Through the Looking Glass: How Travel Found the Girl Who Once Only Dreamed of Elsewhere

I’ve never counted how many countries I’ve been to. Not once. Not even out of curiosity.

Because for me, travel has never been about tallying stamps in a passport or collecting destinations. It was never about the list. It has always been something quieter, something deeper. A calling. A remembering. A return to wonder.

The truth is, I didn’t even get on a plane until I was twenty. I grew up in a small town. We didn’t have much, and we weren’t a travelling family. But even then, I was constantly drawn to what was beyond. Thankfully, I was surrounded by people and stories that felt “otherworldly” to me, and I could never quite shake the feeling that there was something bigger out there, waiting.

When I was little, my favourite story was Alice in Wonderland. I used to imagine what it would be like to tumble through the looking glass—to fall into another world and see life from a completely different perspective. I think that’s what travel became for me. My own version of falling through the looking glass. Not an escape from reality, but a deeper plunge into it.

I remember sitting cross-legged on a dirt floor in a crumbling kasbah in Morocco, sharing mint tea with a family of ten. None of us spoke the same language, yet somehow, we understood one another completely. We laughed, we gestured, we smiled until our cheeks hurt. Connection didn’t need translation. It lived in the eyes, the hands, the shared silence between words.

I remember wandering the backstreets of Kathmandu, following the scent of incense and the rhythm of temple bells. I was lost and unbothered, stumbling into courtyards where monks chanted and children played. I realized I wasn’t lost at all. I was exactly where I was meant to be.

I remember trekking above the tree line in the Everest region, lungs burning, legs shaking, heart wide open. The air was so thin I could hear my own pulse. The mountains loomed like ancient teachers, silent and sure. In that thin air, stripped of everything unnecessary, I found the simplest truth: how little we need to feel full.

That is what travel does. It rearranges your insides.

It humbles you, softens you, and shakes you loose. It pulls you out of your story and into the greater one. It doesn’t care about your plans. It asks only for your presence.

I think that’s why so many women, especially those of us in our fifties and beyond, are travelling more than ever. We’ve spent so much of our lives caring for others, raising families, building careers, tending to homes and hearts, that somewhere along the way, we forgot how to tend to ourselves. Then one day, something stirs. A whisper. A hunger. A quiet question: What else is out there for me?

Travel answers that question not with certainty, but with expansion. It gives us permission to be curious again. To wander without reason. To be both student and witness.

It reminds us that we are not too old to begin again. That adventure has no expiration date. That the world is vast, yes, but so are we.

I never counted countries because how could I possibly count the places that have changed the shape of my heart?

I remember the tea shared on the dirt floor. The laughter in languages I didn’t speak. The trail where the clouds brushed my shoulders. The faces, the stories, the silences that spoke louder than words.

I didn’t grow up in a family that travelled. I grew up in a family that dreamed. And maybe that’s what set me on this path—to keep tumbling through the looking glass, again and again, chasing wonder wherever it leads.

Because in the end, travel isn’t about how far you go. It’s about how deeply you’re willing to feel.

And that little girl who once dreamed of other worlds?

She found them.

And she’s still falling, gratefully, into the next.

In magic and adventure

Penny