The Open Road: Travel, Adventure and Discovery

Introduction

For most working people, travel arrives in rationed portions. A fortnight in summer, a long weekend in spring, perhaps a week of winter sun if the budget and the annual-leave calendar allow. We squeeze the unfamiliar into the gaps between deadlines, and then we fly home, unpack, and try to hold on to the feeling for as long as it lasts. Usually it does not last long.

Early retirement changes the arithmetic of adventure. When your time is your own, the fortnight can become a season; the season can become a year; the city break can become a month of living in a rented flat above a bakery, learning the names of the neighbours and the rhythm of the market. Jeremy Jacobson and Winnie Tseng, who left technology careers in their thirties, put it with lovely simplicity on their blog: instead of two weeks of vacation a year, they now had fifty-two (Go Curry Cracker, n.d.).

This chapter is about what that shift can mean. It is not only about jet-setting. The open road might be a thousand-mile walk along a coastline you have lived beside for decades, a sailing boat crossing an ocean, a converted van parked by a Norwegian fjord, or a slow train through places you once only glimpsed from an aeroplane window. What these journeys share is novelty, movement, time outdoors and the chance to become, for a while, a learner again.

We will look at what research says about travel, novelty and wellbeing, especially in mid and later life; meet six people who retired early and used their freedom to explore; weigh up the honest drawbacks; and finish with practical ideas and questions to help you imagine your own road.

What the research tells us

Novelty and the happy brain

One of the most striking recent studies on everyday exploration comes from neuroscience rather than tourism. Heller et al. (2020) tracked 122 adults in New York and Miami using smartphone geolocation for three to four months, while participants regularly reported how they were feeling. On days when people moved around a greater variety of physical locations, which the researchers called higher “roaming entropy”, they reported more positive emotion. The link held after accounting for things like weather, day of the week and total distance travelled. A subset of participants also had brain scans, which showed that the relationship between varied experience and positive mood was stronger in people whose hippocampus (involved in memory and novelty) and striatum (involved in reward) were more tightly connected.

The sample was young, with an average age of about 23, and the study concerns daily variety rather than foreign holidays, so we should not stretch it too far. But it offers a plausible thread: human beings seem to be rewarded, emotionally, for exploring. Early retirement is, among other things, a structural opportunity to put more variety into ordinary days.

Holidays, health and longevity

The older research on holidays is suggestive, if not conclusive. In a well-known analysis of the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial in the United States, Gump and Matthews (2000) followed more than 12,000 middle-aged men at high risk of coronary heart disease. Those who took more frequent annual vacations during the trial years had a lower risk of death over the following nine years, particularly from coronary heart disease, and the association held after adjusting for factors such as income. The authors’ cautious conclusion was that vacationing “may be good for your health” (Gump and Matthews, 2000, p. 608). Because this was an observational study of men only, it cannot prove that holidays caused the benefit; healthier or less stressed men may simply have been more likely to take them.

A literature review by Chen and Petrick (2013) drew together studies on travel and perceived health and wellness. They found consistent evidence that travel experiences improve how people feel, including their sense of wellbeing and life satisfaction, but also found that these benefits tend to fade after people return home, and that evidence for direct effects on physical health was thin. A meta-analysis of vacation studies by de Bloom et al. (2009) reached a similar conclusion: holidays produce a real but modest lift in health and wellbeing that typically fades within weeks of going back to work.

That “fade-out” finding is worth pausing on, because it is where early retirement changes the picture. Much of the research on holidays measures the effect of a short break followed by a return to the same job and the same pressures. An early retiree’s travel is not a temporary escape from work; there is no inbox waiting on return. We do not yet have strong studies of long-term travellers that settle the question, so this is a hypothesis rather than a finding, but it is a hopeful one.

Walking, nature and awe

A great deal of adventurous travel involves walking: along trails, through old towns, up hillsides for the view. The physical case for this is strong. A meta-analysis of 15 international cohorts, covering more than 47,000 adults, found that taking more steps per day was associated with a progressively lower risk of death from any cause (Paluch et al., 2022). For adults aged 60 and over, the benefit levelled off at roughly 6,000–8,000 steps a day; for younger adults, at around 8,000–10,000. A day spent exploring a city or a coast path on foot can easily exceed those figures.

