My husband Ron and I fly to Australia every winter to visit family and friends. Our first stop is always Woolla, a five thousand acre cattle property a long way from anywhere, owned by Ron’s best mate Peter.

It took us a long time to figure out what was going on. It took even longer to realize there was anything to figure out.

“Pretty” has never been a big word in my vocabulary. Not that I’m an eyesore or anything, just that I’m not and never will be “beautiful.” So Egypt came as a complete surprise.

We started the adventure kayaking on the Sea of Cortez, known for the greatest concentration of Marine mammals in the world. The kayaking was fine, but the wildlife was a total bust.

Our Baja holiday ended with three days watching whales in Magdalena Bay. After no luck in the Sea of Cortez, I was desperate to see some wildlife. Happily, the bay was wall-to-wall gray whales, many with infants in tow.

In July of 2014 my daughter Jess and I spent a week in the Bahamas swimming with wild spotted dolphins. She’d gone on a shark dive in March and discovered that a charter captain who took divers to the sharks all winter took swimmers to the dolphins all summer. She sent me to the website, and I signed us up straightaway.

One of my life’s ambitions has been to go to Africa on safari, and I fully expected my husband to come along. After all, I went to rugby matches, didn’t I?

Our first morning in camp, the guide asked if we’d heard the lions roaring before sunrise. I asked him to wake me if lions roared again. That night he scratched on the flap of our tent and whispered “Come right away.” A scruffy male lion was walking through the camp.

We’ve just come back from a weekend on Cape Cod that had a lot of firsts: It was our first mini-vacation with our grown daughter; our first visit to Wellfleet on the outer Cape; our first foray into AirBnb, and our first little holiday with our dogs, Tilly and Luther.

Standing at my kitchen counter to write this story, all I hear are clichés, trite sayings telling me to get my shit together. “Well begun is half done,” and “Begin as you mean to go on.” That kind of thing.

The trip I’d so nearly ruined was still intact when Diana and I reached the farmhouse. As the idiot who got the day wrong, the welcome pointed in my direction was somewhat reserved, but by the end of the day all was forgiven.

My five-year-old didn’t want to come for a walk, so I bribed him with a snake hunt in the Botanical Garden. I didn’t think we’d see any snakes. I was so wrong.

In 2009 I went to India with an outfit called Relief Riders International. The idea was to hold medical clinics in remote villages in Rajasthan, bringing doctors and supplies into the heart of the Thar Desert.

Every three weeks, rain or shine, we drove from Jakarta to the mountains known as the Puncak. The village where we shared a bungalow gave “rural” a whole new meaning, but the air was always fresh and cool.