Next Tribe

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.

On a mother-daughter trip in Ireland, Jennifer McGaha contemplates letting go--of an adult daughter leaving the nest and of a dear friend who had recently passed. In May of 2022, my adult daughter and I traveled to Ireland on for our first post-Covid mother-daughter excursion.

By night, she's a bass guitarist. By day, a volunteer who fights sex trafficking. Any chance she gets, she's a traveler--now a NextTribe traveler. Who doesn’t love a woman who can play the bass (both electric and standup) and lives the dream playing music with different bands in the Live Music Capital of the World?

Who doesn’t love a woman who can play the bass (both electric and standup) and lives the dream playing music with different bands in the Live Music Capital of the World? Becky Austen, who traveled with us to Japan in April–her first Next Tribe trip–says almost everything in her life has been a “happy accident.” She got into playing the bass in 2008 when she dropped her kids off at School of Rock and she saw a sign offering adult music lessons. She signed up and never looked back.

The companion side of every great trip is a quiet inventory of things that didn't make it home — and what we learned from losing them. It arrived, as these things do, in the early-morning murk between sleep and full consciousness—that particular pang of grief reserved, in my experience, for sudden awareness of a beloved thing that is simply gone.

May 15th is the deadline for our travel photo contest! We’ve had some amazing entries, and we’ve been moved greatly by the photos as well as the stories behind some of the photos you sent in. We don’t know if the photo Elena Seibert submitted will win, but she won our hearts with her description of how a trip to the Swiss Alps changed her, and her friend, forever. *** Elena has taken pictures of faces for years.

The shoes you wear on your travels can make or break your experience. Here we select 16 of the best styles--from loafers to sandals and more. The number one piece of advice I give before every trip is: Wear. Comfortable. Shoes. I say it again and again and again. And still, someone usually shows up wearing something cute but stiff — the kind of shoe that looked great in the store and is going to ruin day two in the souks.

After her daughter left home, Jessica Seiders started traveling to fill the empty space. Only when the pandemic forced her to stop moving did that truly happen. When I boarded the flight to Bali, it was just another stop. I had already spent eight months moving — Spain, Croatia, Austria, Thailand. I had sold everything I owned, walked away from a 15-year corporate career, and said yes to a life that didn’t come with a plan. Bali was next on the list. A few weeks. Maybe a month. Then somewhere new.