I turned 61 on Tuesday.

I celebrated at home, with Scott and step-daughters, Erica and Ashley. I had just returned from Cuba – and before that, from Belgium and Amsterdam. Contrasting to last year’s Sweet Sixtieth birthday bash, this year was low-key. There were cards and flowers and cupcakes with candles and a coffee mug from my beautiful 24-year old stepdaughter:

Aaahhhh – to be 24 again. Which got me to thinking – how did I celebrate my 24th birthday? That was waaay back in 1978 . . . . .

I’ve shared my story before: after graduating from college, without a job and without a boyfriend, forced to move back to my horrible hometown (which was never going to happen!) to live with my parents (who probably hated having me there as much as I hated being there) – I jumped at an invitation to visit my best friend who had joined the Peace Corps. She’d been doing a public health project on a remote island in the Philippines for the past two years. The plan: after her tour of duty was complete, we would travel through southeast Asia and India before returning to Michigan. Three things went awry with that plan:

1. After arriving there, I learned that we would be a threesome, as my best friend’s new best friend would be traveling, too. Ugh.
2. Retiring Peace Corps volunteers – entitled to a healthy travel stipend at the end of their service – were stuck in the Philippines indefinitely. Their funds were not available because the federal government had shut down due to a budget disagreement in Congress (some things never change!).
3. Barbara had taken ill and had been hospitalized.

Bottom line, nothing was going according to plan and it had been decided that I would travel – alone – to a place called Kota Kinabalu on the island of Sabah, Malaysia. They would catch up to me.

I don’t remember much about my 24th birthday. It was a long, long time ago, after all! I was in Kota Kinabalu, staying at the home of a former Peace Corps volunteer who was in the business of exporting tropical fish. I wrote in my travel journal: “My birthday is totally uneventful. Spend my morning alone – read my birthday cards from Mom & Dad and from my brother, Ron. Of course I do some crying.”

What was I crying about? I don’t remember, but my journal (one of my most treasured possessions) is filled with details about my aspirations, frustrations and fears. One entry, a couple of days later, reads: “I’m reading Passages – a very enlightening book. Talks at length about the conflict of leaving home, security and safety to establish oneself as a separate identity with all the risk and hardship it entails. According to her theory, this trip for me is a moratorium – a way of putting off the crisis for awhile.”

What was my crisis? Lacking a job, a relationship and any semblance of confidence would probably sum it up. Little did I know on that momentous, lonely birthday that I had just begun the most eventful and transformational journey of my life: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Barbara and her new best friend would never catch up to me, and I would make the decision (multiple times), to just keep traveling, solo, for a little bit farther . . . A little bit longer . . .  Just one more country . . .

from left: in a Philippine rice paddy in 1978; in Sri Lanka in 1979; in Jaipur, India in 2004 – where I celebrated my 50th birthday!

I thought about going home for Thanksgiving. Instead I spent it in Ko Samoi, Thailand in a thatched-roof hut overlooking the South China Sea.

And then I thought I would surprise everyone and be home to celebrate Christmas. Instead I spent the holidays with new-found friends at Isra Guesthouse in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

For sure, I figured I would be home by Valentine’s Day. Nope. On that day I was in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka.

St. Patrick’s Day was a BIG deal with my friends back home, who always entered a float in the Bay City St. Patrick’s Day Parade and followed that with bottomless mugs of green beer at the Green Hut bar.  Certainly I’d be home for that party . . . ? No. I wrote in my journal on March 17: “Sure would be a good party back home today – but not here in Udaipur” (Rajasthan, India).

I would continue my travel adventure until April 19. I had a ticket as far as London on an Iraqi Airways charter from New Delhi. My final routing would be: Delhi to Bagdhad, with a scheduled stop in Dubai. But we were re-routed to Qatar because a cargo plane had crashed in Dubai. In Qatar we were kept on the plane for a few hours, awaiting the passengers who were supposed to board out flight in Dubai. By the time we arrived in Baghdad my connecting flight to London was long gone, so they put me on a flight to Athens with a connection to Copenhagen, where I was on the stand-by list for a flight to London. Countless hours later, I spent the night on a plush sofa in a deserted bar at Heathrow Airport, washing my hair (with warm water!) in a bathroom sink and breakfasting on Sugar Frosted Flakes with orange juice before catching a trans-Atlantic flight to Washington, D.C. and a connection to Detroit.

From there, I was to make my own way for the remaining 90 miles to Saginaw. For my mother had written some weeks earlier, “You managed to get yourself all around the world so you can certainly figure out how to get the rest of the way home. Your father doesn’t like to drive in all that traffic on those expressways in Detroit and besides, it’s expensive to park there.”

Fortunately, some of my Green Hut buddies rescued me in Detroit and drove me home to Saginaw where my father was visibly relieved to see me without a shaved head and orange robes – so certain was he that I had joined a cult. Otherwise, what could possibly have caused me to stray so far from home and stay away for so long?

Oh, the places I’ve been in those 37 years since that journey! Oh, the lessons I’ve learned!

And one of the most important: “Never underestimate the power of a woman.”

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