Being outdoors appears to matter too. Using a nationally representative survey of 19,806 people in England, White et al. (2019) found that people who spent at least 120 minutes a week in nature were significantly more likely to report good health and high wellbeing than those who spent none, with benefits levelling off at around 200–300 minutes. Crucially, it did not seem to matter whether this time was taken in one long outing or several short ones, and the pattern held for older adults and for people with long-term health conditions. Again, this is cross-sectional evidence and cannot show cause and effect, but it fits comfortably with the experience of many walkers and sailors.

Then there is awe: the feeling of standing before something vast that you do not fully understand, such as a mountain range, a night sky at sea or a cathedral. In a small but elegant randomised trial, Sturm et al. (2022) asked 60 healthy older adults in California to take a 15-minute walk each week for eight weeks. Half were simply asked to walk; the other half were encouraged to notice things that inspired awe. The “awe walk” group reported more joy and more prosocial positive emotions such as gratitude and compassion during their walks, showed increasingly broad smiles in the self-portraits they took, and reported greater falls in day-to-day distress. Measures of anxiety, depression and life satisfaction did not change in either group, so the effects were on daily emotional experience rather than on clinical outcomes. Even so, the finding is heartening: awe seems to be something we can cultivate, and travel is one of its richest sources.

Travel, identity and later life

Tourism researchers have also listened carefully to what retirees themselves say. In interviews with 20 retirees in the south-eastern United States, Nimrod (2008) found that travel after retirement was connected not just to the new freedom of the life stage but to lifelong interests, existing leisure habits and social networks, while also being shaped by constraints such as health and money. In other words, retirement travel tends to grow out of who we already are.

In the UK, Morgan et al. (2015) interviewed 16 older people on a subsidised holiday scheme for those with limited means. They found that trips offered escape, respite, companionship and reminiscence, and, for some who had been widowed, a chance to renegotiate their sense of self. They also noted that trips could be anxiously anticipated, a reminder that travel is not effortless for everyone.

There is even emerging interest in travel as part of dementia care. Wen et al. (2022), a team of tourism and public-health researchers, proposed a conceptual framework linking features of tourism experiences, such as sensory stimulation, social interaction and positive emotion, with established non-drug approaches to supporting people living with dementia. This is a theoretical paper that calls for research rather than reporting trial results, so it should be read as an idea worth testing rather than a treatment.

Slow travel

Finally, the concept of “slow travel” deserves a mention because it describes so well how many early retirees end up moving through the world. Dickinson and Lumsdon (2010) set out slow travel as an approach that values the journey itself, lower-carbon modes of transport such as rail, bus, bicycle and foot, and deeper engagement with local places and people. It is, in a sense, the natural rhythm of someone who is no longer counting down annual leave.

Lives enriched: real stories

Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung — “way beyond my wildest dreams”

Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung, the Canadian computer engineers behind the blog Millennial Revolution, reached financial independence at 31 after roughly nine years of saving aggressively from their salaries in Toronto (Paul, 2021; Chen, 2021). They originally planned a single year of travel as a kind of victory lap. What changed their minds was a spreadsheet: after a year on the road they totted up their spending and found it came to about $40,000, roughly half what they had braced themselves for and no more than their projected budget for living at home (Chen, 2021). So they kept going, living nomadically in countries including Vietnam, Portugal, Germany, Malaysia and Hungary, and staying in apartments and Airbnbs rather than resorts (Paul, 2021).

Kristy has been candid that she is a natural pessimist and feared boredom, depression and a loss of identity after leaving her career. The reality, she told the Hack Your Wealth podcast, “was actually way beyond my wildest dreams” (Chen, 2021). Their travel evolved from moving between countries every few days to longer stays, local language lessons and a growing sense of community in favourite places. Bryce described the difference between a tourist, who drops in to absorb a culture, and a slow traveller, who wants to integrate, cook, make friends and see how people really live. They are also honest about the downsides: both acknowledged loneliness, and Bryce observed that long-term travel can be especially hard for single people because everyone you meet is on their way somewhere else (Chen, 2021). They went on to write a best-selling book about their approach (Shen and Leung, 2019).

Jeremy Jacobson and Winnie Tseng — six weeks that became five months

Jeremy Jacobson and Winnie Tseng saved a large share of their technology-sector incomes for about a decade by living in a small apartment, cycling and walking rather than owning a car, and cooking at home, then retired in their thirties to travel (Go Curry Cracker, n.d.). Jeremy said that from the day early retirement and full-time travel became a real goal to the day he resigned was “exactly 10 years and a day” (Mad Fientist, 2013).

