StansWorld

I am easing into the fourth chapter of my nomadic life.  It started a year ago when I not got control my type 2 diabetes.  Thanks to a low-carb diet, I no longer suffer from the awful symptoms of diabetes that had ground me down to a dead stop.  Recovery was neither rapid nor a complete return to the health and fitness of my earlier wandering days.  I am old and getting older.  I feel weaker and frailer with each passing day.  The ravages of age march on.  Does this mean I cannot go new places, meet new people and do adventurous things?  Definitely not!  It just means I have to pace myself.

Pacing is a two-part problem.  The first and easiest is minor daily adjustments I make.  I say easy because my body tells me what to do and I listen.  I eat, sleep, exercise, work and socialize however and whenever my body tells me to.  I have no set time table.  Most scheduled activities are discretionary and easily skipped.  Things like doctor’s appointments and can always be rescheduled.  Most of the time, my travel itinerary allows me the same freedom to make minor daily pace adjustments that my body tells me.

The second and harder part of pacing is major adjustments to unforeseen illness or fatigue resulting from inadequate mental and physical fitness.  Unforeseen illnesses and fatigue can happen at any time or place. I must deal with when and where they occur because I have no home to retreat to and recover.  I only have itinerary bookings which leave me two choices.  The first is to push on if I can, probably feeling miserable.  The alternative is to interrupt my travels and stay where I am until I recover.  Once recovered, I can “leap frog” and catch up to the original or rescheduled time point of my itinerary.  My travel plans must allow for major adjustments to unforeseen illness and fatigue.

Unforeseen illness and fatigue can occur months from the time I book my itinerary but estimates of the probability, severity and my ability to cope is based on my condition at the time I make the bookings and past experiences of what can go wrong.  Both under and over estimating my future health and fitness can have negative consequences.  The consequences of over estimating are obvious – breakdown and travel disruption.  Less obvious is the consequence of under estimation – loss of freedom.  Fear and uncertainty about health and fitness lead me to go to safe, comfortable and known places.  For example, my recent ordeal with diabetes severely restricted my mobility.  I played it safe by spending the first five months recovering in a large American retirement community. This was followed by an easy five months in a very familiar Costa Rican expat community.  I am currently back in the American retirement community catching up on medical and dental checkups. I have renewed my passport and began booking travels to new places, new people and new adventures.

Outlined below is a detailed time line of two months of bookings of slow travel. The itinerary takes into a account a realistic assessment of my health and fitness and minimizes stresses of prolonged travel. I know from past experience to avoid as much as possible the fatigue of long-distance multiple-connection flights in favor of shorter direct flights with overnight or multiple day layovers at airport hotels.  A realist travel pace for me is to spend at least a month in any geographic area staying in accommodations at anchor locations that are less than a few hours from each other.  Bookings at anchor locations are for at least two weeks and always have cooking facilities to prepare healthy low-carb meals.