By O-Zone, I mean “Old Zone.”
I realized I had crossed the invisible border between Baby Boomer and Old, when I bought travel medical insurance for a recent trip.
Apparently, insurance agencies have no qualms about telling it like it is: If you’re 61 or older….your insurance will skyrocket.
The assumption is that once you reach that magic number, your body starts to implode. Or explode.
The “pre-existing conditions” on the insurance policy read like a grocery list of decrepitude, and for that, oldies are penalized.
Yes, I get that insurance companies assume more risk when they insure older travelers, but the price we pay for reaching the ripe old age of 61-plus is kind of shocking. For a six-day trip to California, it cost me $220 in travel insurance.
I guess you can’t put a price on health. Or can you?
All you have to do is walk by a travel agency or Google “senior travel” to know that aging is a new and extremely profitable cottage industry. And by aging, I’m referring to people over 55, which seems to be the new benchmark.
Seniors’ group tours seem to dominate the landscape. It’s like all of a sudden, at 55, we need someone to plan our trips, dictate when and where we eat, decide what hotels to stay in, and generally lead us through our vacation, slowly, by the hand.
It’s a fact that many seniors on fixed incomes can’t afford the luxury holidays they used to take when they were working. And for those folks, group tours are a boon.
Bye-bye independence.
Then there is the Senior Discovery Tours, “the largest Canadian tour operator specializing in fully escorted worldwide group tours for the 50-plus traveler.”
Seriously, 50-plus? I find it fascinating that someone out there arbitrarily decided that people age 50 and over have different travel needs, than say, someone age 48.
Do we really have such different needs? Think rules. Think exceptions.
So, why am I railing against these age-specific travel issues?
Because they make me feel old. Dylan Thomas had it right in his poem Do not go gentle into that good night when he wrote: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
You can bet I’m going to enter old age kicking and screaming.
In the words of Ian Brown, from his book Sixty, “You know you’re getting old when someone offers you their seat on the bus or speaks extra-loud to you.”
One down, one to go.
Shelley Civkin is a retired communications officer with the Richmond Public Library
