I reflect on the past year, just as I do every year, this New Year’s Eve. At least here in the States, our new year is about 11 hours away, while our friends on the other side of the globe are recovering from their celebrations held hours ago. It’s always fascinating to me, and has been since I was a child, that Sydney is 17 hours ahead of us here in the Central Time Zone (aka Chicago, etc.). It makes sense, on a daylight and Earthly rotation level, but it is hard to grasp, especially in today’s age of instant news from 17 hours in the future, so to speak.

We woke up this morning to yet another shooting, this time in Denver, and this time over a domestic dispute of some variety. There was also the guy today in Houston who thankfully decided to get smashed/hammered in a bar prior to the New Year’s Eve celebrations occurring later this evening directly down from his high-floor hotel room.

I write today not to go into the Great Gun Debate, but to state affirmatively, again, that I will not allow the crazies, the terrorists, the weirdos to deter my travel and adventurous spirit. While you probably won’t find us in Tunisia again, we enjoyed our time there. While you probably won’t find us in the bad-part-of-town anywhere, be it St. Louis, Calcutta, or Rio, you may very well find us in those places, enjoying our time as much as possible, taking in life. We as a society absolutely cannot allow dictators, terrorists (be them domestic or foreign), freaks, and crazies to keep us from enjoying the rest of the world. If we do, they win.

I am inspired by Malala, the young woman shot by the Taliban. Did she stop her work for education for women? No. Did she hide under a rock? No. Did she persist, drive, and move ahead without stopping? Yes, she did. She represents, in part, what is best in all of us – hope. That tiny thing at the bottom of Pandora’s famous box that keeps us all going even when the going gets really tough.

My sisters and I took a trip to New York in 2014 to celebrate my mom’s 65th birthday. It was January, freezing cold, and windy. I’d been twice before, so I knew my way around a bit, and we did the tourist and non-tourist things. We ate at off-the-wall restaurants, kitchy restaurants, and hot dog carts. We shopped, we went to mass at the Cathedral (under construction), and stared in awe at the Statue of Liberty as we crossed under her upraised arm on our tour boat to the base.

We took at taxi to the American Museum of Natural History our proported last day there, only to get stuck there when 10” of snow dumped on the city in a matter of a few hours. With our flight cancelled for the next day, I made quick arrangements to get a decent hotel room at a decent price last-minute. Successful in that, we decided to just stay in the museum as long as we could, since we were limited on our options to get back to our original hotel and retrieve our bags.

The Museum is located on the Upper West Side of Central Park in Manhattan, and it was, of course, the setting for the Night at the Museum movies. It also has a most-excllent gift shop, where I bought my very favorite coffee cup ever (it’s thick-walled, old-school porcelain, which makes it hold heat very well). There are many artifacts from various cultures and societies throughout the world and time. Dinosaur bones, Easter Island statues, huge oak tree slices, and Teddy Rosevelt statues and nature accomplishments line the halls. If you’ve not been, and you’re in New York, it’s absolutely worth a trip. If you have kids over the age of 5, it’s a must.

From the large windows in the dinosaur bones area of the museum, we Southern girls watched in awe at the huge snowflakes quickly piling up all around us. I’m sure our New York and Northern friends were not as impressed, knowing what was to come as far as travel goes. We were on holiday, so it was different for us, and we considered it yet another twist in our adventure that had started with me literally breaking my nose by running in to a glass door at night, full-force. I looked really nice for several days with a black eye, a cut on my nose, and swelling.

With no taxis to be found, no busses running, and no other good options, we walked through Central Park in a beautiful snowfall, cold and wet, but happy. With so much snow, the park was just about abandoned. If you haven’t walked the park, let’s just say it’s huge – like really huge. Although we’d been to the park in the daytime, without snow, we found a certifiable winter wonderland on our trek that evening in January 2014. I tripped over something and fell flat on my face into the snow, something that my tripmates have not yet let me forget. I nearly paid a guy $100 for his bicycle, then realized it would have done me little to no good in 10” of snow. My sister kept asking if we were going to get mugged, wary of the perhaps 10 people we saw during the whole trek across the park. My boots were toast after that, but we found our way back to the other side of the park (as in the other side – East – from the museum) a few hours later after dark, thankful for the journey. Had we had our wits about us, we might have thought twice about traversing scary, dark, Central Park, potentially full of muggers and other nefarious characters, but we really felt like we had just about no other choice. There were four of us, too, and we are all pretty tough ladies. It’s a night I’ll never forget, and one I would not want to go back and change. It was one of the best nights of my life, truly.

There is a sense of accomplishment for travel journeys like that one. The ones where you make all these plans, have them thwarted due to weather, strike, or otherwise, and the actions that you take to overcome those difficulties lead you to a place where you never thought you’d be, much better than the plans you made anyway. That’s what travel does for me. New experiences, new journeys, and the very best memories ever made.

I don’t know that I would trek through the Park again, in the snow and dark, not because I have had time to think about it, but more because I think it would cloud my memories of the adventure we had that day with my Mom. My sisters and I have thought about going somewhere else with her, but we just haven’t set it up yet. Maybe Rome, to the Vatican, which I believe would be a dream come true for her. I think that was one of the things most-special about that night. The joy on her face at the experience. Something we all four talk about even four years and many trips later.

Happy New Year to all. Go out and do something adventurous and memorable today and this year. You won’t regret it.