GROUP TRAVEL
Most of my elderly friends travel overseas either on cruises like Viking where you spend every night on a boat and spend the days in city after city or they go with a group tour such as Gate 1 Travel with a group leader guiding them from city to city and giving talks on what is most interesting.
The reason they do this is to avoid what I went through yesterday at the customs office. They don’t have to locate their own places to stay or find the best restaurants or to deal with customs or to find a hospital if they need one. They feel secure and safe and comfortable.
Group travel usually costs two to three or more times as much as traveling on your own for a several reasons. One reason is that the price of your guide or guides and all the making of arrangements is included. A second reason is that if you are organizing a group and promising a good experience nothing can be allowed to go wrong. One way to avoid having things go wrong is selecting first class accomodations and charter buses where the hotels or restaurants and the buses punctual and can be guaranteed to be clean and the food delicious. This is probably the biggest reason why group travel costs two to three times (and advertises itself as being luxurious) as much traveling on your own. People who organize group travel are able to get better rates on travel and better rates on hotels and meals, but this isn’t passed along to people in the group.
I know, because I have led many groups abroad, particularly to India. Most of them have been student trips. Students don’t complain about very much of anything and are able to weather any disaster such as train tickets not being properly booked by a third party and having to spend the night on the train sleeping on the floor or in a railway station waiting room. Groups of young people create their own problems, often making foolish choices such as missing trains or having bizarre accidents. But they also want to travel as cheaply as possible and usually don’t complain. With adult groups such as college teacher groups or church groups my attempt to travel cheaply has sometimes led to poor accomodations or terrible meals or even a bus catching on fire. The worst mistake I’ve made, innocently enough, was taking a group to Agra to visit the Taj Mahal on a Friday when I discovered that it was a Moslem holy day and the Taj was closed. We saw the Taj Mahal, but over a wall. On another staff trip the train from Varanasi to Agra was 12 hours late and we missed the Taj completely, spending the night sleeping on tables in the railway waiting room and singing Christmas carols to amuse ourselves before going straight to Delhi. My form of group travel is cheap, but a little risky.
But the biggest problem with group travel is precisely missing out on having to deal with people in the country as I have had to do in Montevideo. If I were in a group I would have missed out on all the acts of kindness that I wrote about yesterday and I would have avoided having to deal with the culture directly. I would have missed out on the experience of Uruguayan customs or taking an ordinary bus ride or searching for a place to eat. Of course as a clueless 86 year old I choose to only do one thing a day, I choose to walk less than 4 miles a day, I choose to sit in my Airbnb and write. I choose to often eat often not very great grocery store food. I choose to visit a city and then mainly sit around for a month. So I miss out on a lot that I would have done if I was 46 rather than 86.
I reduce costs first by visiting places when a half price ticket appears even if not the ideal time of year or even a place, like Montevideo, that I had never thought of visiting. I reduce costs by getting an Airbnb for a month which is much cheaper than getting ten Airbnb’s for three days at a time with the travel expense of going from city to city. I cut costs by eating grocery store food or carry out as I would do at home. I entertain myself by walking around the neighborhood rather than by going on boat rides or safaris.
I do admit that travel is more fun if I am traveling with someone else. Five times in the last two years my daughter, who likes the same kind of travel, but a little more vigorous, has come with me for ten days or more of the month in a country. It is fun to have someone to share with and talk to. We have a great time. But I have been talking with her about my trip twice a day on Facetime, so it is almost as if she is along on this trip. Yesterday’s adventure gave me something to talk about. Next month I will be in a hotel near Taormina, Sicily with a hotel full of people from the little town of Marshall, North Carolina and other parts of North Carolina for Rob Amberg’s 75th birthday party. That will be fun in a very different way and after that I will travel with my son and his wife and my granddaughter in Greece for two weeks in high style and that will be fun.
I guess I am saying that many forms of travel have their appeal and that my suggestion is that you try then all, but don’t be afraid to travel by yourself to unknown places in you 80’s.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 