My now husband and I were tucked between two lumberjack (err, gentlemen’s) clubs and an empanada food truck on SE 82nd Avenue when he realized without a doubt he wanted to marry me in 2012. We had found our way to a Vietnamese travel agency in East Portland thanks to our building handyman, Binh Nguyen’s recommendation to seek out “Tim” Nguyen who sold us tickets to Thailand. After completing the sale, my explorer gene burst and saturated my entire chest and neck in a rosy colored rash reserved for moments of extreme excitement. Yes, I was having that reaction to the mere thought of our first trip to SE Asia and this wasn’t the first time in my life this had happened.

It was 1989 when I first realized I may have the explorer gene. My parents took my sisters and I on a road trip in our family Truckster to our magnificent nation’s capital to absorb stats and statistics on our nation’s forefathers, peruse the rows of treasure at the blissfully air-conditioned Smithsonian, and step into the past in colonial Williamsburg. They were certainly doing their best to provide the three of us a knowledge-based cultural endeavor. But, it was June and the streets of DC could fry up some of my dad’s always-at-the-ready can of Spam. Alas, this eight year old was miserable. In fact, my dad’s three ton video camera captured evidence of my strained and panting tomato red face on the National Mall, complete with documentation of my sister Stephanie providing me with a piggy back ride up Capitol Hill. (Remind you, I was eight. A small eight, but albeit eight.)

After a street snack of a remarkably disgusting and sizable hot dog, an older (probably sixty) tired looking woman with a tattered gray scarf covering her head and a purple flowing dress approached us. She didn’t say a word, but simply smiled and held out her knobby hand to give me something. Having been raised by an overly cautious mother, of course, I darted a look at her to question if I should accept the gift. I had been given a stack of picture postcards from a place I’d never seen. Not especially striking or colorful postcards, but something completely foreign to my suburban upbringing drew me in to those pictures of snow, fields of berries, farmers, and rather plain looking houses. Although my family quickly lost interest, I was mesmerized by those postcards and thrilled to now have something in my possession infinitely more interesting than a terrible hot dog. Yet, the real discovery for me came when I turned a postcard over to reveal something undecipherable scrawled on the back… stopping me in my tracks. “Dad!!” who had since sped ahead, “Is this another language?!” Everybody quickly debated on the origins of my discovery and settled on Russian. My postcards were from Russia!!

It was that day I decided to start my postcard collection. This collection was to become a stockpiled source of inexhaustible wonder, escape, and aspiration through my high school years. Over these years, I would receive postcards from friends and family members from far and wide including exotic locales like Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Peoria, Illinois; and Daytona Beach, Florida. On rare occasions my dad would bring me a postcard from his work travels bearing strange and sometimes unpronounceable names that truly captivated my attention like Amsterdam, Bangkok, Paris, and  Rio de Janiero. I put them all in a tiny blue Keds shoe box, categorized and alphabetized. That little blue box was my ‘go-to’ happy place whenever I wanted to fantasize about escaping the Midwest.

I always had a fear of being ordinary. When I was six, I amused myself with Wuzzles and Care Bears instead of the baby and Barbie dolls all my friends preferred. I ran a foster home, where I would help Aids-stricken Care Bear Cousins (from Africa) find new American homes with Nintendos to help them heal. My best friend Jamie and I even played poor people (how politically incorrect were we?), by “living” in closets and under tables in my house and being provided with one trip to the food shelter a week where we were given “one apple and one strawberry fruit roll up as our rations. Clearly from a young age, part of me wanted to teach myself extreme budgeting and rationing skills, which little did I know would befit my future traveling endeavors, even though we were clearly far from destitute.I remember lying in a field behind our neighborhood and looking up at a passing plane when I was about nine and saying to that same best friend, “Don’t you want to be in that plane? That plane could take you anywhere!” When I wasn’t gazing longingly at airplanes, I would bury myself in books and fantasize of living on a magical street called Klickitat (located in a distant foreign place called Portland, Oregon) thanks to a Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books. Incidentally, I now live 10 blocks from Klickitat Street.

As the years went on, I was in a tug-of-war with the culture of ‘trying to fit in’ and a longing to experience diversity and just live differently. But something inside was pushing me, driving me to run for the borders of normalcy. I tested the waters subtly at first, I went with Bonjour over Hola in high school because everybody else took Spanish… a decision I still kick myself for as I cram DuoLingo in my day. I was Cleopatra, exotic Queen of the Nile, for Halloween while others opted to be a slutty fill-in-the-blank. As co-editor of the high school yearbook, I fought for a theme based on roads, traveling, maps, and journeys. I enrolled in journalism as my major over education when I went to college, (even though deep down I really wanted to be a teacher, but everyone was going to be a teacher). And of course, there was no question when I opted to move away to college when most stayed home. I just knew deep inside me I wanted something more.

Next stop Paris! Urm… but only after a series of misguided life choice detours. Instead of fulfilling my dream of studying abroad in Paris (yes, despite my best efforts I was still a naive, rose-colored glasses Hoosier who thought this was the only option for studying French), I fell into an unfortunate pattern of serial monogamy. I pretty much based all my life decisions on boys from 1998 until 2006. I endured weekend upon weekend of college football games, working 60+ hours a week, and way too much binge drinking on Bud Light, which I’m ashamed of ingesting to this day. I had embarked on a road to Iamtrappedinnowheresville en route to killingmeslowlyland.The years from 2005 to 2007 were the most confusing years of my life, a time I now jokingly call “my dark period.” I painted a lot, all too regularly found escape in alcohol and prescription pills, and generally just felt like a turd floating along aimlessly in some backwater slough.Okay, so rock bottom for an untapped travel junkie… have a miserable soulless marketing job in Columbus, Ohio and then getting let go… floating (like you know what) through a dead end relationship… family life entering turmoil territory…Fight or Flight? Flight! To Prague I go.