There’s a question I get asked more than any other. It isn’t about altitude sickness, or boot break-in, or whether the food in the teahouses is any good. It’s this:
How do people make time to travel?
I’ve been asked it by doctors, teachers, contractors, retirees, and people three years from retirement who are already counting. It’s always framed as a logistics question. It almost never is.
The best answer I have to that question is a couple from Alabama named Russ and Susan Moore.
Two Kids at a Gymnastics Clinic
Russ is a municipal bonds consultant. Susan is a gymnastics coach. They live outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and they’ve been together since the early ’80s, when they met at a gymnastics clinic during their second semester at the University of Alabama.
They went on to become Alabama cheerleaders — the kind of shared history that tells you something about two people. Whatever they’ve done since, they’ve done it together, and they’ve done it moving.
That’s the part that matters. Russ and Susan were never elite athletes. They were never seasoned international travelers. They were two active people in their 50s who somehow always ended up hiking or climbing something on vacation, and who had started to wonder, quietly, whether something bigger might be possible.
They didn’t have a plan for finding out. They had a hunch.
The Night Everything Changed
In 2017, Susan saw a Facebook post about an Everest Base Camp presentation Holly and I were giving at Mountain High Outfitters in Tuscaloosa. Just a slideshow and a talk on a weeknight — the kind of thing that’s easy to scroll past.
She didn’t scroll past. She talked Russ into coming.
They sat up front. I remember that. They listened to us talk about Nepal — the Khumbu Valley, the suspension bridges, the light on Ama Dablam in the afternoon — and then they peppered us with questions. Good questions. Specific ones. The kind people ask when they’re not just curious but calculating.
By the time they got home that night, they’d decided to go.
Not “someday.” Not “let’s think about it and revisit in the spring.” That night. In the car, probably somewhere on McFarland Boulevard, two people in their 50s decided they were going to walk to the foot of the highest mountain on Earth.
Everest Base Camp, 2018
The following year, Russ and Susan joined our inaugural Hobnail trek to Everest Base Camp — 14 other clients, plus Holly and me.
If you’ve never done it: the trek to Base Camp is not a technical climb. You don’t need ropes or crampons or a background in mountaineering. What you need is the willingness to walk uphill for a couple of weeks at altitudes where the air holds roughly half the oxygen you’re used to, sleeping in unheated teahouses, eating a great deal of dal bhat, and getting up the next morning to do it again.
It is hard in a way that has very little to do with athletic ability and quite a lot to do with deciding, each morning, to keep going.
The Moores kept going.
Russ still talks about the first time he saw Everest.
“It was absolutely breathtaking. Nothing can prepare you for it.”
He’s right. Nothing does. You come around a bend on the trail and there it is — the summit pyramid, the plume of snow coming off it sideways in the jet stream — and every photograph you’ve ever seen of it turns out to have been a rumor.
The Spark
That trip lit something.
Since Base Camp, Russ and Susan have done three more Hobnail adventures. They’ve trekked the Central European Alps down to the Dolomites. They climbed Mount Kilimanjaro — 19,340 feet, the highest point in Africa, and the tallest freestanding mountain in the world — which they mention the way other people mention a 10K.
And last year, they went to Ecuador, where they paddled the Amazon, hiked Cotopaxi, and snorkeled the Galápagos. Three wildly different worlds in one trip: rainforest, high volcanic páramo, and an archipelago full of animals that have never learned to be afraid of people.
Four continents. Not bad for a bond consultant and a gymnastics coach.
The Answer
So I finally asked Russ directly. Two busy professionals, full careers, real lives — how do you carve out the time for all this?
He shrugged.
“We just make it happen.”
That was it. That was the whole answer.
I’ll admit I wanted more. I wanted a system. A calendar hack, a savings strategy, some clever arrangement with an employer. Something I could pass along.
But the longer I’ve done this work, the more I’ve come to believe Russ gave me the only honest answer there is.
What I’ve Learned About How People Make Time to Travel
Here’s the pattern, and I’ve watched it hold for years now: the people who go on these trips are almost never the ones with extra time.
They’re surgeons and small business owners and parents of teenagers. They’re people mid-career, mid-mortgage, mid-everything. Their calendars are not emptier than yours.
What they have in common isn’t huge piles of money and time. It’s a decision. At some point — often a specific, identifiable point, like a Tuesday night at an outfitter in Tuscaloosa — they decided that the thing they’d been putting off had waited long enough.
Everything after that was logistics. And logistics, it turns out, are solvable. Time off gets requested. Money gets saved. Boots get broken in on the local trails. The Facebook post gets clicked instead of scrolled past.
Time for a trip doesn’t just appear. You make it appear.
If You’ve Been Waiting
I know a lot of people reading this are waiting for the right time. After this project wraps. After the kids are out of the house. After the knee feels better. Next year, when things settle down.
I’d gently suggest that things do not settle down. They just change shape.
The right time isn’t something you find. It’s something you choose.
Russ and Susan chose theirs in a car on the way home from a slideshow, and it’s taken them to four continents since.
Your version of that night might be right now.
Ready to make it happen? Take a look at our upcoming Hobnail adventures and let’s talk about which one is yours.
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