Travel Map

I’m the sort of organizational geek that has themes to the rooms of her house regarding what is hanging on the walls. My living room, for example, is “the Ashley room” – all art by my dear friend Ashley Megal that I’ve collected over the years.

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to make my office the ‘travel’ room. So far, I only have a collage frame up of some travel photos, and for a long time, I’ve wanted to find something I could hang up that could track my travels. I’ve spent more time than I should have considering all my options (like random rabbit holes several times over many years). Well, I finally made the choice – and let me say, there is nothing like realizing just how little of the world you’ve actually seen by creating a visual of where you’ve been:

For the first eighteen years of my life, my world consisted of northeastern Illinois and northeastern Wisconsin, plus one side quest to Minnesota when I was thirteen. I didn’t start really traveling until I was in college and joined the UWGB chapter of Habitat for Humanity. Every winter and spring break, the chapter took a collegiate challenge trip where they paired up with a chapter elsewhere in the country and spent the week working on a house. During my time in college, I went on six of these trips, finally getting to see various parts of the country – and I got bit hard by the travel bug (of course, I was a broke college student who didn’t own a car, and these trips were the only way I could see anything at all). Then, after college, my residence life friends took jobs all over the country, and I got to mark off other states by visiting them (because I finally had a car and could spare an occasional plane ticket). Add in some road trips and conferences, and I’ve managed to so far mark off thirty states, with a goal to see all fifty.

There are some rules, though – I have to do something of significance in that state for it to count. So while I’ve slept overnight in Colorado (on the way to the Arizona HFH trip) and driven through Ohio several times, those remain unmarked. I had hoped to mark off a few more with my Route 66 trip before I had to turn back (literally made it two miles to the border of a new state to mark…). Hoping to still mark off a couple more later this year. *fingers crossed*

My first trip out of the country happened in 2014 when I got to go to Kenya (thankfully with some help from my work’s International Education Committee!). Over the next few years, I managed to also visit Colombia (to visit a friend in the Peace Corps), Costa Rica (I got to be the assistant director of the study abroad through work), and China (I got to participate in a professional exchange, again through work – legit never thought teaching would afford me so many chances to see parts of the world). It’s hard to believe my last time out of the states was already six years ago (where has the time gone?) when my bestie and I road tripped around Scotland. The pandemic delayed making any new plans, but now I’ve got a renewed passport and an itch to see something new.

I’m sure there are people out there with the aim to visit every country, but I am realistic enough to know that’s not feasible for me (lack of independent wealth and all that), but at a minimum, I would like to touch down on every continent (two more to go) and countries I have ancestral connections to – Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland, Poland, France, and Norway (plus a couple others if I go further back, like Sweden, Belgium, and, WAY back – like the first century way back, to Finland – which, I also acknowledge the extreme privilege I have to be able to trace my ancestry anywhere, let alone a couple thousand years).