The Indonesian Ministry of Immigration still had six e-visa applications saved as a draft from 2024, when I logged into my account this summer. I took a clear deep breath, stared at the full screen, and clicked apply for a new visa. One visa.
In 2024, the plan was to stop in Sydney, scuba dive in Komodo National Park, and tour temples in Bali. But when I arrived to pick up my daughter from college, I discovered she was very sick. Heartbroken for all of us, I canceled all our reservations.
In our kitchen at home hangs a black and white map designed out of stickers making up the countries of the world. I bought it while traveling around Scandinavia with Brian, and our four daughters, while celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary. After we visit a new country, I peel off the sticker.
“There’s a whole part of the world over here to visit,” said the woman at the frame shop, pointing to Asia when I finally took the map to get it framed.
“Yes, I know. I’m trying to get there,” I replied.
Between 2020 and 2024, our family spent Christmas Eve chasing the Northern Lights in Yukon, Canada, scuba dived at remote Caribbean islands where airport security meant opening your suitcase, spent Spring Break in Cuba, and skied above the Arctic Circle in Finland with frozen eyelashes. All featured in Where We Have Been.
Yet still, all the stickers I had removed were from Europe and North America.
Removing stickers from the other side of the map was going to have to wait. So it seemed.
When Family Travel Plans Change
Walking along the pebble beach in Nice, France, as a young couple during a college study abroad trip together, Brian and I vowed never to stop traveling, even when we had kids. My determination to travel never waned.
Longing to go somewhere to regroup after our canceled trip, I landed at an Iyengar Yoga retreat at the Feathered Pipe Ranch, nestled in the Rocky Mountains of Montana for six days, the longest I had ever left my family.
Every evening after yoga, I swam under the rising moon until my skin was numb from the cold mountain water. In the afternoons, I sat by a stupa, surrounded by hundreds of Tibetan prayer flags blowing in the wind. And something changed inside me, I accepted that family travel was evolving with our aging family. Bali was supposed to be a soft introduction to Asia for my family, but I really wanted to go to India.
When I got home, I expected to hear reports of difficult days, but everyone was as chill as the moose I saw in the swimming hole. So, I announced to my family that I was going to India.
Learning to Fly Solo
What unfolded from that one-month solo trip to Pune, India, was a pilgrimage around the world to new continents, 25 new countries, and 50 stickers removed from the map the year I turned 50, including Indonesia.
I began exploring in ways I never imagined, because my family loves me enough to set me free, watch me come back, and help me peel stickers off the map from far-away places they have never visited.
The black regions remaining on the map are China, Russia and Africa. I will visit South Africa in November, orginally scheduled to be my 50th country. But sometimes plans change for the better.
I love when my whole family can travel with me, but lives are busy, and it rarely works out for us to all travel together anymore. My goal in family travel has always been to raise global citizens brave enough to see the world with an open heart. And we are doing that.
After a family ski holiday in Bansko, Bulgaria, we left our two college daughters at an airport hotel in Sofia to make their own way back to college in Tennesee, while we traveled on with our two school-aged daughters to Serbia, Bosnia, and Poland. One college daughter will be studying in Spain next year. The other travels the United States with Remote Area Medical.
Brian still prioritizes family travel but I prefer to challenge myself with travel.
50 Countries, at 50 Years Old. I did it!
At 50 years old, I am wild enough to scuba dive in Indonesia with manta rays in notoriously strong currents, skilled enough to navigate the Tokyo subway on a 10-hour layover, and grateful enough to embrace a 17-hour flight in an economy seat with a smile.
From the deck of a wooden boat where I stayed for 10 days while scuba diving in the Komodo National Park, on my last day there, I got a good look at the wooden bungalows on shore where we had planned to stay in the summer of 2024. It was a long, strange trip to get there, but a good trip.
Counting adventures in Tokyo, Japan, I have officially been to 50 countries. I feel like a world traveler. I am a world traveler.
