travel style, travel tips, age and traveling, budget travel

No matter how much we try, we cannot avoid getting older. In fact, we can be grateful that we are one year older each year. After all, not all are this fortunate.

How does age influence your traveling?

If you have read “about us” post, you realized that we have been traveling for years, but when we reached our 30s our traveling has changed a little. I guess 15 years of intense traveling has its tax. The changes are not bad, but it is clearly seen, that our travels are a bit different than before.

Six changes in traveling due to getting older

1. Accommodations

We can notice the biggest difference in accommodations. We hardly use dorms anymore – except when we go on a trekking. Now that Simon and I are traveling together as a married couple, we like to have some privacy. We luckily have found out that staying in a clean, private room with our own bathroom does not really need to cost a fortune. On the other hand, if we travel by our 4WD car, we still do lots of wilderness camping, which is still our favorite. There’s nothing more beautiful than a camping fire under the starry sky.

2. Food

Our student years were sometimes extreme. We have been working all year, just to afford traveling. If we wanted to travel, we only had one choice – to do travels as cheap as possible. We were staying in dirt cheap rooms and also food was not really special. We were not eating just bread and drinking water, but sometimes we were not far from it either. Even now we do watch our expenses, but we still afford to spend few bucks more, if it is worth it, but we mostly still eat street food.

3. Plane tickets

Plane tickets are normally the largest expense and years ago they were even more costly than nowadays. We normally choose our next destination according to the price of a plane ticket, but due to the fact that we only have 20 days per year of annual leave, we watch that we don’t spend too much time on the airports and rather on our final destination.

4. Clothes

We have never been into fashion; it’s just not for us. Seeing the old photos, we sometimes looked as bumps. Our backpacks contained old and worn down clothes only. We are still not much into what to wear, but at least clothes fit us and are the right size.

5. Public transport / renting a vehicle

It might be that we stopped using public transport due to our heavy photo equipment and not so much because of being older. We mostly try to travel by our own car, but sometimes this is just not possible. If that is the case, we try to rent a car and do a self-drive tour. We love the independence, which you get with stopping everywhere you pleased. Renting a car is more expensive than using a public transport, but there are so many benefits that we don’t really think about costs too much. Nevertheless, we do try to do wilderness camping as much as possible, so taking this into account, renting a car is not so expensive after all.

6. Experiences

Each new travel feels more comfortable due to experiences. Even if you have never visited a country, you can know a little what to expect. We don’t ask our self anymore »what if…«, because there is always a way. Our experiences do raise our self-esteem and each new travel is better and more adventurous. Letting go is the best thing you can do!

These six changes might not valid for everyone, but when we talk with other travelers our age or older, they all agreed we do become more comfortable. If that’s what suits you, there is nothing wrong with being comfortable. I guess that being more comfortable comes also with limited holidays, as you don’t really want to return back to work exhausted. After all – which travel style to choose from is not really important, as the only way to enjoy traveling is to find what it suits you and to learn something from a new visited destination and its people.

Do you also notice any changes in traveling with getting older? If you do, we would love to hear about them!