Try a working vacation for a more satisfying traveling experience
  • Journey close to home and do the things that an out-of-town tourist might do

Retirement Travel Resources

Air Travel Humor

Food or Drink — It's Your Choice  

A flight attendant on a United Air Lines cross-country flight nervously announced about 30 minutes outbound from LA,

"I don't know how this happened, but we have 103 passengers aboard and only 40 dinners."

When the passengers' muttering had died down, she continued,

"Anyone who is kind enough to give up his or her meal so someone else can eat will receive free drinks for the duration of the flight."

Her next announcement came an hour later.

"If anyone wants to change his mind, we still have 29 dinners available!"

Note: from the Air Travel Handbook by Dan Poynter 

Three Types of Seating on Airlines

  • First Class,
  • Business Class
  • Sardine Class

Air Travel Factoid: Reclining seat issues account for some 75% of the in-flight disputes.

Quotations about Travel

Here is a list of travel quotes to put travel in proper perspective:

A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.
— Jean Cocteau

The fabric of my faithful love
No power shall dim or ravel
Whilst I stay here — but oh, my dear,
If I should ever travel!
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
— Paul Theroux

The strength of the turbulence is directly proportional to the temperature of your coffee.
— Gunter's Second Law of Air Travel

The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.
— Daniel J. Boorstin

Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong.
— Vita Sackville-West

Travellers never think that THEY are the foreigners.
— Mason Cooley

I travelled among unknown men,
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor England! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee.
— William Wordsworth

In America there are two classes of travel — first class and with childen.
— Robert Benchley

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
— Robert Louis Stevenson

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air . . . It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.
— George Bernard Shaw

An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.
— Iain Sinclair

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
— Oscar Wilde

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
— Paul Theroux, U.S. novelist, travel writer. The Great Railway Bazaar

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
— John Steinbeck

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.
— Robert Louis Stevenson

A part, a large part, of travelling is an engagement of the ego v. the world. . . . The world is hydra headed, as old as the rocks and as changing as the sea, enmeshed inextricably in its ways. The ego wants to arrive at places safely and on time.
— Sybille Bedford (b. 1911), British author. The Quality of Travel, in Esquire (New York, Nov. 1961; repr. in As It Was, 1990).

A man who leaves home to mend himself and others is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country, guided by the blind impulse of curiosity, is a vagabond.
— Oliver Goldsmith

The time to enjoy a European tour is about three weeks after you unpack.
— George Ade

As the Spanish proverb says, "He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him." So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.
— Samuel Johnson

The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.
— Max Lerner

Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
— Henry James

I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists.
— Brigitte Bardot French screen actor, Upon on leaving her home at Saint Tropez.

For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.
— Charles Baudelaire

The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.
— Charles Horton Cooley

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
— Elizabeth Bishop

The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.
— Fred Allen

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
Mark Twain Quotes

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
— Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives— from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichacestenango— with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to-date scripts for actors on the tourists' stage.
— Daniel J. Boorstin

Sailin' 'round the world in a dirty gondola
Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!
— Bob Dylan

As for pictures and museums, that don't trouble me. The worst of going abroad is that you've always got to look at things of that sort. To have to do it at home would be beyond a joke.
— Margaret Oliphant

I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhoea and bites from the mosquitoes. But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a pleasuring.
— Lord Byron

I was disappointed in Niagara — most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.
— Oscar Wilde

We travellers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull and have observed nothing. If we tell anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic.
— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.
— Robert Runcie

Travelling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, "I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station."
— Lisa St. Aubin de Terán

When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.
— Edward Dahlberg

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
— Ernest Hemingway

 

More Retirement Travel Guide Resources

Here is a list of Hotel Review Sites and Travel Communities to help you with your retirement travel:

  • TripAdvisor.com
  • TravelPost.com
  • Trivago.com
  • Igougo.com
  • Uptake.com
  • Hotelicopter.com
  • Virtualtourist.com
  • Holidaywatchdog.com
  • Vinivi.co.uk
  • Holidays-uncovered.co.uk
  • Globalhotelreview.com
  • Mytravelguide.com
  • Travbuddy.com
  • Shermanstravel.com
  • Hotelscombined.com
  • Hotels.about.com
  • Triptake.com
  • Hotelmotelreviews.com
  • Hotelscoop.com
  • Hotelshark.com
  • Driftr.com
  • Bootsnall.com
  • Travellerspoint.com

More Travel Resources for Seniors

General Travel Tips for Retirees

Regardless of how far you go, the degree to which your next trek turns out to be pleasurable, adventurous, and satisfying will depend on how well you plan your trip.

The quality of your journey will also depend on your ability to be spontaneous and how well you are able to maintain a positive attitude throughout.

Here are a few general travel tips for retirees to help make their voyage more pleasureable.

  • When traveling, leave the good jewelry at home.
  • Put your address inside your luggage as well as on the outside.
  • Check hotel bills carefully when checking out.
  • Take along two big safety pins when so that you can pin the drapes
    shut in your motel room.
  • Carry our own alarm clock when traveling. Hotel wake-up calls are
    not 100 percent reliable.
  • Carry a small pocket knife.
  • When traveling by airplane, carry your valuables and important papers with you instead of placing them in your checked-in luggage. 
  • When you have the choice of two exciting things to do, choose the
    one you haven't tried.
  • Ask anyone giving you directions to repeat them at least once, even
    twice.
  • Don't use expensive luggage. Thieves expect expensive luggage to have expensive things in it.
  • Carry your edition of The World's Best Retirement Book wherever you go.
  • Trust in God but always lock your valuables in a safe.
  • Remember that the shortest way to get anywhere is to have good company traveling with you.
  • By all means see new places, but remember to take along an open mind.

 

Bon Voyage 

 

The World's Best Retirement Book

To Help You Retire Richer in Spirit and Travel Smarter and Happier as a Result

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Published in 10 Languages

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How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free  is so rich with retirement information and has such immense power to change retiree's lives, that it now appears in Amazon.com's number 1 position — out of over 14,000 listings for retirement-related books — when you type "retirement" or "retire" into Amazon.com's search feature.

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Retirement Wisdom That You Won't Get From Your Financial Advisor 

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COPYRIGHT © 2020 by Ernie J. Zelinski
Author of The World's Best Retirement Book
All Rights Reserved

 

 

  
 

   

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