Travel!
Monday--16 February 2026
Travel—While You Still Can
Rome, Italy, and Athens, Greece—or Rome and Athens in Georgia? Paducah, Kentucky, or the Grand Canyon? Exploit or Be Exploited? And Like That.
Mural and Door to Ohio River, Paducah, Kentucky
Grand Canyon, Arizona
Canal in Amsterdam
When I demand that you start traveling, do I mean around the corner or around the world? And for business or pleasure? To show off or to get educated? To lap up luxury and attention or to learn? To fulfill your passion for interesting stuff or to be more interesting to your date or neighbors (to have tru-ish tales to tell)? To destroy the environment or to enrich it? To spread the joys of our culture or to make us better? And “While you still can”—what does that mean?
Best listen carefully, because I have strong opinions on some of these questions and you want to get it right, I know.
Rome, Italy, or Rome, GA?
I definitely mean local travel. And international travel. There is joy to be had wandering over to a neighborhood you haven’t ambled through before—and if you haven’t seen Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon or the Museum of Modern Art in New York, there’s no substitute for in person eyeballing.
Niagara Falls
Every US state, every province in Canada, and nearly every US county or town has interesting things to see. Go to that weird museum or odd sight or courthouse or capitol building AND go overseas.
Business or Pleasure?
If you’re like me, you’ve been to other places on business—to sell a product or deliver an academic paper or attend a professional convention. Usually when this is the purpose there is little or no time to enjoy and explore the new place. You may use airplanes or cars or other forms of transportation, but you aren’t really traveling.
Maybe if you write travel magazine articles or take photographs to sell to tourists or to motels, maybe then business and some traveling joy are mixed.
But mostly, by travel, I mean going somewhere you don’t need to go, to see stuff you just delight in seeing.
Impressing Others or Learning Stuff?
Some people probably travel to be able to brag—”Oh, I’ve been there!” But if you’re really going with the expectation of impressing anyone, instead of deepening your grasp of what you didn’t know—maybe even of what you didn’t even know you didn’t know, then you’re missing the point.
Luxury and Being the Center of Attentive Servants or Gaining Understanding? Serendipity?
If you want to eat and live high on the hog, with pricey meals and hotels as the point rather than possibly the price you must pay, then don’t travel.
Check in to the luxury hotel nearest where you live and remember to tip big.
And if you want a circus or Disneyland or Six Flags Over Texas, take some of your hard-earned money and do that—but that’s not travel.
Serendipity should be, ironically, something you plan for. Go somewhere you haven’t been and plan your trip and schedule with some care, making sure you include things you know you want to see. Check out books on the place and make sure that museum is open the day you hope to visit. But make a point of leaving some time unscheduled, too. The thing you hadn’t thought of could turn out to be the highlight of the trip.
Exercising Passion for Interesting Things or Being Better Able to Impress Your Date or Neighbor (Stories to Tell)?
The wise reason for travel—and, yes, this is one of the answers I’m pretty firm about—is to enrich your own life, to learn more about places and people not like you.
Go buy groceries in a foreign place so you can see how they do things differently there. And how they do things much the same.
As Peg Bracken (1918-2007) once wrote—
Travel never made a bore interesting; it only makes for a well-traveled bore, in the same way coffee makes for a wide-awake drunk. In fact, the more a bore travels, the worse he gets. The only advantage in it for his friends and family is that he isn’t home as much.
Damage the Physical Environment or Enrich It?
There’s no way around it: travel, especially airplane travel, is bad for the environment. So travel but be aware of that and vote for ad support politicians who’ll make it less destructive. Be a capitalist but support social democratic policies.
And read the Sarah Wooten essay linked to at the end of this Letter.
To Teach the World to Be Democratic and To Eat Like Us or To Figure Out What the World Can Offer Us? “Ugly American” Syndrome?
I want the world to be more democratic and to adopt values more like the ones I like—cherish differences, respect individual rights, treat women and men equally and with respect, love and protect children, and the like. But that’s not a good reason to travel.
If you’re a Trump supporter, probably keep that to yourself when you travel—and expect to have to explain. If you’re a bitter opponent of Trump (like me), resist the temptation to lecture folks in another state or nation. If you’re a US resident traveling in Canada, apologize.
When traveling internationally, go with an open mind and seek (within reason) new experiences and pleasures.
DON’T be like the guy I heard—I swear I’m not making this up—who actually said, when advised the price of popcorn in Bombay (now called Mumbai) would be “one rupee,” asked “How much is that in real money?”
Conclusion: Travel While You Can
You need—this is old man Ed talking—to travel sooner rather than later. Of course, sooner has to be balanced against any job you have, what resources you have, and that sort of thing.
Remember that someone (Peg Bracken?) said something like
Never borrow money except for things that don’t depreciate—like houses, education, and travel.
Partly I certainly do mean to travel while you’re physically strong enough, healthy enough to get places and enjoy getting there instead of having to stay close enough to your cardiologist or your bidet that you just can’t really wander far.
But I also mean that I’m a bit pessimistic about the national state of affairs (for us Americans) and the world-wide social stability of all cultures and nations.
I’m not telling you that economic and political collapse is imminent—but I’m not completely sure it isn’t, either.
So go.
An essay by Sarah Wooten about capitalism (recommended to you by a leftist social democrat, please note) that touches on travel and whether you ought to feel guilty about enjoying it—
https://quillette.com/2026/02/11/capitalisms-paradox-prosperity-guilt-moral-performance/
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I traveled extensively with my spouse around the US, Canada, and Europe from the late 80s through the early 2000s and also through 2017 on my own in Western Europe and the US on book tours. I traveled for immersion in the culture we were going to when it came to Europe (and to practice/expand my language skills). In the US it was to become better known for my books and to meet new people--and get paid. :-) Highlights of solo touring: Florence, Munich, Houston, London, Ghent, Brussels, Munich. Highlights of co-travel: Domme, Nice, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris Paris Paris, Venice.
Mark Twain wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejuidce, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”