I have always had a passion for adventure … not the kind where you climb Mt Everest to prove to yourself and the world that you have amazing endurance and ability to withstand cold, but the “Around the World in 80 Days” kind of adventure, the kind where you set off for countries whose names you can’t even pronounce, to explore other cultures and other peoples, to learn how we are different and (perhaps even more importantly, how we are the same).

My first foray into travel adventure was over 50 years ago, June of 1970, on my honeymoon. At the time, the typical way to take a honeymoon was to find the most luxurious Caribbean resort available and stay there for a week, but a week on the beach just didn’t sound like the trip of a lifetime. Instead, my husband Mark and I opted for 10 weeks in Europe, relying on Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day , the budget traveler’s “Bible” of that era. We had no advance reservations, just rented a car and headed off, to the great chagrin of our parents who (in those days before internet and cell phones) had no real way to get in touch with us. We just gave them a general sense of our theoretical itinerary and told them to send us a letter care of the American Express Offices in various cities if they needed to reach us. And every Sunday, we went to the local post office to call home by means of the very cumbersome overseas operator process.

In the late 1970’s we stretched our cultural understanding even further by beginning person to person visits. First, we participated in Friendship Force, an intercultural city-to-city exchange program created by Jimmy Carter. Boston was chosen for an exchange with Hamburg, and we ended up hosting a lovely German couple in our home for 10 days. With the liberal use of a German-English dictionary, we got well beyond the typical superficial conversations to discuss serious topics and share real feelings. Our positive experience with Friendship Force led us to get involved with Servas, an organization whose members host each other in their homes for 2 day periods and to host a Japanese exchange student in our home for six months when our kids were in high school. We still participate in Servas over four decades later, and have stayed with families all over the world, from South Africa, to New Zealand, Indonesia, Japan, Italy, and others, as well as hosting many international families here at our home.

1987 was our first visit to a REAL adventure destination. Mark decided that he wanted to go on a cruise, so I started looking at cruise destinations and in the process, I discovered that it was possible to take a cruise to the Amazon! That sounded WAY more interesting than the Caribbean! We booked passage on a small boat with about 10 or 12 cabins, on the Napo River, which is a tributary of the Amazon, in Ecuador. Along the way, we became familiar with local tribes, pirhanas, and 12 inch wide spiders. We finished the trip off with a visit to the Galapagos, before the mainstream tourists had discovered it.

And then came Epcot. No, Epcot was not the adventure. Epcot was where we hatched the adventure. We were eating lunch in the restaurant at the French village. I said to Mark “This is so quaint. Wouldn’t it be great to live in France?” He was supposed to say, “That’s crazy! We have jobs and lives here in Boston.” Instead, he said “OK. Sounds good to me!” So we quit our jobs, rented a house in a tiny village an hour and a half south of Paris, and proceeded to live the Year in Provence life, except that this was Burgundy, not Provence. It was 2002. I have always said that that year changed my life, and I still measure things as “before France” or “after France”. I never imagined that we would become a real part of a community in rural France, but we did. I volunteered at the local nursery school once a week, and on Fridays I took long hikes in the forest with my new-found friends from the town. We went to dinner parties at other people’s houses and invited our neighbors to dine at our home as well. We attended town-wide soirees (including a New Year’s Eve Party that lasted until 6am), and of course we ate at every gourmet French restaurant we could find. We were so glad that we had chosen to live in a small village instead of in Paris, because in Paris we would always have been treated like tourists, even after a year, but in the countryside of northern Burgundy, we were accepted as part of the community.

2008 was the start of another shift in our travel style. We started doing home exchanges, where we stayed in the home of a family in some other country at the same time they stayed in our home. So far we have done about ten of them (to France, Italy, Ireland, Holland, Singapore, and Australia), but the first was by far the most interesting of the lot, because we stayed in an actual French chateau! We never figured out why people who lived in a chateau would want to stay at our house, but we weren’t inclined to complain. The chateau had a grand ballroom, so the owners rented it out for wedding receptions as a side business. On Saturday afternoons, we would come home to find the caterers setting up. We would go to bed to the strains of lively dance music and awake at 7am to find that the caterers were still there cleaning up. The French definitely like to end their parties late!

In recent years I have added humanitarian volunteer work to the mix. Doing good while seeing the world. I have made three trips to Haiti to work with NGOs, visited a remote school in the Gambia, and offered my help to a remarkable community of Falasha Jews in Gondar, Ethiopia.

At last count, I had visited about 115 different countries, on all seven continents.

My most interesting adventures? Papua New Guinea (which I visited twice, once for the most amazing tribal festival I have ever seen … perhaps 200 different tribes in various forms of face paint and traditional dress, singing and dancing in a giant tribal competition), Tibet (the rooftop of the world), Bhutan (where I wandered into a temple and ended up in a conversation with the Queen Mother, and then stayed with a family in a home whose outside was carefully decorated with images of giant phalluses), Thailand (where I learned to ride elephants bare-backed and even performed in a show for tourists), Mongolia (where I ended up being the guest of honor (and only non-Khazak) at a 300 guest Khazak wedding, and slept in the yurts of two different champion eagle-hunters, Ethiopia (a giant mélange of cultures .. Ancient Coptic Christians on the North, 12th century Moslem cities in the East, and perhaps 15-20 different animist tribes in the south, Uganda (where I clawed my way straight up a mountain in order to find a family of mountain gorillas and spend a quiet hour with them), and of course Antarctica, where there are no people (except research scientists), but lots and lots of penguins.

I think of myself as a citizen of the world.
One of the things I find meaningful about travel off the beaten path is that I get to see how people really live and what they really think, not what the American news media tells me that they do and think. It also makes me appreciate my life of privilege as an American. Every time I think I have something to complain about in my daily life (like store shelves empty of toilet paper), I think of people I’ve met in third world countries, and I feel very lucky indeed.