Seniors’ Misconceptions about travelling
Any person who thought he was too old to travel will never travel.
Here are some simple stories to highlight this fact:
“Not too long ago, I was chatting with an exhibitor at a wine fair. We were talking about the foreign wines that we had had the opportunity to discover while traveling. Another customer in his 60s right next door, tasting at the same time as us. He was listening to our conversation and ended up participating, saying: “Ah young people, you are lucky, you can travel”.
He seemed to be in good shape, and to stand well on his two legs. He didn’t look very old, at least not as old as he thought, so I told him that he too could travel quite well and that he wasn’t that old as that. But he didn’t want to give up, for him; he was too old to travel. I tried to explain to him that when you travel, you don’t do anything special or crazy that you don’t do here in France. By that I mean, we walk, we eat, we visit, we walk, and we do things that we are able to do and that we could do at home.
But no, for him he was condemned to not being able to visit the rest of the world or discover everything we were talking about with the winemaker.
Do we only travel at the beginning of our lives?
Conversely, I don’t think there’s any need to convince people that you have to travel when we’re young, because I think a lot of people are already doing it, and now the trend is more towards traveling during studies, or at the end of studies before entering working life.
Let’s fight this myth!
On the other hand, this person made me understand that there were surely many people like him, with a psychological block and the strong conviction that it was no longer possible for him to travel and enjoy the pleasures that go with it. The way he said it, made it clear that there was still a little bit of regret somewhere, but that it was like that there was nothing to be done. He made me feel doomed, when he doesn’t really achieved his dream.
It was obviously useless to try to convince him and explain to him that he was perfectly fit to travel, but that he had simply decided to put these barriers in front of him.
So there won’t be much to say in this article, since I think it’s just psychology. But let’s try all the same to see a little bit if it’s really embarrassing to travel when you’re old, let’s say senior to be less pejorative.
I’m not necessarily in a good position to talk about it since I’m not old, but I can give you some anecdotes and examples of things I’ve already seen.
Old people on a hike – Old but tough!
I am thinking for example of this group of elderly people, and I think that there, we can use this word since they were all at least 70 years old. It’s not the impression they gave us physically, but it’s the age they gave us when we spoke with them.
I met them during a hike, of a rather difficult level, at the very top, when we were about to start the picnic break. What surprised us was that they didn’t arrive from the same side as us, but from another side where we didn’t know there was a path, which incidentally adds at least 5 km of more on a steep drop from the very bottom of the mountain.
“It’s in the head”
Since we were next for our lunch break, we started chatting. They looked rather driven, as they quickly pulled out a bottle of homemade pastis with the ice cubes that went with it. While they served us a pastis, which was more like a flan, they explained to us that they did this hike every year at that time, that it was a ritual for them, and that they did well other hikes. For people around 70 years old, I think they looked in great shape, and they even looked less tired than us!
This is proof that age does not necessarily count since in their heads I can guarantee you that they were not 70 years old, and given the condition they had, it really does not seem impossible for them to get on a bus, a plane, or a boat, and a few hours later on the other side, to do exactly the same thing as what they are able to do in France.
Ditch the old one!
And you see, if I think back to the guy at the wine show, I wonder if in fact what must have been the problem was not simply the fear of the unknown. I think he actually had no physical concerns about traveling, just a fear, having apparently never traveled before. Which is a shame, because now that he has been retired for a while, he has time, and given his order, obviously the necessary and sufficient finances to make a few trips.
As I have already done in other articles, I like to give you concrete examples that I have been able to see and which often concern people from whom we can learn a lesson. Sometimes they will even give it to us on their own, without us having to deduce it, simply by talking to them.
Retirees around the world to escape the cold!
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I am thinking, for example, of retirees who were with us in a shuttle to go to the airport and who were going to travel three months in a row, since in France it was cold and they preferred the heat. They had simply planned a trip, apparently not that organized, and told us that they would see along the way where it could take them. But one thing was certain, it was that there were at least two or three countries planned warm.
They looked barely older than the guy from the wine room, and yet they were the complete opposite mentally.