Author: Tess Malijenovsky

Here’s one thing that everyone in Beaufort has more of than anyone in New York City: a wealth of...

By Tess Malijenovsky Emerald Isle – By the time she made it to my apartment, Deborah Walters, a 63-year-old grandmother, was halfway through a 2,500-mile journey from Maine to Guatemala. She’s traveling in a kayak. Alone.    “A lot of people go out paddling for a day and then pull a short night and sleep,” says Walters. “Well that’s all I’m doing. The only difference is that I’m doing it day after day after day until I get to Guatemala.”

A wall of thick heat waves over me as I step off the plane in Zanzibar. I’d never heard of this Tanzanian island in the Indian Ocean until a friend of mine from college said he’d be living there learning Swahili and extended a casual invitation. Thanks to either the Google images or a dream I’ve had since I was a little girl, I’ve just arrived 8,600 miles away from Beaufort.

There are many things for a woman to fear when she travels alone. Perhaps because it wasn’t my first time traveling alone or in Ireland, I wasn’t afraid. However, it was in this cold, dreary and majestic land that I realized I’d been living a life consumed by fear.

Four Days Up the Coast of Croatia The McDonald’s employee sees my littler sister and me sleeping on their red bench seat. She continues to sweep under our empty table, waking me up. It was hard to fall asleep anyway, what with the terrible Spanish music and cold draft in the Barcelona airport at 2 a.m. It’s just Chloe and me now, in transit overnight to Dubrovnik, Croatia where we will arrive without reservations—literally without lodging plans, but also without expectations of this southeastern European nation between the Balkans and the Adriatic Sea.