On the Road, Being a Woman ‘of a Certain Age’ Has Certain Advantages

Much to my astonishment, I have discovered that I am getting older and that aging changes the experience of travel, particularly for women.

The revelation occurred about a month ago when I picked up my suitcase and ran out the door to catch a cab to the airport. I felt my lower back wrench and tighten. Through the whole trip, I couldn’t get up from a chair or turn in certain ways without feeling a shock of pain.

Before that, I had hints I wasn’t going to be young forever, all while traveling. I noticed on a bus trip from Santiago, Chile, to Buenos Aires that I’d gained weight around my stomach. On the street in Cuernavaca, men’s eyes didn’t follow me as they usually had in Mexico. And in Paris last spring, shopkeepers called me “madame” instead of “mademoiselle.”

It was inevitable. I couldn’t travel often or far enough to escape it. So I’m trying to put a positive spin on it by focusing not on the ways getting older makes travel more difficult--the diminished strength, endurance and youthful sense of invulnerability--but on the benefits a traveler discovers because she’s “of a certain age.”

“I look forward to growing old and wise and audacious,” actress Glenda Jackson once said. I hope she meant it, because wisdom and audaciousness are excellent handmaidens to travel, and I want to keep traveling right to death’s door.

Clearly, it’s possible. Bess Chase of Madison, Wis., started traveling at 100 with Elderhostel, a Boston-based not-for-profit organization that provides educational tours for people older than 55. She made her last trip at 107 and died earlier this year at 108.

“Elderhostel makes travel easier for older women by providing a safe and secure environment,” says Marcia Rhodes, who directs Elderhostel programs that take place at the Center for Studies of the Future in Ventura. The tour organization was cofounded in 1975 by educator and social activist Marty Knowlton after a visit to the folk schools of Scandinavia, where he saw older people passing on their traditions to youngsters. The Elderhostel idea was to give American seniors the chance to stay vibrant through education and travel. Now the organization offers 11,000 programs a year in more than 100 countries.

We Americans live in a culture that prizes the flat stomachs and high jinks of 20-year-olds. But there are places where age is respected above youth. This was one of the things I learned from my monthlong stay in China several years ago. The same is true in parts of Europe and Southeast Asia, older women travelers tell me.

Marilyn Mason, a well-traveled Santa Fe, N.M., psychologist, says she is called “mama” in some parts of Africa and treated especially well in Tibet. “The people are often quite amazed at an older woman traveling and show a lot of respect,” says Mason, who is 68.

Sandra Gustafson, author of the “Cheap Eats” and “Cheap Sleeps” guidebook series (published by Chronicle Books), has noticed that she gets better treatment at hotels now that she’s in her 50s. “They know that I’m not going to have a wild party in the room or leave without paying the bill,” she says.

At 77, Frances Weaver, who writes and speaks about happy, healthy aging, has just begun using a cane. “It’s a good way to get to the front of a line,” she says. Sometimes she arranges for a wheelchair in airports, partly to avoid walking but also to get where she needs to go with a minimum of confusion. “The guys who push the chairs really know what they’re doing,” Weaver says. For her, traveling successfully as a senior is a matter of knowing and accepting one’s limitations. She knows that carry-on baggage can weigh a person down, so she checks everything but her handbag before boarding a plane.

Increased self-knowledge is another benefit of advancing age. By the time you’re 45 or so, you begin to better understand how you want to spend your time on a trip, not to mention whom you want to spend it with. Louanne Kalvinskas, the 71-year-old co-owner of Distant Lands, a travel agency and book, map and gear store in Old Town Pasadena, just returned from a trip to Berlin and Dresden in Germany and Prague, Czech Republic. In Berlin she toured with an Elderhostel group, which helped her get acclimated before going on to Prague and Dresden by herself. She says a woman in the group wanted to join her on her post-Elderhostel travels. “As a younger person, I would have felt that I should take her with me. But no. I wanted to go by myself,” Kalvinskas says.

I’m not old enough for Elderhostel and haven’t started using a cane. I have, however, noticed that men don’t notice and harass me as much as they used to, which makes me feel more secure. Rita Golden Gelman, the author of “Tales of a Female Nomad” (Crown, 2001), agrees. “Traveling is easier when you get older in terms of safety,” says Gelman, who is in her 60s. “I am not chased down the street because I am not young and nubile.”

For Phyllis Stoller, founder of the Florida-based Women’s Travel Club, being older means giving herself permission to dress comfortably. “I don’t travel in tight things, short skirts, high heels,” she says. “If I go into a bar, I don’t look like I’m there for a pickup.”

Of course, there’s a psychological price to pay for the respect and freedom conferred by advancing age. Being called “madame” in France bruised my ego.

But I’ve decided to look on the bright side, which increasingly seems to me the biggest blessing of being a woman traveler “of a certain age.”