Hi, I’m Bridget, a Washington, DC native, who after experiencing two years of traumatic life events, realized that it was time to get back to living.
Traveling has always been a huge passion of mine, but I never had the urge to write about traveling until I lost my little sister, Shannon. In the summer of 2016, Shannon decided to enroll in a Spanish immersion program in Guatemala. Her goal was to master the Spanish language so that she could help the many Spanish speaking victims of rape and domestic violence that she encountered at the crisis center where she volunteered as a counselor. Shannon was a week away from her 25th birthday when she was killed in a motor vehicle accident coming back from a weekend cliff diving adventure at Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. The van she was riding in blew a tire, causing it to flip several times. She was thrown out the bus window and was killed instantly.
When going through Shannon’s things, I discovered a will that she wrote a few days before her travel. This wasn’t your typical will and to be honest, she filled it out incorrectly, but that’s what made it so special. She was supposed to list the traits that she embodied that she wanted to leave to her friends and family, but instead she listed the traits that she admired in others that she felt she had inherited from them. Next to my name, she had written “wanderlust”, which means the irresistibly strong desire to travel or wander.
When I was in my 20’s, I was always traveling. After finishing college, I took a job waiting tables which allowed me the flexibility to travel whenever the urge struck me. However, eventually I got married, worked my way up the corporate ladder to become an Executive over a large procurement group, and opened two businesses which left me absolutely no time for traveling. Ten years later, after a messy divorce, a bankruptcy from a failed business, and the tragic loss of my sister, I decided that life was too short to waste. I once again began planning trips to various places; Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and Iceland to name a few.
I decided to blog about my adventures and call it, Createmywanderlist.com (a twist off of wanderlust), to inspire others to live the life that Shannon started but never got a chance to finish. It gives me comfort to think that although her life was way too short, she died doing what she loved best…traveling.
