The Global Slowmad

After more than eight months of nonstop travel, completing a full circle of the globe and visiting 21 countries along the way, I finally am heading back to Tulsa.

Regular readers who also have been following my (mis)adventures on social media may realize there are several destinations I still haven’t written about yet – one of which ended up being my favorite stop of the entire journey. Never fear. I’m not planning to travel nearly as much in 2026, so I should have plenty of spare time to finish up the remaining location reports.

But that’s not all. In addition to finally accepting my Gen X fate and posting quite a bit on Facebook and Instagram, I became a heavy user of the Notes app this year and have accumulated a few hundred pages of unpublished content about the places we visited, along with travel tips, travel fails, lessons learned, ways to save money and general musings about life, food, art, religion, urban planning and the seemingly perilous state of the world. I’ve seen a lot of strange things over the last several months and honestly am still processing some of it; however, that won’t keep me from sharing my thoughts in the meantime. There’s enough for a (very long and very boring) book.

To no one’s surprise, I have mixed feelings about my return. I love the mental stimulation and daily challenges that come with living on the road, but it’s been far more challenging to change locations every 3-7 days over the last ten weeks than it was slow traveling with Darla, where we stayed a month or more at each destination. Travel days are always difficult, and I expected as much. But having so many travel days in rapid succession has begun to take a physical and mental toll. And as someone who can get overstimulated by sights, sounds, smells, crowds and basic human interaction, the daily grind of on-the-go sightseeing does not leave much room for recovery time. It’s also difficult to squeeze in even a few hours each week for focused exercise when I’m constantly fatigued from walking all day. I treasure the moments of relative solitude in a park or on a short hike. That said, the pace of travel has allowed me to see a lot in a short period of time. And, candidly, I would not want to have spent a full month in a few of the places I’ve visited. So I have no regrets but am ready for a break.

Solo travel has its own trade-offs. It generally is less stressful when I only have to be concerned about my own interests and wellbeing (which certainly influenced my decisions to eat a century egg, stir-fried insects, grilled sheep intestines and a deep-fried baby frog, among other things), but there’s always this nagging reminder in the back of your mind that there’s no one around to help if something goes wrong. It’s nice to have a second set of eyes to make sense of confusing local signage and a second brain to pay attention to little details like going to the correct airport for your flight. It’s also nice to have the company. Solo travel can be isolating. That’s not always a bad thing, as it forces you to be alone with your thoughts and you develop stronger problem-solving skills. There may be a place for occasional solo travel in my future, but it probably won’t be a round-the-world whirlwind tour in 10 weeks next time.

What about the future of the blog? At this point, it does not generate enough traffic for me to attempt to monetize it without sacrificing the reader experience, so it will continue in its present form for as long as I have enough material and the energy to keep it going. I don’t want to subject anyone to popup ads, and it’s hard to imagine I’d ever agree to write a sponsored post or attempt to become a social media influencer. I might add some referral links someday for credit cards or specific products and services that I really use and really like, but that’s probably about it.

I also may try converting some of the location reports into city guides, complete with tables of contents, topic headings, neighborhood overviews and restaurant recommendations for random users of the Internet who may be serious about traveling to any of the locations we visited this year. I’ve read that this kind of content organization used to help with search engine optimization, but I’m not sure that matters anymore. From what I’ve read, 2025 has been a terrible year for professional bloggers because most people just read the Google AI summary and never click through to the source material. Even formerly successful bloggers are not getting the clicks they once did. The chances of enough people accidentally stumbling across my little blog these days to make it a meaningful source of income are pretty remote.

Finally, there is the “what will I do with the rest of my life” question. Glad you asked. 🙂

I am enjoying retirement far too much to return to the stress and frustration of a corporate environment and a real job. Beyond that, I’m really not sure. I likely will stockpile more points and miles even though it has become a challenging credit card rewards environment, generate some bank and brokerage account bonuses and perhaps do a little one-off HR and legal consulting from time to time. I’m looking forward to spending some quality time with friends and family before Alex heads off to medical school next summer. I’m also hoping to remodel a bathroom or two, commence a shock-and-awe campaign of Geneva-Convention-be-damned atrocities against a family of pocket gophers in an attempt to resurrect the lawn, practice my cooking skills and do some leisure reading. But mostly I suspect I’ll be planning our next slow travel adventure.