While putting together my 2025 Christmas letters, I started watching Itchy Boots @ItchyBoots on YouTube. About three years ago an old/new beau introduced me to her channel. At the time she was riding her motorcycle (motorbike as she calls it) solo from the tip of South America to the top of Alaska.

Yes, you read that right—SHE, solo, South America to Alaska, on a motorcycle!!

Itchy Boots is from the Netherlands, looks like she’s in her late 30’s (dangerous trying to guess a woman’s age) and just hit over 3 million followers on YouTube! I am one of the 3 million.

I jumped into the middle of season 8, and she’s riding through Afghanistan. Season 8 started in Turkey and she hopes to end up in Japan. It’s a part of her around the world trip on a motorbike. When I started watching the other day, she was near Jalalibad, headed towards Kabul, and now she’s following a raging river through some unimaginably huge mountain ranges to get into Tajikistan. As she traveled through Afghanistan, the tension she created in her YouTube posts was masterful. The risks posed by the Taliban were palpable.

Itchy Boots doesn’t take the safest routes. When she was determining her passage through Tajikistan, she reminded me of myself: she considered routes based on the most pavement, the route she had taken before on a previous trip, or the road she had never taken before. Of course she chose the path she had never done before. I do the same thing as I drive around Santa Fe, New Mexico, or the West–I try to choose the route I’ve not driven before. It doesn’t always happen for me. And there were the times Google Maps took me on a dirt path that wasn’t a road and just got narrower and narrower, mesquite scratching the sides of my truck; or the time in Oregon the paved road ran straight into a flooding river. On a smaller scale, when I have time to burn, I’ll take streets in Santa Fe that I have never been on, just to see what’s there.

I sit in my warm, cozy office in Santa Fe, NM, thinking of this young woman and her quest to go around the world. I am taken back to the inciting incident that catapulted me onto my own solo travels. For Itchy Boots, it was a cheating boyfriend who compelled her to sell most of her worldly belongings and start her motorbike adventures.

For me, it was the death of my husband of 32 years that propelled me to take our Little Blue Truck, a Ford F-150 extended crew cab, and begin a solo ski adventure around the Rocky Mountains. I didn’t have to sell off my worldly goods to fund my travels. A lifetime of saving for retirement and survivor benefits funded my sojourn. I didn’t start a YouTube channel but I wrote about the adventures in my website blog (www.elainekoyama.com) and published the blogs in a book called Solo Ski Sojourn. I traveled alone for five winters, skiing the mountains of Canada and the US. It was a thrill to have 6 or 8 hours of road time ahead of me, alone, to think, listen to audiobooks, podcasts or local radio.

What resonates with me is Itchy Boots’ love of the “going.” You can feel it in her laughter as she faces new challenges, her open smiles when meeting new people from all walks of life, and her faith that in spite of the unknown around the next bend in the road everything will work itself out.

I am over thirty years older than Itchy Boots, yet I feel a kinship as if she were my peer. I’ve not done anything as adventurous as she, but I am reminded that for each of us, the boundaries of our life are ever changing and amorphous. Adventure can happen anywhere, anytime–our challenge is to be ready to embrace it when it arises.

My Itchy Boots adventures are still happening. I’ve done the Solo Ski Sojourns and still continue to ski; I’ve moved to a new city in a new state and have opened my arms to whatever comes next. I have become a first-time tennis coach in an after school youth program. And while it’s not the same as hopping on a motorbike and traveling through the middle and far east, it’s my version of being Itchy Boots.

Maybe the beauty of YouTube content isn’t that I have to do it to experience it. YouTube is another form of story telling. Itchy Boots is taking me along on her adventure. Just like writing a book transports the reader to another world or time, watching Itchy Boots and content creators like her take me to worlds I have only imagined.

And like magic, her adventures become mine.

PS: Follow ItchyBoots on YouTube @ItchyBoots. Her book Free Ride is available on Amazon.