94-year-old grandma takes on huge travel challenge
"Grandma Joy" Ryan was 91 when she first got her passport, and she hasn't stopped travelling since.
Now aged 94, she is embarking on a new global challenge with her grandson Brad Ryan, 42, with the intergenerational duo planning to travel to all seven continents in the world together.
"I don't have many years left, [so] you hop to it," Grandma Joy told CNN Travel.
"If you slow down, you don't get anything done."
The pair, who are from the US, have already travelled to three continents, visiting Banff National Park in Canada last year to "represent North America well beyond just our own country", and Africa in 2023, visiting both Amboseli National Park and Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya.
Their most recent trip was to South America, where they travelled to Ecuador, and spent time in the Galapagos Islands, as well as Chile.
"It was amazing to see those huge tortoises," Grandma Joy recalled. "They could raise their shells up just like a convertible or something."
Prior to travelling the world together, the grandma-grandson duo were actually estranged for around a decade due to a family rift that occurred after Ryan's parents divorced.
After reconnecting in 2010, Ryan was telling his grandma about his previous hiking adventures on the Appalachian Trail and Mount Kilimanjaro, when he learnt that his grandmother "had never set eyes on a mountain."
"That was one of her lifelong regrets," he said.
"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 stuck with him and the pair embarked on their first journey together in 2015, when Ryan decided to take a weekend road trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
"At 85, she saw her first mountain, climbed her first mountain and went camping for the first time and fell off the air mattress a couple of times and didn't complain," he said.
He added, that having to move more slowly as he was travelling with his grandma, meant that he was able to appreciate everything in a more meaningful way.
"I wasn't rushing through the places that I was visiting. I was really taking the time to appreciate smaller details.
"The lens through which she is seeing the world is very different to most people my age. She doesn't visit a place thinking, 'Well, I'll be back again,' so there's more presence."
They kept the adventure going and decided to travel to the 62 other US National Parks, and while it took them almost eight years with two-month long breaks between each trip, Grandma Joy made history last year.
She became the oldest person to visit all 63 National Parks in the US.
"Being an old person sitting on the porch, this makes you feel like, 'Well maybe I did accomplish something.' So I enjoyed every bit of it," she said.
Ryan himself is very proud of his grandmother's achievement, and after going viral with their national parks quest in 2023, he said that travelling with her has been a life-changing experience.
"She shattered my preconceived notions about what it means to be an older person," he said.
"Because she wasn't just sitting in the passenger seat looking out the window, although we did that too."
He then described how Grandma Joy went ziplining at New River Gorge National Park and Preserve in West Virginia and whitewater rafting at Wrangell St. Elias National Park in Alaska at the age of 91, and how she reminded him of all the possibilities that come with getting older.
"I think we all have this sort of innate dread about getting older," he said.
"And we think about the limitations instead of the possibilities. She [Grandma Joy] reminds us of the possibilities that still exist."
While the pair are currently "still recovering" from their latest trip to South America, they shared their plan to visit Australia later this year, and hope to "hop over to Asia" after.
Once they've ticked off Australia and Asia off their list, they plan to visit Europe and hope to end their trip in Antarctica.
"Antarctica is the one that's like the wildcard," Ryan said. "We would love that, but getting there is challenging.
"I'd like to end big, and I think Antarctica would be the cherry on top of this adventure."
The duo document all their adventures on their Instagram account, grandmajoysroadtrip and despite people wondering when they would wrap it up, Grandma Joy's "willing spirit" keeps her going.
"I just take one step at a time, one day at a time, and thank the Lord every morning for giving me one more day," she said.
"I try to be an optimist. The glass is half full, not half empty. And the people that you meet along the way lift your spirits.
"You see people in worse shape than you, and I just think 'I've got a lot to be thankful for.'
"Not everybody's lucky enough to have a grandson that's willing to drag them around."
Images: Instagram