Freelance Writer And Teacher Discovers The World
By Kelly Westhoff '94
My husband, Quang Nystrom, and I recently returned from a seven-month adventure, traveling the world on a trip we planned ourselves. We set out in October, spending our first month in Mexico, where we rode horses to historical sites, witnessed a Day of the Dead celebration and visited the monarch butterfly reserve. We continued our travels, first southward and then westward to take in the penguins of Patagonia, South America; my husband's home country of Vietnam; and the Great Wall of China. By the time we returned home in April, we'd visited eight countries on three continents.
We first talked about the trip two and a half years ago, when my husband proposed and asked me to travel the world with him. He hadn't done a lot of traveling outside the United States and didn't have to pitch the idea to me twice. We spent our first year and a half of marriage saving money, put our jobs in the Minneapolis area on hold for several months and finally stepped on a plane.
My love for travel developed while at Concordia. I spent a semester in Pamplona, Spain, where I not only improved my Spanish-speaking skills, but gained confidence and independence. I learned I could exist in a place other than Minnesota and it was very empowering.
I think my liberal arts background from Concordia really factored into this trip as well. Because I was required to take classes across a range of subjects, I learned to appreciate different fields of study and other points of view. It doesn't take long before you can start drawing connections, for example, between biology and archaeology and religion. Travel, in many ways, does the exact same thing.
Read our Global Roam blog for more about our trip.
