She didn’t receive a passport until she was 91, but a year after becoming the oldest person to visit all 63 National Parks in the United States, “Grandma Joy” Ryan is embarking on a new worldwide adventure with her 42-year-old grandson Brad Ryan.
In 2023, the intergenerational duo went viral with their quest for national parks. Now, they intend to visit to all seven continents.
“I don’t have many years left, [so] you hop to it,” Grandma Joy, now 94, tells CNN Travel via Zoom. “If you slow down, you don’t get anything done.”
The couple has already visited three continents, including Banff National Park in Canada last year to “represent North America well beyond just our own country” and will travel to Africa in 2023 to visit both Amboseli National Park and Maasai Mara National Reserve.
Their most recent excursion was to South America, where they visited Ecuador, the Galapagos Islands, and Chile.
“It was amazing to see those huge tortoises,” Grandma Joy says of the trip. “They could raise their shells up just like a convertible or something.”
While they’re very inseparable now, the grandmother-grandson combination were estranged for about a decade due to a family schism that developed when Ryan’s parents divorced.
After reconnecting in 2010, they began updating each other on what had happened in their lives during their time apart.
While recalling his prior adventures trekking the Appalachian Trail and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Ryan discovered that his paternal grandmother “had never set eyes on a mountain.”
“That was one of her lifelong regrets,” he says. “Her travel had been limited to just a few road trips to Florida with my grandfather when he was alive.
“Her view of the world was always what she saw on the Travel Channel or just on the news.”
That conversation stayed with him.
A few years later, Ryan, who had been struggling in veterinary school, decided to take a weekend road trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles the border between North Carolina and Tennessee, and asked Grandma Joy to accompany him.
“I just needed to get away and I wanted to do something that would fill my cup,” he explains.