Adventure travel has long been promoted as the stuff of the young and the able-bodied, who are often depicted striding along paths, traversing streams, and navigating narrow mountain passes. Joy and Brad Ryan—94 and 43, respectively—want to change that.
The grandmother-grandson duo have been traveling together for 10 years, but the pair weren’t always so close. After Brad’s parents divorced, they were estranged for roughly a decade before reconnecting when Brad was in veterinary school and on the cusp of burning out. After reflecting on what mattered most, he called Joy and asked her to join him in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park—yes, she said. The experience set off a shared desire to see more of the country, and in 2023, Joy became the oldest person to see every U.S. national park when they visited the National Park of American Samoa, roughly 6,700 miles from their home in Duncan Falls, Ohio. Now, she and Brad are in the middle of a second quest: visiting all seven continents. (Next up? Asia.)
Afar sat down with Brad and Joy to discuss intergenerational travel, the power of saying yes, and connecting across cultures.
How has your travel together changed over time?
Brad: We started very, very humble—$3,000 to get us around the United States for a month. Camping, ramen noodles, fried chicken from gas stations: just trying to stretch that money out so we could see as many national parks as we could in a short amount of time. We went from a tent with an air mattress to a tent with military cots to then going viral and having corporate sponsors that would put us up in hotels.
But the thing that’s stayed the same has been to just show up and allow the experience to be what it will be. And sometimes that burns us, but usually I think it turns down the expectations and the stress. We’ve had plenty of magical wildlife encounters that way and met awesome people. So usually we just show up and say, Hey, we’ve got this much time. What do you say?
Joy: He doesn’t just go, We’re going to go this way. But if he sees something that looks interesting, You want to go over there and do that? Yeah, we’ll do that. We saw people working on a mammoth—they were only using a toothbrush [to remove the dirt and sediment from the bones]. It’s huge!
Brad: We were headed toward Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota, and someone said, Well, you don’t want to miss that. So a lot of it is just chatting with people in visitor centers or restaurants. And people come up and they want to know what we’re doing and where we’re heading, and tell you, Be sure to stop here or there. And a lot of, a lot of our trip has just been sort of improvised. You don’t want to miss the highlights, but you also don’t want to be just running to get 10 things checked off your list and not really enjoy the the unexpected.
It’s saying “yes“ to what comes up.
Brad: That’s how we ended up on the Iditarod, too. We were at a little roadside stand in Seward, Alaska, and some woman drove by and recognized us. So she called her friends and we ended up on a dog sled later that day. We were just racing through the woods with 10 sled dogs.
Joy: There was another lady there with me, same age, practically, and I said, I guess we’re going to have to hold on. And we did. And her grandson was driving the little cart, and, man, they was really going like the dickens down through there. That was funny. That was really fun. Brad was hanging on with one hand trying to take pictures.
Brad: Whenever we end up doing something that’s a little more adrenaline inducing, she’s always chuckling through the whole thing, which helps make me feel like I’m less irresponsible.
Joy: You gotta live it up while you can.
What has surprised you?
Joy: Well, I guess a lot of things, because you don’t ever know who’s going to come up and tell you where to go next. And the world is open, and people don’t realize how beautiful it is out there. It’s amazing, what’s out there. It really is.
Brad: We really have traversed almost every corner of this country. So you realize, on one hand that it’s so diverse. But you also start to realize that there are these common threads in our humanity that most people don’t get to experience if they’re not actually out there looking people in the eye and having these conversations.
We’re very concerned about what’s been happening with our national parks recently. Beyond the fact that our parks are more vulnerable than they’ve ever been because of these federal employees being fired, is that this is the most powerful opportunity for people to come together and set the differences aside and actually have a shared moment of humanity. You’re not debating differences of political views or religion when you’re watching the sun rise over the Grand Canyon or seeing a humpback whale come up next to your boat in the Channel Islands. So I think that’s what surprised me is that despite how crazy diverse it is on one level, at the end of the day, if you choose to look for the the common ground, it’s there.
Joy: The national parks is also the one of the few places people can take their family that’s affordable. Baseball games are supposed to be a family thing, but cost $27 for a ticket.
Brad: There’s also hope, because people are speaking up about it, and I think that love for the national parks does cut across the typical dividing lines. So I have faith that people care about protecting these lands and the wildlife and just making sure that that is an experience that’s going to be there for their their children and their grandchildren.
That’s what’s so lovely about what you’re doing. You’re not only sharing this experience together, but you’re ambassadors for this mindset. As I see it, you’re also ambassadors for intergenerational travel.
Brad: For us, this was a journey of reconciliation. When you’re driving for an entire month across the country, there comes a point where you’re going to end up discussing everything that you want to discuss. I was sort of on a detective mission to piece together my memories, compared to her memories of certain events. And you start to sort of piece it all together, and you realize you’ll never get the whole story, but you put enough of it together that you can start to have grace for everyone and move on, forgive. We had a lot of adventure and a lot of laughter, but we also had tears and we also had anger and we had frustration and annoyance. I found out later she would turn her hearing aids down when she didn’t want to hear my voice anymore.
Joy: Well, at first it was the music. He said it was supposed to be music. It didn’t sound like music to me.
