4 days ago
While many people have dreamed of doing it, one woman in her 60s is determined to get to every country in the world.
She's got a big head start on her bucket list, too.
Lynn Stephenson, an office administrator, sold her home, quit her job — and began to travel the world with the goal of visiting every single country around the globe.
She exchanged her two-bedroom home for hotels and hostels around the world after she was bitten by the travel bug, according to news agency SWNS.
In Nov. 2022, she said, "I decided to sell up. It was always on the radar and what I wanted to do."
At age 62, she's already visited 168 countries and plans to keep going for the remaining 27 in the year or so ahead.
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Prior to that, she'd taken a number of trips around the world over the years — but this time she really meant it.
So she sold her semi-detached cottage in Carlton, Nottingham, England — and pocketed roughly $173,000 after paying off her mortgage, she said.
That money is still fueling her travels.
She's amassed a following on social media as she works to complete her journey. Most recently, SWNS reported, she's been "island hopping" around the South Pacific.
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"I absolutely love it. Every day is an adventure."
She added that sometimes things can go wrong — "it's not all fun and games," she said.
But she said traveling makes her "very calm."
What gave her the push to do this as a full-time endeavor?
Nothing less than the COVID lockdowns, she said.
"COVID gave me the complete push that I needed to do it," she told SWNS.
"I had never believed that you could lock down the entire world."
She said that when "lockdown was lifted [in portions of the U.K.] on July 3, 2020, I was on a plane to Italy on July 5."
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She said she put everything in storage ahead of that flight date.
Since she began her full-time travels in late 2022, Stephenson has ticked off Nepal, Bhutan, Thailand, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Korea, Pakistan and Taiwan, she told SWNS.
She called the Galápagos Islands "amazing … I went for eight days and stayed for 16."
Where else in the world, she said, "can you swim [on] the same day with penguins, sharks and sea lions? They have giant tortoises and I saw a seahorse."
She also said, "I think it's really difficult to pick your favorite country. How can you compare Papua New Guinea to Italy? They're completely different."
She said, "My favorite thing about traveling is just realizing the world is full of really kind, hospitable people," despite what others may believe or are told, she said.
She also said, "I don't get frightened very easily."
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She acknowledged that "there's going to be [some] countries that I'm going to struggle to get to, like Haiti and North Korea … I have walked in the DMZ, but I need to go into it."
She also said that "there's a couple in the Central African Republic that are a big dodgy."
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Coming up for her in the next year, she said, is Australia, where she'll see friends she's met on her travels and spend a few weeks.
She also has Bangladesh and Brunei on her radar for 2025.
She's "going back to Africa," too, she said.
She said that once she gets to every country she can, she's going to revisit some of the favorite spots on her "epic world tour."
As for her motto on her travel blog, "Dare, dream, discover," it's nothing less than this: "A smile for every mile."
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