Bring Back Tradition in Travel!

If somebody called me up right now and said, “I’ve got the plane ready to go, we’ll pick you up and let’s head to Europe,” my answer would be no.

That’s how deeply content I've gotten just to spend summer with family and old friends in Newport. And how extreme my reluctance to jam-pack my calendar with travel has become.

Don’t misunderstand me. My friends currently cavorting about in the Balearics or the Greek islands look like they’re having a blast. But watching all their videos jetting around the Med and capitals of Europe, I mostly feel … exhausted?

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I just have little desire to fly that far and go through significant time changes. I hit a wall a couple of years ago, where nonstop travel slowly lost its appeal. Places started to blur. I often found myself noticing things repeating as much as things being different. And my body began to rebel.

Maybe it’s all a part of getting older (so if you are an older reader, forgive me for stating something obvious and verging on cliche), but I’ve started to rejigger my travel calendar. Sure, there are still the big trips to places I’ve never been. This year, that’s been the Amazon and Uzbekistan, and likely South Korea in late fall. Higher in importance has become travel focused on seeing friends. If I’ve made it to London, Mexico City, Paris, or Madrid, it’s because of them, not some desire to see more of these places. As much as I love those cities.

But highest in importance, and the travel I look forward to the most, are the trips that have become tradition with my family and friends.

It’s neatly broken up into one for each season. Over Christmas and New Year's, that's Tucson, a city in southern Arizona which I’ve fallen madly in love with for its natural beauty, rich culture, and our family ties. Our time there is mostly spent doing nothing, peppered in with hikes we now know well and specific holiday parties we always attend.

A recent sunset at Second Beach

In summer, it’s Newport, where I’m from, and the perfect seaside town to be a kid, an adult, or something in between. We have our routine down, even to the exact same swim and beach walk every single night. Over the Thanksgiving holidays, I don’t travel, and instead, my friends and some of my family come to me. We’ve had to add folding tables and are beginning to stretch from the dining room into the sitting room–a seating conundrum that secretly brings me great joy. I get to take them into my routine in D.C., and now have traditions like skating at the rink by the National Archives on its first day of the season.

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And in spring for Passover/Easter break, we have made Tampa/St. Pete our spot. It’s a place that runs counter to so much of my natural inclinations, and yet I’ve become charmed by it.

As this whole new mentality around travel has settled into place in my brain, I’ve spent time thinking about why. Why are we (and by we, I mean younger Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z) in such a frenzy about traveling as much as we can? Part of it might just be that we can–if you can have Europe and most of the world as your playground, why wouldn’t you? Some of it, I’d guess, is a reaction to previous generations of Americans who didn’t leave the country very much and whose worldviews and attitudes did not match our own. Part of it is also that many of us don’t want kids or at least not until much later than our parents or grandparents did.

But this zeal for constant travel is not, for lack of a better word, normal. I’ve given up trying to figure out how all these people in college and in their 20s and 30s are financing these trips. But nobody I knew growing up was traveling all the time, and certainly not crossing oceans. Not at the sort of middle-class Catholic day school where I went K-8, nor at the New England boarding school I went to for high school. Not even at Georgetown. Spring break, if you could afford it, was for Florida and the Caribbean, and summer was for a summer job or sweating it out at an internship in New York.

The pool at Holler & Saunders

As a kid, I always looked forward to a certain hike we’d do in Vermont in summer, planning to be first up the mountain but dreading the icy pond dip after. Now, I love tradition because I find anticipatory pleasure in counting down the days until it’s the first time of the summer we’re jumping off Beacon Rock or popping down to the U.S.-Mexico border for antique shopping at Holler & Saunders.

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There’s also the obvious pleasure of spending time with friends and family, especially as it adds new generations. It’s a way of ensuring I get as much time as I can with those I love. I doubt I’ll be on my deathbed wishing I’d met more people, but I dread being the cliche who wishes he’d spent more time with loved ones.

But the main reason I’ve come to love tradition in travel is the lack of pressure. When I’m in Tucson, there might be a trail I haven’t done that I’ll get around to or a new restaurant, but I don’t feel pressed to do anything. I’ve done most of it. The same goes for Newport and the Tampa area.

And I’ve found that far more freeing than having the world a plane ride away.

(For those interested, here are my Newport and Tucson guides.)

Yahoo CreatorWilliam O'ConnorCreator of Getting Around with William O'ConnorAuthor of the weekly newsletter Getting Around with William O'Connor and the aviation editor for Travel + Leisure. Formerly the travel editor for The Daily Beast.Follow

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Getting Around with William O'Connor