Every year, it’s something.
The summer before last, we drove. Two successive flight cancellations out of Tulsa forced Bonnie and me onto the road — three days each way, two nights in hotels, the endless interstate unspooling through Oklahoma and Kansas and Wyoming until we reached Red Lodge, Montana, and Bonnie’s brother Mo and his wife Cheryl waiting for us in the Beartooth Mountains. It was that trip, on the way home, that we stopped in Gillette, Wyoming, and sat on a park bench overlooking a small lake, and the idea for The Encore Project was born from the exhaustion and the beauty and the question of what came next.
This summer we flew. We left Billings at six in the evening and arrived home at two in the morning, eight hours to cover a distance that should have taken three, because that is what air travel does now, especially if Denver is involved. Denver is always involved.
I am eighty-one years old. My hips hurt. The backpack I carry through airports is stuffed to the brim because I’ve learned to save whatever I can on baggage fees, and it is heavier than it should be for a man with my specific collection of physical complaints. Airport terminals are long. The walks between gates are longer. Every year I wonder, quietly and without saying it out loud, whether this is the last time I’ll be able to do this.
And every year, I go anyway.
The Honest Cost of Getting There
Nobody writes about this part honestly. Travel writing is full of sunrises over the Beartooth Range and golden light on mountain streams and the particular blue of a Montana sky that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It is not full of the tightness in the hip flexors after four hours in an economy seat, or the strategic calculation of which terminal has the closest gate, or the specific misery of a two-hour delay in Denver when you’ve already been traveling for six hours and home is still two more away.
The AARP’s 2025 Travel Trends study found that more than half of adults fifty and older cite spending time with family and friends as their primary travel motivator, and that almost all of them believe travel is good for their mental and physical health. I don’t argue with that. I’ve lived it. What the study doesn’t capture is the growing gap, for men my age, between knowing travel is good for you and managing the physical reality of actually getting there.
The hip doesn’t care about the view from the Beartooth Pass. The hip cares about the gate at Denver International.
Researchers have a name for the psychological shift that happens when older men start reconsidering travel: the mobility fear threshold — the point at which the knowledge that a fall can do more damage now than it once did begins to quietly reshape where you go and how you get there. I haven’t let that fear make the decision for me. But I feel it. Every year, a little more than the year before.
The hip doesn’t care about the view from the Beartooth Pass. The hip cares about the gate at Denver International.
Why We Keep Going
Red Lodge, Montana is a small resort town southwest of Billings, tucked against the Beartooth Mountains in country so beautiful it makes you want to argue with anyone who has applied the phrase “God’s Country” to somewhere flatter and less dramatic. Mo and Cheryl — Bonnie’s brother and his wife, who spent years working for the San Francisco 49ers before settling here — have a mountain home just outside town and a second property in town itself where family gathers every Fourth of July.
We have made this trip many, many times. It is the travel I do not question, even when I am questioning everything else.
The family that remains — and at eighty-one, the circle is smaller than it once was — is almost entirely on Bonnie’s side, and most of them make it to Red Lodge every summer. The scenery would justify the trip on its own: streams running cold and clear out of the mountains, valleys that open suddenly into views that seem engineered to make a man feel appropriately small, skies and clouds and the particular quality of light at altitude that photographers spend entire careers trying to capture. But it is not the scenery that gets me on the plane. It is the people I love most. It is always the people.
A 2024 study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that long-distance travel is positively associated with higher cognitive function, lower depression, and reduced loneliness in older adults — framing leisure travel as a vital tool for the social connectedness that stands between an older man and the quiet deterioration that isolation accelerates. I didn’t need a study to tell me the ten days in Red Lodge leave me feeling more alive than the month before them. But it’s useful to know the research agrees.
The Faith I Actually Have
Somewhere around seventy, something shifts: you stop waiting. You stop deferring to other people’s schedules, other people’s availability, other people’s hesitation. If the trip matters, you go. If it requires driving three days because the planes aren’t cooperating, you drive. If it means arriving home at two in the morning, you arrive home at two in the morning and you do not apologize for any of it.
The research makes the case more forcefully than sentiment can. Regular travel, according to the Global Coalition on Aging and the Transamerica Institute, can lower mortality risk by 36 percent and reduce the risk of dementia by 47 percent. A 2024 study in the Journal of Travel Research found that positive travel experiences may delay some signs of aging by training the brain’s flexibility in ways that reduce Alzheimer’s risk. The question, in light of those numbers, isn’t whether you can afford the physical effort of the trip. It’s whether you can afford to stop making it.
I think about this standing in the security line at Denver International with my overstuffed backpack and my protesting hips. The indignities of modern air travel are real. The cost to the body is real and growing. And the reason to absorb that cost anyway — to board the plane when it finally boards, to walk the distance between gates, to arrive whenever you arrive — is one of the most important investments I can make in the version of myself that exists five and ten years from now.
The mountains don’t ask how your hips are. The family doesn’t count the hours you spent in Denver.
The Question I Ask in April
Every April or May, when it comes time to book the flights for July, I sit with the question I don’t entirely ask out loud: will I still be up for this?
The honest answer is that I don’t know. The physical logistics — the airport walks, the gate changes, the delays, the weight of the bag, the recovery time on either end — are no longer invisible, the way they were when travel was simply something you did without calculating the cost to your body.
And I know that when I am sitting on Mo and Cheryl’s porch looking at the Beartooth Range with the people I love most, none of that calculation feels like the right frame for the experience. The mountains don’t ask how your hips are. The family doesn’t count the hours you spent in Denver. The Fourth of July fireworks over Red Lodge don’t care how tired you were when you got there.
They are simply there. And so are you. And that, for now, is enough.
What I Would Say to Another Man Asking the Same Question
Keep going, in whatever form you can manage. Modify the trip before you abandon it. Pack lighter. Accept that recovery takes longer and build that into the plan. But go — because the cognitive stimulation, the family, the simple act of being somewhere that isn’t your usual four walls are doing something for you that is very difficult to replicate any other way. And the people you go to see are not getting younger either.
Make the reservation in April. Adjust as needed. And then go.
