Empty nesters discover the joy of slow travel

With kids grown up, couples are ticking off the bucket-list items that they had been postponing 

- Rishad Saam Mehta

A few years ago, when I posted videos on social media about my adventurous road trips with the Jeep Compass, about seven couples got in touch with me saying they had bought the vehicle and were looking forward to their own adventures.

The single thing that united them: They were all recent empty nesters. All of them said they were done with squeezing holidays into school holiday timetables and taking red-eye flights to maximise the time at their destination. Now that their children had left home, they wanted to travel without the shackles of schedules or the constraints of check-in luggage. They wanted to experience the freedom of slow travel and the romance of the open road.

Empty nesters is a term for couples whose children have moved out of the family home to pursue further studies or live on their own. This usually happens when the parents are in their late-40s or early-50s. In a figurative full circle, these couples are back where they were before they had children and with considerably more means than they had in their 20s. Rather than describe themselves as "lonely" empty nesters, feeling a void, they prefer the term "free bird" since they are now set to do all the things they had dreamt of when they were young.