Between the elections and a pandemic, 2020 brought about deep divisions that made it difficult for people to reach out and form connections at a time when it was needed most.
In the aftermath, Deborah Schutt, Kim Kalan, and Jane Rabe, entrepreneurs with plenty of travel experience, embarked on a venture to get women back out into the world. They tried wine-and-cheese events. They tried mother-daughter trips. Kalan, who ran outdoor businesses Gage Outdoors and Big Hat Outdoors with her husband, tried asking clients, mostly men, whether they'd gift girls trips to their wives.
They were all complete and utter flops.
After a year and a half of failed projects and money lost, the trio went out to lunch together, albeit a little sadly, Kalan said. There, they came up with one more idea.
They put up a Facebook ad that focused on conservative, patriotic women over 50 and immediately got a response. Kalan recalled seeing alerts that first day about new sign-ups by the minute. By the Fourth of July, they had received some 700 members, and Facebook shut the ad down.
In 2022, the group organized 32 trips, and this year will see 55. Next year, there are some 70 trips planned, with other ventures in the works. Broader travel industry statistics show similar growth: Solo travel is the biggest growing sector, and a vast majority of those travelers are female. A quarter of Americans reported considering a solo trip this year.
“Somehow we stumbled upon it over chicken wings and salad,” Kalan said. “It’s truly magical ... these women come together, and a lot of these women come from a bad spot ... and they come and they heal. It truly is magical.”
Friendships Forged Through Adventure
Debbie Henderson lost her husband a few years ago. They had been a close couple, and Henderson cared for him all the way to the end. She'd brought him home from the hospital and set up a hospital bed for him in their home by a window and slept nearby. She heard him take his last breaths, saw him close his eyes for the last time, and then she called the funeral home and crawled into bed beside him to wait.After he passed, she fell into a deep depression, losing her appetite for life. She dropped a drastic amount of weight and was skeletal at 95 pounds, when one day she woke up and realized she had stopped living herself and decided it had been long enough.
“I started my journey back to living again, and that’s when I found Beatrice Bradley and that’s why I tell them that they saved my life,” Henderson said. “I needed to get back to my life and they gave me the opportunity.”
Henderson isn’t the only one with a story like this, Kalan explained. Some of these women lost spouses by death or divorce, some have lost children to suicide, and many have lost friends. She can hear the courage they’ve mustered up in order to book these trips when she speaks to them by phone, and she has experienced numerous times in person the transformation that they undergo on these five- to seven-day trips.
Schutt recalled one woman who told her she hadn’t laughed in the two years after losing her husband and lived in a cloud of gloom. But on the trip she took, she smiled and laughed every single day.
“Jane and Deborah and I, we’ve lost a lot of our friends. And it’s hard. It’s sad. You don’t know how to have fun anymore. So these women come on these trips, and they truly learn how to have fun again,” Kalan said. “They’re all grandmas going ziplining, going rafting, hiking, eating fabulous food.”
The women average 67 years old, and they jump into adventures, whether it’s ziplining together or swimming with manatees. The more adventurous the trip, the more it seems to appeal to the older set, Kalan quipped. And on every trip, the hosts hear women say that they'd had the trip of a lifetime. But, they add, the magic of it is really in the camaraderie.
Henderson and her husband had both been in the travel business and took vacations together frequently, but traveling alone seemed too intimidating for her. With a group of other women, of a similar age and with similar views—Beatrice Bradley stresses repeatedly in its signup process that the club is for conservative, patriotic women who love the United States—Henderson and other women said they have one less thing to worry about. There’s no fear of being ostracized on a trip or a political debate dividing a travel group; as such, the travelers usually leave behind the issues of politics altogether in pursuit of adventure.
Ivy McKinney has a long list of places she wanted to experience and a husband who will travel but doesn’t quite enjoy it. Many times, she said, he will ask whether one of her girlfriends could go with her instead. She considered traveling alone but wasn’t quite sold on the idea of having to plan out everything herself and then sit in restaurants alone. The meticulous planning at Beatrice Bradley convinced McKinney after her first trip to then book five more, many of them with women she met on her first trip.
“They just think of everything,” McKinney said.
The trips are paid for up front, and travelers book their own flights. Once they arrive, hotels, meals, snacks, itinerary, and everything else is covered and considered, so there aren’t additional fees or planning to take care of while you’re there, according to McKinney.
The company is a boutique one, selecting unique accommodations such as a mansion in the mountains or local chef-driven restaurants. It’s not budget travel; trip costs run in the thousands. McKinney’s New York City Christmas trip was about $3,000, and international trips run higher; Schutt’s recent Costa Rica and Ireland trips came out between $6,000 and $7,000. At those prices, the Beatrice Bradley team is conscious that the trips are truly special experiences for these women, and they make it so that the women need not focus on anything but enjoying the experience.
“And the great thing is, that was kind of unexpected for me, was that I made friends that I'll have for the rest of my life,” McKinney said. “I know all about their lives and they know all about mine, so it’s really forever friends. You just don’t really have the opportunity to make friends like that in your day-to-day life.”
Beatrice
The club is named after Schutt’s grandmother, Beatrice Belle Baker Bradley.“My grandmother was a take-no-prisoners kind of feisty woman,” Schutt said. “She‘d say, ’Come and let’s have a little adventure today.‘ I remember when I was 4, she took me to the movie ’Gigi‘ ... we’d grab our coats and get into the car and go somewhere, just spend the day doing something fun.
“She really, really said to me, ‘You need to embrace adventure. Have fun. Don’t be afraid of it. Don’t let anybody talk you out of something. Be fearless. Push yourself and try something new and different. You’re going to enjoy life so much more.’ She was very bold in that way, well before her time.”
Beatrice didn’t have the opportunity to travel the world, or to travel much at all, but the fearlessness that Schutt admired in her grandmother inspired her to name the travel club after her.
“It puts people together and gives them a chance to be fearless and embrace adventure and meet all these new people.”
