I am a fifty-something year old living in Savannah, Georgia where I was born and raised. As a mom of two grown children, I am at the stage in life where I get to be selfish to the fullest extent by spending my free time and my spare change on whatever I please. For me, it’s traveling the world as much as I can – constrained only by that pesky thing called work, along with my four cats. I’m at a great place as far as stages of life go, and I take advantage of it every chance I get.
When I was nineteen years old, I married the love of my teenaged life. He had joined the military since we originally started dating when I was sixteen and he was eighteen, and had gotten stationed in Vicenza, Italy. So, once we were married, I joined him there, leaving all I had ever known behind for life in a foreign land. During the two years I lived there, I had my first child – my son – when I was just shy of twenty-one years old. And while my husband and I did travel to Austria, Germany, and to nearby towns in Italy, we didn’t see nearly as much of the ‘ole Boot as I later came to wish we had. We were young, poor, and (at least in my case) pretty naive to how fortunate we were to live someplace that spectacular.
Fast forward a year and a half: I found myself divorced, in the military myself, and stationed in Germany, which I had requested because I fell in love with it when I got to see it a couple of years before. Because I had the fortune of living in Europe for a second time in my early twenties, I took advantage of my surroundings, often hopping in my car and traveling to another country for the day with my son at my side. We also saw a lot of Germany during our three-and-a-half-year stay. By the time we left Germany, I had visited a total of eight countries, which included Italy, Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and France. I had been bitten by the travel bug at that point, and I’ve remained infected ever since.
I got out of the military in 1997, and in January, 2003, I found myself divorced for the second time. During the years in between came my second child (my daughter), a move back to the US, living first in North Carolina (for the second time), then Virginia, and then back to Georgia near my family. Money was always tight raising two kids on my own so, travel was completely out of the question. I managed to put myself through nursing school during those years and graduated with my Associate of Science in Nursing degree in 2004. By the end of 2010 (the same year my son graduated from high school), I had completed my Bachelor of Science in Nursing as well. Earlier that same year, the kids and I moved back to Savannah where my son started (and finished) college.
My daughter graduated from high school in 2017 at which time I started working on my Master of Science in Nursing, which I finished in 2019. At that point, I was finally at a place where I could start to feed that hungry travel bug that had been growing inside of me for all of those years in between. I had always dreamed of going to NYC, and in December of 2019, I did just that. It was all I had hoped it would be, and more! And my calendar started filling up with trips planned for 2020. Then came COVID, putting a screeching halt to all of it.
In late 2021, I managed to squeeze in a couple of trips, going to Cape Cod, MA (see The Cape for more on that), and Portland, ME in the fall, NYC for Thanksgiving, along with a trip to Disney in Florida earlier in the year. By January 2022, I was ready for the big stuff! I had already booked my first solo trip with fingers crossed up until the day I left that it wouldn’t be cancelled because of COVID. It wasn’t cancelled, and I hopped on a plane alone and flew to Italy all by myself, just like I had done thirty-one years before. I spent a week seeing many places I had not visited during the time I lived there. My trip started in Rome, went on to Assisi, Florence, Pisa, and ended in Venice. Now, I had been to Venice several times because my now ex-husband and I lived only a forty-minute train ride from there when we lived in Vicenza. So, this was the one place that was a repeat visit for me, but I saw it with completely different eyes this time. For more on my trip to Italy, see Solo Not Solo.
Since then, I have added two more countries to my list, having gone to Madeira Island, Portugal in May of 2022 (read about that trip here), and Nova Scotia & New Brunswick, Canada in September 2022. I’ve also been back to NYC several times, went back to Cape Cod over the summer, back to Maine in the fall (albeit an area of Maine that was brand new to me), and added Rhode Island to my list of states visited. In March of this year (2023), I’ll be headed to Ireland!!
In addition, I’ve added this blog to my life because writing has always been a pleasure to me, and I wanted to find a way to incorporate it into my life in a meaningful way and on a regular basis. I also dream of transitioning to writing full time and leaving nursing behind. I hope you’ll stick around as I share all of these amazing journeys with you. To me, there is nothing more exciting than immersing myself into a new culture, experiencing life via different customs lived out in different areas of the United States, Canada, and throughout Europe. At this point, that is as much of the world as I’ve experienced, but I cannot wait to go beyond these regions and see what life is like in other parts of the world.