Speaking to the Financial Independence Podcast from San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, the couple described how their pace naturally slowed. They had planned to spend six weeks in Mexico before heading south, but ended up staying for more than five months. Winnie reflected on how living simply in Guatemala changed her perspective: “when you live there, you realize how little you need”, and you appreciate what you have more. Jeremy said Mexico “feels like home for us right now” (Mad Fientist, 2013). Their story is a good illustration of Dickinson and Lumsdon’s (2010) slow travel: the freedom to linger turned a trip into a way of living.

Jason and Julie Buckley (OurTour) — a motorhome, 35 countries and an honest decade

Jason and Julie Buckley (“Jay and Ju” to their readers), a couple from the English Midlands who write the long-running OurTour blog, left their jobs at 39, rented out their home and spent two years touring Europe and North Africa in an elderly motorhome they named Dave. When the money ran low they came home, worked for a couple more years, and then stopped work for good in their early forties (Buckley and Buckley, no date; Buckley, 2025).

Looking back on a decade of very early retirement, Jay estimates they have spent about four years on the road across roughly 35 countries, staying in well over a thousand places. He writes warmly of “travelling across deserts, mountains, forests, beaches and fjords” and of meeting fascinating people they would never otherwise have encountered (Buckley, 2025). But his account is valuable precisely because it is balanced. After some years they began to tire of endless travel and found they enjoyed being part of a settled community; Brexit also made long European tours harder. Retirement brought a period of low mood and too much alcohol, which Jay tackled by taking up running again: he lost about 20 kg, stopped drinking and has since run marathons and ultra-marathons. Ju, too, runs, has kept up a daily Spanish habit for years and volunteers for their running club. His advice to anyone contemplating the same leap is to plan what you will do once travel “becomes stale”, yet he concludes that if they could speak to their nervous younger selves, they would give them a hug and tell them to go for it (Buckley, 2025).

Julie Bradley — retiring at 40 to sail around the world

Julie Bradley joined the US Army as a teenager, having experienced financial insecurity when her family fell apart. When she married her husband Glen at 30, he brought an audacious idea into the relationship: retire early and sail around the world. She credits that dream with changing how she thought about money: “That audacious and fantastic dream taught me that accumulating money for its own sake was not enough” (Bradley, 2019). Saving, she says, went from “machine-like to exciting”.

She retired at 40 on a military pension and they set sail on an ocean-going sailing boat bought overseas, later writing about the voyage in her book Escape from the Ordinary. Her article opens with the memory of sighting Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas after 21 days at sea and anchoring in what she believed was the most beautiful bay in the world (Bradley, 2019). Today the couple live in Arizona and volunteer internationally with the American Red Cross, a reminder that adventure can lead naturally into service.

Steve Haworth — 633 miles to mark a new beginning

Not every adventure requires a passport. Steve Haworth was 57 when he was made redundant by the Audit Commission in 2011 after more than 30 years in the public sector. With a redundancy payment and pension, he recognised he was luckier than many younger colleagues, but he also worried about “an unexpected vacuum” in his life (Haworth, 2021). He had lined up voluntary work with a homelessness charity, but first he wanted a challenge to mark the transition.

So he decided to walk the whole of the South West Coast Path, 633 miles from Minehead to Poole Harbour, with his partner joining him at weekends. He describes it as “one of the most rewarding experiences of my life” (Haworth, 2021), and his account is full of the texture that makes slow journeys memorable: goats in the Valley of the Rocks, lung-bursting cliff climbs, a pint at the Hartland Quay Hotel after a hard day, and the gradual discovery, around day six, that his body had settled into the rhythm of walking 13 miles a day. Setting off, he had wondered what “an overweight 57-year-old” was doing attempting such a trek; the path answered him mile by mile.

Darrow Kirkpatrick — a boyhood dream on the Colorado Trail

Darrow Kirkpatrick retired from a 30-year software career in 2011, aged 50, and founded the blog Can I Retire Yet? (Kirkpatrick, 2026). About five years into retirement, with more free time, he turned to a dream he had carried since boyhood camping trips with his father and the Scouts: completing a long-distance trail. He began section-hiking the 500-mile Colorado Trail through the Rockies, a project that took six years through his late fifties and early sixties.

