I remember well the first moment I stepped off an airplane at the Douala International Airport in the Central African country of Cameroon, in 2009. The tiny, rectangular terminal looked like a rain-soaked paper bag perched atop toothpicks that would blow away in a storm. The thick humidity rolled over my face like a steamer.

The sounds of buzzing mosquitoes and English spoken in African accents twisted in my ears. The smells of unfamiliar tropical plants and foods, like plantains frying in roadside shanties, permanently imprinted the time and place in my mind.

In the beginning of my time living in Cameroon, all my senses were firing, figuring out my new surroundings. It’s a fleeting sensation every traveler
chases and relishes before it fades—feeling foreign.

My husband’s work kept us relocating abroad—to Douala, Moscow and London. Over the course of ten years, we racked up travel adventures worth writing about (and so I did). I hiked through the jungles of Rwanda to see mountain gorillas, downed shots of Russian vodka just off of Red Square, got flogged in a Turkish bath, biked through dusty farms surrounding the Pagodas of Burma and toasted a royal wedding in the streets of London.

But long before my passport pages started filling up, Florida was my first foreign frontier.

My high school friends remember me as the girl with a funny accent who moved from North Carolina to South Florida as an uncertain 16-year-old. My memories of arriving in Ft. Lauderdale for the first time bear a striking resemblance to the culture shock I felt as an adult in Douala, only the mosquitoes were malaria-free.

But it was during those teenage years that my love of travel and adventure began—roaming the streets of the Calle Ocho Festival in Miami, dancing in cowboy boots at the Chili Cook-Off in Pembroke Pines, fishing for tarpon in the Ten Thousand Islands, and of course, driving in a convertible down the Overseas Highway to Key West.

Now, having returned to roost in the Sunshine State as an adult, my inner explorer still needs to get drenched, dusty, dressed up, lost and found. And there couldn’t be a more promising landscape than right here at home, where dive sites bubble up from crystal clear natural springs, country airfields provide a portal to forgotten outposts, and panthers roam as freely as people between untamed wilderness and urban metropolis.

I’ve dedicated Flamingo’s second issue to satisfying my own wanderlust. I hope our stories will inspire you to take off by land, sea or sky to find your own foreign places in Florida.