While we are here thinking twice to go from our room to the kitchen, this 21-year-old has become the youngest woman to have touched every country on Earth.
21-year-old Lexie Alford after stepping in North Korea has broken the Guinness World Record of the current 24-year-old James Asquith. She has seen all 196 sovereign nations. She did this recently on 31st May.
Since her parents had their own travel agency, traveling is all that she did since she was merely a kid. She describes her urge to travel all the time because her parents had a knack to do so too.
My parents placed a lot of importance on exposing me to every way of life around the world and that had a very profound impact on the person I am today. I’ve always had a curiosity about other people’s ways of life and how they find happiness.
Lexie mentions that her original agenda was not to break any record earlier but when she realized that people have started looking up to her, she didn’t want to back out.
It wasn’t until things started getting really challenging that I realized I was inspiring people around me, especially young women. Feeling that support meant that I couldn’t give up when things got tough. I was determined to show everyone that the world isn’t as scary as the media portrays it to be and that there’s kindness everywhere.
The idea of her breaking the record of traveling all the countries in the world happened after completing her 12th grade.
The very first time I thought about breaking the world record was in October 2016 in my home, California. I graduated from high school two years early and had gotten an associate’s degree from a local college. I was ready to start my gap year when I dropped the idea of going back to school and began to pursue the record full-time.
But since traveling is not the cheapest thing to do, she did have a lot of planning to do. Her traveling has always been ‘self-funded’. She got hold of some branded deals throughout her journey by particularly being active on her Instagram page. She did a lot of photography and blogging through her journey. She also co-hosted a travel show which will be airing soon.