Next Tribe

Najwa Klostermann isn’t just a frequent traveler, she’s a super frequent traveler. She’s done seven trips with NextTribe in the last year and a half, with Turkey coming up next month and Argentina and South Africa in 2027! That’s in addition to all of her other travels: solo, with family and friends, and sometimes with new friends she’s made on NextTribe trips. Born in the US, her parents immigrated from Iraq in the 1950s.

My quest to experience Japan originated quite a few years ago and ran through unexpected places– Hawai’i and South Carolina. My mother—and her mother—grew up in Hawai’i, an unorthodox upbringing for a Scottish family. They landed there because the family traveled to Hawai’i to raise cattle on the famous Parker Ranch. When my grandmother was young, the family moved to Honolulu to live in Manoa, adjacent to the mountain.

When Dawn Janáček took a work assignment in India, she was going for the adventure. She came back with so much more. In 2004, I went to India for work, and I was genuinely excited about it. This wasn’t something I was dragged into—I wanted the assignment. I wanted to see it for myself. And Bangalore doesn’t ease you in. NextTribe takes small groups of women ages 45+ on fun, transformational trips.

The physical demands of a trip--even a relatively quiet one--can be daunting as we get older. Here's how to prepare and when to start. For months, she was really looking forward to her trip to Costa Rica with her daughter. The rainforest, the wildlife, the whole thing. And then her daughter mentioned she wanted to go zip lining. That’s when my client started quietly panicking. Not about the heights. About whether she could keep up. Whether she’d be the reason they couldn’t do it.

My husband and I were sitting at a table outside a fast-food restaurant in a bustling Santiago neighborhood, exhausted after a nine-hour flight, when someone dropped some coins at my feet. I bent over to help him scoop them up. They must have spilled out of a hole in his pocket, I figured. Then a few more clattered onto the sidewalk. My husband leaned in to help. Suddenly, something felt weird.

On NextTribe's Greece trip to Greece, we'll meet goddesses galore in Athens, Hydra and other islands. Their stories challenge the patriarchy--then and now. If you’ve ever taken a course on Classical Civilization, you might remember being all confused about which goddess/god was revered for what benefit to the populace. All you need to know is that in Greek mythology, goddesses had no time for the patriarchy. They had work to do.

There are two kinds of travel days: the ones where you’re actually going somewhere, and the ones where you’re stuck at your desk, in a waiting room, or on the couch with a bag of chips, dreaming about somewhere else. NextTribe exists for both. We’re here to get you on a real trip, but we’re also fully in favor of the fantasy trip — the one you take at 11 p.m. by scrolling through someone else’s photos of a Moroccan souk or an Antarctic ice floe and thinking, I could do that. I should do that.

More than a million Americans crossed the border for healthcare last year. Here’s what one of them found. In 1992, I was a CNN reporter in Seoul, South Korea, newly arrived on our first overseas posting with my foreign service officer husband. We’d been together five years and were talking about having a baby—which meant I’d been quietly hoping to get pregnant on that particular tour of duty.

The swankiest suite and the scruffiest budget room have exactly one thing in common: you will spend your first hours there completely baffled. Think about the number of hotel rooms you’ve been in. The swank, the scruffy, the minimalist, the cave-dark. The one with the closet big enough for a family of four; another with nary a hook for your things. Each is so different—and yet they all share one essential quality: they are puzzles that need to be solved, preferably before you go to sleep.

What to do if your job has been the organizing principle of your life for 33 years? You escape to South America to keep your sense of wonder alive. Beyond becoming a mother, the biggest change in my life happened when I retired from a 33-year career in cutting-edge technology, the last 24 of them with IBM. Back then, the earliest age you could retire with full benefits from ever-shrinking Big Blue was 55. I was in no hurry; thought I’d wait until I was 58. Then I decided to wait until I looked 58.