Welcome to Restless Legs
If you're middle-aged, female, and/or travel alone (or not), get your things
Ahoy! Before I go any farther, I thought it would be a good idea to explain what makes this travel newsletter different from other ones. After all, if you want to read about travel, you can go just about anywhere for travel content, and some of it is pretty good. Why should you come here?
Well, writers are always told “write what you know.” So this is not a travel newsletter about luxury travel to $1,000-a-night resorts on islands reachable only by yacht. On the other hand, it’s also not about seeing [insert continent here] on $7.50 a day by sleeping in bus stations and washing your hair in public toilets. There are many, many splendid budget-travel resources—and I am strongly in favor of traveling as much as you like despite limited finances—but frankly, I am too old to enjoy roughing it, so I leave that niche to others. I did my time dragging all my luggage through subway stations and sleeping on my valuables in hostels when I was young, but my back and feet have taught me to be very keen on sleeping in nice beds and taking hot showers now, so that’s what I seek out on the road.
I’m going to be writing about what interests me, and I’m fairly confident that, if I do it right, other people will also find it useful and interesting. I wrote a newspaper column for many years, and I’ve enjoyed traveling since … well, as long as I can remember, even when my parents took me camping in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey in a 1968 VW microbus. (That formative experience gave me a strong distaste for both camping and insects, but that’s a story for absolutely no other time.)
So this will be content most likely to appeal to travelers in middle age, with the desire and means to be comfortable if not necessarily lavish. Like all women, I am always aware of safety concerns on the road, particularly when traveling alone, so that’s a perspective I bring. I try to be a traveler, not a tourist, and experience the places, food, music, etc. that the locals enjoy. I like to learn, relax, and have fun, preferably all at the same time. And I really like to share what I learn with others. That’s where you come in.
Ideally, I’d like to build a community of people who can share our journeys and learn from one another. But for right now, I just want to say, hi. I’m Sam. Let’s go somewhere.