Slower travel, honest planning, and learning to leave space for what your body actually needs.
Managing a chronic condition on the road doesn't mean you have to give up on getting out there. What it does mean is doing things differently than most travel advice assumes you will.
For me, I started to understand this years back while raising my two youngest kids with autism. I learned fairly quickly to plan holidays around what they could genuinely handle, not what the average travel brochure thought they should be able to do.
There were never any jam-packed itineraries, no overstuffed schedules, and definitely no pushing through just because "we've come all this way."
I wasn't going to set them up to struggle for the sake of ticking boxes. This approach has stuck with me.
Now, even though my kids are grown and sorted, I plan my own travel the same way. No pressure to see everything, plenty of downtime built in, and half-days instead of trying to cram everything into full ones.
There are always extra rest days for when my body decides it's had enough - and it will, usually at exactly the wrong moment. It was making my world a lot smaller.
Over the past few years, as my health declined, I found myself spending more and more time stuck in my bedroom with either pain or debilitating fatigue. I had lost the ability to do simple things that used to bring me joy.
I could no longer go for walks along the beach, or paddleboard - which was something I loved doing early in the morning or late in the afternoon to catch the sunrises and sunsets. Some weeks, I couldn't even make it out of the house, which does wonders for your mental health, as you can imagine.
So this shift into travel wasn't just about chasing some idea of freedom. It was about getting my life back, bit by bit.
It's about working out a version of travel that actually fits the body I have now, not the one I used to have or the one I keep hoping will come back someday.
This section is where I share how I manage that reality. From pacing myself and planning around bad days, to the small things that help me get through rough patches on the road.
You’ll also see notes like this pop up around the site:
💬 Chronic Illness Tip: This helped me during a crash day.
Because not every traveller is working with the same energy levels or timeline. You're allowed to go at whatever pace works for you, even if that pace looks nothing like what everyone else is doing.
I’m still figuring out exactly what this newsletter will look like — probably a mix of road trip updates, things I’ve learned the hard way, and useful tips I’d tell a mate.
No pressure. No spam. Just the occasional note from me when there’s something worth sharing. Drop your email below if you’d like to stay in the loop...
Forget perfect. One life. One road. Just go.
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