People ask me why I travel.
The easy answer is because I love it. Because it feeds something in me that nothing else does. Because there is a version of me that only shows up when I am somewhere new — somewhere that has nothing to do with laundry or schedules or the life I left at home for a few days.
But that is not the whole answer.
The whole answer starts at Disney World. About a year after I lost my husband.
The Moment Everything Changed.
Rocky and I had talked about travel. We had plans — the way couples make plans, the way you assume you have time to do the things you dream about together.
And then life took a turn we did not see coming.
A year after he passed I took my girls to Disney World. Lauren was ten. Gracie was just a baby. I talked myself up to it right up to the moment I left — honestly right up to the moment we walked through those gates. There was a voice in my head that kept saying this is too hard, this is too much, you cannot do this alone.
And then another voice — the one I have learned to listen to — that said:
No one is coming to save you. You have to do this or it won’t happen.
So I did it.
I watched my girls experience Disney World and something happened to me in that moment that I did not expect. Standing there watching them — the joy on their faces, the wonder, the magic of it — I made a decision.
I will never let my girls not experience travel.
Whatever it takes. However hard it is. However many times I have to talk myself into it right up to the moment I leave. We are going.The Night I Finally Cried
That trip — that first big trip after Rocky — was also the first time I really cried. Not the quiet kind of crying. The kind that comes from somewhere deep.
The girls had fallen asleep. We were at Port Orleans Resort Riverside — this beautiful, peaceful place — and I sat there in that room in the quiet and it hit me.
This was supposed to be different.
We were supposed to be doing this together.
I sat with that for a long time that night. And then I made another decision — the one that has shaped everything since.
I am going to finish what we talked about. I am going to do everything we said we would do. And I am going to make sure my girls see the world.From that point on I took my girls everywhere. Italy. Ireland. Cruising to the Bahamas and Mexico. Road trips where we stopped whenever we wanted and saw whatever caught our eye. Amusement parks. Adventures. Moments I will never forget and neither will they.
I wanted them to understand that there was more out there for them. That they could go anywhere. Do anything. That the world was bigger than our town and our routine and our grief.
And somewhere in all of that — somewhere between the planning and the packing and the talking myself into it every single time — I discovered something.
Travel was doing something for me too.nt Everything Changed