Brad: She forgets all the Ella Fitzgerald and the Nat King Cole I played for her.
The duo began traveling together in 2015, and took their first trip to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Courtesy of Joy and Brad Ryan
For anybody looking to travel with someone else for a long period of time, what’s your advice?
Joy: You have to be pretty good friends to start with, because you don’t want to start out with somebody you don’t really know. You don’t know what the heck is going to happen out there. You gotta have somebody that you aren’t afraid to say something to. You just can’t just grab somebody.
Brad: Good communication, people that are flexible. It helps to set expectations ahead of time accordingly. At the beginning, we knew we were going to be sleeping in a tent most of the time. It was fun because she wasn’t going to complain about only having a shower every three days.
Joy: If the wind blows the right way, you’re alright.
Brad: Just make sure that you’re focused on the intention of the trip. This trip was not only to see all these national parks, but it’s also because I want to hear her story. I had a recorder going the whole time, because I wanted to know: How did you meet my grandfather? What was your love story? What was it like? What were some of the highlights of your childhood? What did you learn from your mom? She had to be willing to be interrogated while we were driving around. If I went with somebody else that wasn’t willing to say yes, it would have been miserable.
You’re 94 and 43, respectively. What does age have to do with travel?
Joy: If you want to do it, do it. If somebody asks you to do something, don’t just say “no” right away. Say, “OK, I’ll give it a whirl.” That’s the idea. But, you know, I’m getting close to the end, so I’m going to live it up as long as I can.
Brad: I don’t think of age the way I did in the beginning. Our first trip, I’m driving to the Smoky Mountains with her in the rain, and she’s never been in a tent. She’s never been camping. I’m like, OK, this is either going to be the best weekend ever or it’s going to be a disaster. She fell off the air mattress twice on that first night. And I knew that because she was laughing. The next morning, the rain stopped and the fog lifted and we ended up hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail. I knew then that my preconceived notions about the limitations of age were unfounded.
Joy: He kept saying, “Grandma, we can go back down.” I said, “I’m getting up this mountain if it kills me.” There was a whole bunch of college kids up there, and they gave me a rousing cheer.
Brad: We all wish that we could live forever, that our bodies weren’t going to fall apart, and that these adventures are always going to be available to us. So there’s certainly a message of “seize the day,” but there’s also a message of, well, if this woman, who started traveling at 85, has gotten as far as she has, and has actually gotten healthier and more coordinated and got a passport at 91, then what am I doing sitting on the couch feeling like my best days are behind?
Joy: We started out to get these older people that sat in the chair to get up. They didn’t want to do anything but walk around the block, and we wanted to know that they can do this. It’s not: Oh, you’re too old. You can’t do that. Well, how do you know till you try it?
Brad: People stop traveling for different reasons. There are a lot of folks that stop traveling after they stop experiencing joy in their life at the level that they did before a death or a health setback. So I think knowing that there’s this woman who climbed across Great Sand Dunes National Park at age 87 and climbed up a dune and then rolled down it—I think that that lands the same in almost any person that sees that, whatever culture, whatever language.
And we have that experience everywhere we go. We get messages from people my age saying, We were already going to go to Yellowstone next year, and we’ve, we decided to modify our plans to bring our grandpa or grandma along for the adventure. Then a million people postretirement have said that she’s the one who got them off the couch and considered entering the world again in the aftermath of losing a child prematurely or losing a spouse. That actually that fills our cup more than going. We love traveling, but at this point, having seen and done as much as we have, that’s the outcome that brings us the most pride.
What have been some of your favorite moments?
Joy: Brad has a giant schnauzer. And we were up on this mountain, and this man came along with two of them, and it was a joy to see all of them together. Then when we were on this ship, and this man and woman wanted to go to the back of the ship, and they had a little six-month-old baby. And so I got to babysit while they went to explore. It’s the little things and connections that pop up like that that make your trip, I think.
Brad: It’s moments epic and small. We were in Glacier National Park and we hiked a section of the Continental Divide to Fishercap Lake to watch the moose at night. When we arrived, there were two moose out on the water. My grandma was wearing a polka-dotted fleece, and a little girl that was probably about four, who didn’t speak English, was wearing a similar polka-dotted fleece, and she walked over and sat next to her. She had a pair of binoculars that she wanted to share with her. I just watched them smiling and looking at each other and pointing at the moose and passing the binoculars back and forth and just seeing that that generational divide not matter. Yes, there are a lot of things that prevent us from connecting with one another. Language is one of them. But you can look into the eyes of anybody and smile and put your hand on your heart in the presence of 35 brown bears fishing for salmon at Katmai National Park, which we got to see. It’s the moments where you say, You know what, there is hope. There is hope that people can come together and, and most people are good.
Joy: It shows that underneath, we’re all alike.
Brad: It’ll be two years in May that we went to our first country, the nation of Samoa. And then we’ve been to Canada. We’ve gone to Denmark, we’ve been to Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, the Galápagos, Iceland, and Antarctica. It’s cool to see it still unfolding and anybody can do that, you know? Even if you can’t make it to Antarctica, you can still find that adventure in your own backyard. But I just hope that people have the foresight to think about how radically your life would be transformed if somebody cared enough to invite you along for an adventure.
Joy: I think that’s about it.
