17 stages. 19 countries. Over 75,000 kilometres — all without flying.
It was never going to be direct.
Not in distance, not in time, and not in the way it unfolded. What started as an idea—travelling from Australia to Switzerland without flying for a white Christmas—had lived mostly in conversations, plans, and possibilities. Until the moment it didn’t.
The day we left home, it stopped being something we were preparing for and became something we were actually doing. There was no simple line from A to B, even though much of it had been carefully planned—stages mapped out, cruises booked, and parts of the journey already set in place. But alongside that preparation sat something harder to define. We were leaving in August, leaving our family choosing instead to follow a long-held dream of experiencing a white Christmas.
It was a strange mix of certainty and uncertainty—of plans in place, and emotions that didn’t quite settle. The road ahead was mapped, but what it would feel like to travel it, was something we were only just beginning to understand.
The Departure
Leaving wasn’t a grand moment. There was no clear line where everything suddenly felt different—just a series of small, ordinary actions that, together, meant we were going. Bags packed, doors closed, one last look back before stepping into the car.
It felt familiar at first. We’d travelled before. We’d packed cars, followed roads, set off on trips; remember we live eight hours drive from our kids on the Gold Coast. But this time there was something sitting quietly underneath it all—a knowing that we weren’t just heading away for a while. We weren’t looping back anytime soon and we wouldn’t be with family for Christmas
The road out of home felt the same as it always had, but the meaning had shifted. Every kilometre wasn’t just taking us somewhere—it was taking us further from what we knew, and deeper into something we hadn’t fully figured out yet.
Some moments felt more personal than we could have anticipated.
Some Moments That Made Us Pause
Some moments felt more personal than we could have anticipated.
In Bow Church (London), we went searching for something small—a single headstone, barely readable among timeworn graves. Many were covered in moss, their inscriptions faded or lost altogether. But what we found instead was something entirely different.
Tucked within the church grounds, we came across a crypt bearing six names from my own family. A quiet discovery, in an unexpected place—this small, historic church now sitting within what has become little more than a traffic island.
It wasn’t something we could have planned for, and yet it became one of the moments that stayed with us most.
Then there were places that surprised us in a completely different way. When I first included the Grand Canyon in our plans, it wasn’t met with much enthusiasm—just “I don’t know if I want to see a big hole in the ground.” But standing on the edge of it was something else entirely. No photo or description prepares you for the scale of it, or the way it quietly takes over your attention.
Other moments carried a different kind of weight. Visiting National Civil Rights Museum at the
Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, wasn’t something you simply “see” and move on from. It asks you to stop, to take it in, and to sit with what happened there.
Each of these places was different, but they had something in common. They made us pause—not because we had planned for them to, but because they gave the journey a depth we hadn’t fully anticipated.
Looking Back
Looking back, what began as a plan to get from one side of the world to the other slowly became something else entirely. The lines we thought we might follow blurred, shifted, and disappeared altogether—replaced by moments we couldn’t have mapped out, and experiences we hadn’t thought to expect.
The journey didn’t unfold in a straight line, and in the end, that was exactly what gave it meaning. It was found in the pauses, the detours, and the places that asked us to stop rather than move on.
And perhaps that’s what stayed with us most—not how far we travelled, or even where we went, but the way the journey revealed itself along the way, one unexpected moment at a time.
Some of those moments would go on to become stories of their own.
Leave a Reply