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Some Baby Boomer Traveler’s Tales
Baby boomers are a unique group of people. Only one in twenty relocated outside of their original home counties, more than seventy percent think that leisure travel is essential and most take at least two trips per year. Interestingly, they don’t all head to the same kinds of places and some baby boomers choose some truly unique vacations and getaways. Consider the following examples:
“Donald” is a single man of 57 living just outside of New York City. He worked a hectic schedule running his own business and rarely got any time off, even to just take a trip into the “Big Apple”. One unusually peaceful Sunday afternoon he began to get annoyed with the idea that he never got a vacation and so decided that New York City was the ideal place to get away for a few days over the next weekend. He began to look around and realized he wasn’t all that keen on a double-decker bus tour or a visit to the hustle and bustle of Times Square.
So rather than give up on the idea he simply sat back and pictured in his mind the things that really meant “New York” to him. The first image that popped into his head was the game at Yankee Stadium he had enjoyed with his father more than forty years earlier. He discovered that tours of the soon to be demolished field were being given and can happily say he spent a weekend getaway walking the field, touring the stands and locker rooms and having a great vacation.
Across the country, another boomer, Genevieve had grown up in San Francisco and enjoyed life in the wonderful city. She had always, however, had a fondness for the hills and landscape of New England. She also loved the Gilded Age author Edith Wharton. Like many baby boomers before her, she decided to head to the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts and visit the Gilded Age “Mecca” of Lenox and the home of her beloved writer in the same town. The Mount was built by the author in the early years of the twentieth century and she remained here, frequently visited by Henry James among others for many years.
In one week Genevieve was able to visit some of the most famous examples of architecture from the period, enjoy the Norman Rockwell Museum and tour the home of Daniel Chester French. Along the way she saw many of the same sites that hundreds of thousands of her fellow baby boomers head to the region to witness each year.