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I was there to hold her hand when she first went snorkeling off a catamaran in the Florida Keys. She was 4, a little towhead squealing through her snorkel with joy at her first look through a mask into the wondrous world of the ocean around her.
A year later, when she was 5, my first-born niece, Maddy, was the first off the boat to go snorkeling with reef sharks when she visited me in the Bahamas when I was living there.
A Florida girl through and through, Maddy was born with fins for feet, already treading water in her backyard pool as a toddler. By the time she was a teenager, she was a certified diver, and we’d explored shipwrecks together off Key Largo.
When Maddy turned 18 earlier this year, she decided to take a gap year before starting college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I not only endorsed this idea but encouraged it. Wanting to squeeze in as much time with her as I could before her wings fully unfurled, I suggested that we kick it off with a dive trip to the place that first cemented my own wanderlust when I was close to her age.
Travel as teacher
As I approach mid-life and the mid-century mark (in 2025, I’ll turn the big 5-0), I’ve become more keenly aware of how my early travels shaped me as an adult — and how they’ve shaped me as an aunt and a parent. Those travels made me curious, resilient and open in a way I’m not sure would have happened had I not spent my formative years traveling the world and meeting so many different people.
I like to think some of my wanderlust rubbed off on my four nieces and even my young children already, too. And when I mentioned to Maddy that we could go diving in Fiji together as the send-off for her gap year, I was thrilled she was onboard.
In my early 20s, the nation of more than 300 islands in the South Pacific had been my first stop on a round-the-world trip I took with my surfer boyfriend. It was a grand adventure that saw us chasing waves and wonder for more than a year (I quit my office job and joked to my parents that I was retiring early, much to their chagrin). That Florida surfer boy and I went everywhere, from Australia and New Zealand to Southeast Asia and Europe.
Despite no longer being of budget backpacker age and preferring hotels to hostels, I hardly feel past my prime for big adventures. And I’m not alone.