Making Black History Moments (MBHM): In September of 2011 Evie Robinson founded the Nomadness Travel Tribe, an award winning virtual community of over 20,000 black and brown nomads who contribute over $50 million into the travel industry annually.

I am infected with Wanderlust. You can see it swirling all around me as I dart here and there. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to stay still in the same place. My brain just can’t bend around the concept. It might have something to do with the way I came up.

I was about 10 years old when I made up my mind that I would one day visit Barcelona. My logic was clear and simple, I was studying Spanish in school and loved the language so I should clearly go speak Spanish with Spaniards in Spain.

Give me a break, I was 10 and living in the middle of a cornfield. 🤷🏾‍♀️. While my initial motivation for visiting Spain may have been a bit underdeveloped, the notion never left me.

Even at that age, I was no stranger to travel. My parents took me on my first plane ride from Savannah, GA, to Chicagoland to meet my paternal grandparents for the first time before I celebrated my second birthday. By 10, I had already visited at least 10 of the 50 states and Canada 🇨🇦. I honestly thought that was what everyone did. I was a kid and so I didn’t have a passport to stamp and I don’t even remember anyone asking us for one. We were visiting family in Detroit and decided to cross the river and spend the day in Windsor. It was a very different time.

It wasn’t until college that I got close to leaving the country again. My school wasn’t offering a study abroad program to Spain but they had one to Cuernavaca, Mexico 🇲🇽. I was so excited and then they cancelled the trip because I was the only student who signed up to go. I was heartbroken.

I finally managed to leave the mainland and set foot in both Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands due to an amazing job that required I travel on occasion to places like that (😆) but neither of those places granted me the satisfaction of a passport stamp.

Years later, when my husband and I finally took a moment to have a honeymoon I just KNEW this would be my time. We were cruising to the Bahamas and I was READY to join the passport club. I returned to the mainland defeated. The customs agent just scanned my passport through the machine. NO STAMP 😩! Not only was my passport book still naked on the inside, but our bank account was breached so we were broke in Florida and had to figure out how to drive back home with no money and no help from our bank because it was a federal holiday. But that’s another story for another day…

So there I was, sitting at my computer one day 🧑🏾‍💻 halfway through my 38 year of fabulosity when it hit me. I needed to get stamped by any means necessary. It just so happened that this decision happened close to the time when my brother and his family pulled up stakes and relocated to Northern Italy 🇮🇹 to try something new. Now I had even greater motivation to break free of the North American continent so I could go see my little nephew and niece. I figured it out and landed in Barcelona on June 2, 2019, and backpacked my way across Spain 🇪🇸, France 🇫🇷 and Italy 🇮🇹. It was fantastic! The only real let down was that I only got stamped for Spain because I entered the EU there, a situation I partly rectified by returning to Europe six months later and getting my Paris stamp 😆!

Knowing a bit of my travelocity, is it really any wonder that I would feel an immediate kinship to the Nomadness Travel Tribe. The work these organizers have and continue to do is soul work. It’s cleansing and healing and something sorely needed in our current atmosphere.

People need people.

All kinds of people.

Same people, different people, bad joke making people, smarties, slofies, you name it, we need it!

Travel helps us be better to one another and connect. As I consider my upcoming travel I know that a few things will remain constant for me.

1. I will convene with members of my tribe on a regular basis for my personal health and well-being.

2. June is my month to celebrate me and will involve travel. This year’s trip is going to be epic.

3. I will authentically share my travel stories because someone might be waiting to free themselves to live more fully and my story might help them.

To learn more about the Nomadness Travel Tribe please go visit https://www.nomadnesstv.com/ and know that this movement isn’t going to slow down because it can only grow because we NEED Nomadness!

---

Marta C. Youngblood is the founder and creative engine behind TheWRITEaddiction creatives co-op founded in 2014 as a virtual community supporting writers from all over the United States of America. Marta’s passion drives her to support the success of creatives from all walks of life to honor their talent and share it with the world. She believes that working in our creative callings does not have to be synonymous with being a “starving artist” and helps creatives master the business skills and strategies they need to work in their gifts.