It’s been a summer of wanderlust for friends and family. I’ve lost count of how many of them visited Ireland, and I’ve marveled at photos from Norway and reports from New Orleans, Colorado, and even Brazil. These are not young people jetting around the globe, by the way — they’re retired or approaching it. And, if I’m to be completely honest, viewing their adventures just makes me a tad weary.
That’s not to say My Lovely Wife and I stayed put all summer, but our idea of an ambitious trip these days tops out at a three-hour drive north from Minneapolis to the North Shore of Lake Superior. We haven’t boarded an airplane in almost seven years, and neither of us seems particularly tempted to do so.
Maybe we’ve been everywhere we’ve ever felt the need to visit: We’ve traveled in Europe and spent time on the East and West Coasts. I’ve hiked through Glacier National Park; MLW has hitchhiked through England and France. We were much younger then, however, and now the thought of venturing far beyond our geographic comfort zone offers little allure.
To hear Fangli Hu tell it, though, we’re missing an opportunity to slow down the aging process.
Hu and her research team at Edith Cowan University in Joondalup, Australia, recently released a report arguing that travel, rather than inducing stress and anxiety, actually can act as a form of therapy for older adults. The report, published in the Journal of Travel Research, points to specific physiological benefits of venturing to exotic locales.
“Tourism isn’t just about leisure and recreation,” she notes in a statement. “It could also contribute to people’s physical and mental health.”
A positive travel experience, she says, can stimulate the body’s stress response, elevate metabolic rates, and improve immune-system response. “Put simply, the self-defense system becomes more resilient,” she explains. “Hormones conducive to tissue repair and regeneration may be released and promote the self-healing system’s functioning.”
It seems to be an attractive theory, until you learn that Hu and her team are basing their conclusions partly on the assumption that your travel plans do not focus primarily on lounging by the pool or yanking a slot machine in Vegas. If you’re spending a fair amount of your vacation hiking, climbing, walking, or cycling, she notes, you’ll be accruing these antiaging benefits. But, of course, you don’t need to fly to the Swiss Alps to squeeze in a workout after breakfast.
The researchers also admit that not all excursions may be positive ones. And if your vacation turns out to be less than carefree, you may return home feeling a lot older than when you left home. In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Hu notes that each adventure carries potential benefits and liabilities. “Some places can make people with anxiety or depression feel even more uneasy,” she says. “All this negativity may not be beneficial. So the type of travel depends on each person’s situation, their needs and their health status.”
It may be this uncertainty that is contributing to the ambivalence MLW and I have been feeling. Will the novelty of new surroundings, fresh interactions, and surprising discoveries be worth all the time, energy, and expense required to get from here to there and navigate the unforeseeable upon arrival? That’s not a question that tends to surface for us when considering yet another trip to Duluth and its environs. Familiarity, in this case, breeds comfort rather than contempt. We frequent our favorite haunts, soak in the beauty of the North Shore, and still manage to handle the unexpected with a minimum of angst.
So why were we chatting the other night about a late-winter exploration of Charleston, S.C.? Or pondering the intricacies of intercontinental air travel while marveling at photos of our friends cycling around Amsterdam? Despite Hu’s theories, it’s not because we think such adventures will add a few years to our lives. I suspect it’s more about revisiting our own latent wanderlust before we’re too old to arrive at a suitable response.
And, even then, we might still end up in Duluth.
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