When my husband Don and I met in 1966 at the University of Kansas, it would have been hard to predict the passion for worldwide travel that has dominated our lives. Early indicators were not particularly aligned. Don grew up in a small rural farming town in western Kansas and I had been moved multiple times to urban areas around the entire U.S. by a father whose career path was full of transfers for better opportunities.

Fortunately, I had a mother who made the best of these many moves. She insisted that we would “see it all” wherever we landed. I usually knew more about a region in two or three years than most of the kids who had lived there their entire lives. In my senior year in high school, my family was selected to host a Norwegian exchange student. This experience definitely whetted my appetite for international travel and curiosity about foreign lands.

Don didn’t have a lot of opportunities to travel, but he had parents who deeply valued learning. One of the things the Hanna family was most proud of was their large library, a rarity in a western Kansas farmhouse. In 1961 at age 14, Don did get one profoundly important early taste of international travel when his parents let him join a neighbor’s family on a three-week road trip to Mazatlan, Mexico. Just imagine eight people in an un-airconditioned Mercury station wagon traveling over 3,000 miles, with much of the Mexico part on unimproved gravel roads across the desert. Don took in the excitement and adventure of it all, and had an early lesson in the value of knowing even the rudiments of a second language.

When we started dating in college, we discovered that both of us were very interested in joining the Peace Corps. This became the catalyst and the foundation for the next 55 years of our lives. Life is never a straight path, and ours has been no exception. We did get accepted into the Peace Corps, but we turned down our initial assignment to Panama. Somehow, at the time, that assignment seemed too close to home. A year later, we entered a new experimental program that combined a one-year assignment in the U.S. Teacher Corps and two years in the Peace Corps. So off we went to Lackawanna, NY, an industrial suburb of Buffalo and home to Bethlehem Steel, and then on to Afghanistan, where we both taught English in one of the only two co-educational junior and senior high schools in the country.

The Afghanistan that we knew and loved has tragically been lost, but our lives were changed forever by the experience. Midway through our service, we had the audacity to request permission to try to have a baby. We wanted to be sure that if we got pregnant, we wouldn’t be sent home. Permission to try was granted, based on a high probability of completing our professional assignments and having a normal pregnancy in a city with a modicum of good health care. Four months before we successfully completed our teaching assignments, our Peace Corps doctor assisted in delivering a healthy baby boy.

We’re sure that many people at home thought us slightly off our rockers. But to our Afghan hosts, a young couple having a baby was a natural joyful event, in even the toughest of circumstances. Needless to say, we felt both emboldened and humbled by the experience. To this day, friends that we made in the Peace Corps remain some of our very best friends and colleagues. They continue to inspire us with their many exemplary contributions to society, both at home and abroad.

The joy of sharing different cultural experiences, taking on difficult challenges, seeing new sights off the beaten path, and meeting people who were decidedly different than us was solidly imprinted by the time we returned to the U.S. Choices we made in our career paths and future travel were all deeply affected by these early life experiences. We had learned to travel off the grid, to spend extended periods of time living in different and strange countries, and to make new friends and colleagues. We also learned to nurture and retain those friendships and relationships, making it possible for us to visit and host and travel with people from around the world on a continuing basis.

A small example of this is the young, newly married couple we met from Santiago, Chile in 2015. We were on our 42-foot sailboat in a marina in Bocas del Toro, Panama, when Cristina came asking for help in the middle of the night for her sick husband, Cesar. Thankfully, I was able to help. As a result, we received an open-ended invitation to visit Chile – whenever that might happen. When an opportunity arose in 2016, we gratefully accepted the invitation, advice, and warm hospitality that we received – not just from Cristina and Cesar, but from their entire extended family. Several years later, we were able to make another memorable return trip to Santiago and meet the couple’s growing family.

Now at 77, international travel is more challenging, but not unattainable. Our beautiful sailboat that traversed the entire Caribbean and east coast of the US has been sold. We’ve boarded more than one cruise ship by now, but still plan most of our own adventures on shore. And we’ve taken several cross-country trips in our mini-camper and experienced the joys of small towns, blue highways and national, state, and county parks.

One of our most memorable experiences occurred last spring in the Oklahoma panhandle – formerly known as “No Man’s Land.” When Oklahoma territorial boundaries were being drawn, this was an orphan piece of property squeezed between Colorado and Kansas on the north and the Texas panhandle on the south. It opened for settlement in 1890, 17 years before Oklahoma became a state in 1907.

It was late in the day and we had spent the afternoon outrunning major thunderstorms, barreling out of the Rockies. Our goal was to reach the site of the once vibrant small town of South Ivanhoe that Don’s paternal grandparents had helped to found in 1910. Alas, the railroad that was promised to the town was lured six miles south into Texas. It became a ghost town in just eight short years. Don had been there once before but we were having difficulty relocating the former town. We were parked in front of an isolated one-room schoolhouse located in the middle of nowhere, when a lovely woman driving by stopped and asked if we needed help. Don asked, “You wouldn’t by any chance know where the former town of South Ivanhoe was located, would you?” Not only did she know, she went out of her way to take us there. That night we camped on the site of the former town. The next morning we had coffee with our gracious angel host and caught up on a lot of family history. No amount of planning would have ever resulted in a more rewarding experience.

Talking to people we meet along the way and sharing stories and family history has been the highlight of so many of our trips. Imagine our surprise last summer when we reconnected with a man in the West Virginia hollers whom Don had visited 22 years ago. He not only remembered Don, but he quickly pulled out a thank you letter Don had sent from the first visit, along with a copy of a letter Don had included, written by his maternal grandmother. The letter described her early life until the age of 10 in this very holler, her walk to school, her teachers, and her family’s decision to relocate in 1885 to western Kansas for health reasons of her father, who was seriously wounded in the Civil War.

As our lives wind down, those early roots that we put down together, and our love of adventure and both seeing and living in interesting places, are still sending up new shoots. Travelling with our three granddaughters – preferably one at a time – has been so much fun, whether by car, boat, or air. Hopefully, we are passing along our passion for exploring new lands, meeting new people and learning about different cultures.

If there is hope for our world, we need to find the beauty and humanity in each of us. World peace will only be possible when people learn to value and appreciate both the similarities and differences in cultures and human nature. We have more in common than what divides us. So, take the time to pass your stories and adventures along to next generations. You too, can be an inspiration to building world peace.