People assume my travel story starts at an airport. It doesn’t. It starts in a car, driving 17 hours from Kansas City, Missouri to Raleigh, North Carolina — with my mom and my daughter riding with me.
This was after the hardest stretch of my life. Depression. Being overweight. Bed rest. All the things nobody tells you come with a spinal cord injury. What pulled me out of it was adaptive CrossFit. I found it, fell in love with it, started competing with myself in the gym — and then I found out there was an actual competition in Raleigh.
I wanted to go. Badly. But here’s the thing: I had never traveled in a wheelchair before. I didn’t know how to navigate any of it. There was no guide for this.
You know what almost stopped me? Not the chair. Not the 17 hours. Nerves. Just being nervous about going outside the box — doing something I’d never done, with a body I was still learning. I was newly paralyzed from the waist down, about to go try to defy all odds.
I went anyway.
That trip taught me the thing I now tell everyone I plan travel for: the first trip is not about the destination. It’s about proving to yourself that the door still opens. Mine opened in Raleigh. Fourteen countries later, it hasn’t closed.