Ilustration by Mark Matcho for Newsweek

Tanya Hahnel, 24, earns more than $25,000 a year helping Boston-area families find affordable housing. She has health insurance, good benefits, no credit-card debt and a frugal lifestyle. Still, Hahnel bartends at night so she can afford to fly home to the Washington, D.C., area for Christmas. Her friends, many of whom are working hourly jobs without health benefits, are faring worse. “If you’re making $7 an hour plus tips, and you don’t have insurance and something bad happens, your credit is just ruined,” she says. “Everybody I know is really struggling.”

You don’t have to be irresponsible or bad with plastic to get slammed when you’re young, out on your own for the first time. Here’s why it’s tough: starter jobs come with low salaries and, increasingly, without health insurance. Rents are high, and there’s a litany of hidden expenses in the life of a twentysomething: deadbeat roommates who “share” utilities but never actually write their checks; friends’ weddings that require costly dresses and travel; security deposits and agent fees every time you move; medical care that’s not covered by insurance; needing everything (furniture, work clothes, wheels, kitchen gear) at the same time, and, yes, college loans.

Silvia Otte
Book It: A sunflower field in Gascony, the setting for the Hours’ literary tour ‘Madame Bovary’s France’...

By Anna Kuchment
Oct. 22, 2007 issue

Last summer Bill Busse, a retired architect from Palo Alto, Calif., took a trip down the Mississippi River and through the pages of his favorite childhood stories. In the Mark Twain Mississippi River Tour (from $5,495; literarytraveler.com), Busse, his wife, Barbara, and a dozen other travelers stayed aboard a 1920s paddlewheel steamboat, heard lectures about Mark Twain and his work and visited Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Mo. The highlight: walking through the cave where Twain set some of Tom Sawyer’s and Becky Thatcher’s exploits in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “I’m not sure that people realize this was a real place,” says Busse. “It just grabbed me.”

Though trips like Mark Twain’s Mississippi appeal to all age groups, their popularity has grown as baby boomers approach their empty-nest years. “Baby boomers are a very well-read group and they travel quite a bit,” says Cathy Keefe, spokeswoman for the Travel Industry Association. A 2006 TIA survey showed that 56 percent of adults were interested in enrichment, or educational, trips. “As kids, we ask, ‘Why, why, why?’ but then we get busy with our lives and put those questions away,” says Ann Kirkland, founder of Classical Pursuits (classical pursuits.com) in Toronto. “But there comes a time when we have a little more space for reflection and we go back to those questions.”

Literary tours range from laid-back sightseeing excursions to more intellectually rigorous experiences that involve reading lists and seminars. On the more laid-back end is British Tours Ltd.’s private one-day Jane Austen trip from London ($970 for four people; british tours.com). Travelers visit her home at Chawton, where she wrote “Emma” and “Mansfield Park”; Bath, which figured prominently in many of her works, and the cathedral city of Winchester, where she is buried. On the more rigorous end is The Hours, a New York City-based company that mixes sumptuous tours of Tuscany and southern France with book discussions lead by a literature professor. Henry James’s Tuscany ($1,160 per person for six nights; thehours nyc.com) is set on an estate in the hamlet of Monterongriffoli, Italy, and includes cooking classes and truffle hunts. Madame Bovary’s France, planned for next fall, will be set in Gascony and will include visits to cheese and olive farms.

More independent-minded travelers can plan their