It was not a simple triumph. He struggled with chronic leg injuries and anxiety, and eventually adapted by hiking with forearm crutches. Overcoming those fears became the theme of the hike and of the memoir he later wrote, Two Sticks, One Path. He reflects that this was the first time he had ever had the luxury of pursuing a dream fully, and that the enduring achievement of early retirement was to take roads he could not have taken before, roads he would have regretted not exploring by the end of his life (Kirkpatrick, 2026). Since then he has turned his outdoor skills to volunteering: leading group hikes and monitoring wild areas for a local non-profit organisation.

A balanced view

It would be easy to write a chapter that makes early retirement sound like one long sunset over a tropical anchorage. The evidence and the stories both suggest a more nuanced picture.

First, the research is encouraging but mostly observational. The holiday–mortality link (Gump and Matthews, 2000) comes from a study of high-risk American men and cannot rule out that healthier people simply travel more. The nature and step-count studies (White et al., 2019; Paluch et al., 2022) show associations, not proof. The neuroscience of novelty (Heller et al., 2020) was conducted with young adults. The awe-walk trial (Sturm et al., 2022) was small and did not shift clinical measures of depression or anxiety. And the tourism-and-dementia work (Wen et al., 2022) is a framework for future research, not evidence of benefit.

Second, the “holiday glow” fades, at least for workers returning to their jobs (de Bloom et al., 2009; Chen and Petrick, 2013). We do not yet know how far this applies to people who never go back to the office. The honest position is that long-term, freely chosen travel is under-researched.

Third, travel can be lonely and tiring. Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung speak openly about loneliness (Chen, 2021), and Jay and Ju tired of full-time touring after a few years and chose to put down roots again (Buckley, 2025). Morgan et al. (2015) found that some older travellers approached trips with anxiety. Constant movement can erode the friendships and routines that sustain wellbeing, and a nomadic life can make it harder to care for ageing parents, as Jay reflects.

Fourth, practical constraints are real. Health insurance, visas and residency rules (including the post-Brexit limits on how long UK citizens can stay in the Schengen area), exchange rates, and the cost of flights all shape what is possible. Several of our storytellers were only able to travel as they did because of pensions, careful investment and, in some cases, geographic arbitrage, which is living for a time where costs are lower. Travel also carries an environmental cost, particularly long-haul flying; slow, overland travel is one way to lighten that footprint (Dickinson and Lumsdon, 2010).

Finally, you do not have to go far. Steve Haworth’s 633-mile walk began a short drive from his home. The benefits most consistently supported by evidence (time outdoors, regular walking, variety, social connection and moments of awe) are available on a coastal path, a canal towpath or a local hill as much as on another continent.

Putting it into practice

• Start with a “taster” trip. Before committing to years on the road, try a one- to three-month journey, as Kristy and Bryce did with their original one-year plan. Track what you actually spend and how you actually feel.
• Slow down. Consider staying a month or more in one place. Rent a flat, shop at the local market, take a language class, and let the novelty become familiarity.
• Walk more of your journeys. Aim for a daily step count that suits your age and health (Paluch et al., 2022). A long-distance footpath, done in one go or in sections as Darrow Kirkpatrick did, can give structure and purpose to a year.
• Collect awe deliberately. On walks, pause to notice things that feel vast or wondrous (Sturm et al., 2022). Keep a photo or journal record.
• Get two hours of nature a week, wherever you are. It need not be exotic (White et al., 2019).
• Build connection into your travels. Volunteer, join walking or sailing clubs, use house-sits or home exchanges, or travel with friends. Plan how you will stay in touch with people at home.
• Plan for what comes after. As Jay of OurTour advises, ask yourself what you will do if and when travel stops being thrilling. Travel often works best as one strand of a rich retirement rather than the whole of it.
• Check the practicalities early. Research travel and health insurance, visa and residency rules, pension access ages, and how you will manage money abroad. Take professional advice where needed.
• Tread lightly. Favour rail, bus, bicycle and foot where you can, and consider fewer but longer trips.

Questions for reflection

1. When have you felt most alive while travelling? What exactly was happening: the place, the people, the pace or the challenge?
2. If you had fifty-two weeks of “holiday” a year instead of four or five, how would your idea of travel change?
3. Is there a journey you have carried since childhood, as Darrow Kirkpatrick did with his long-distance trail? What would it take to begin it, even in sections?
4. Would you rather travel fast and wide, or slow and deep? What does your answer tell you about what you are seeking?
5. Where could you find awe within an hour of your front door?
6. How would you guard against loneliness on a long journey, and how would you stay connected to the people and responsibilities you care about at home?
7. What would you want to have seen, walked or sailed by the end of your life that you will not reach if you keep working until state pension age?

References