If you loved episodes one and two of my new audio adventure A Race Around the World: Based on the True Story of Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland, then head over to these feeds linked below. New episodes are out and you can listen to the full series at these links. Listen here -----> Apple Podcasts Listen here -----> Spotify Thank you so much for li…

Please go to A Race Around the World feed for the remaining nine episodes. ___________________________________________________________________________ Nellie Bly isn’t the only woman to leave New York on November 14th to race around the world. On the same day, the editor of the Cosmopolitan magazine, John Brisben Walker, recognized the potential fo…

Please go to A Race Around the World feed for the remaining nine episodes. _______________________________________________________________________________ On November 14th, 1889, Nellie Bly left Manhattan to go on a race around the world in under 80 days. In this episode, host Adrien Behn will delve into the background of this extraordinary woman. …

NEW SHOW ALERT Hi Strangers! I have been working on a new podcast series and wanted to share the trailer here. Take a listen! ________________________________________________________________________________ On November 14th, 1889, two female writers entered a race to go around the world in under 80 days. Nellie Bly went east, and Elizabeth Bisland …

Adrien and Sam hear avalanches. Adrien reflects on her trip and the last year of stillness as her and Sam make their way back home.

Adrien describes a day in Bryce Canyon with her partner Sam that tests their relationship. She then interviews Sam about their time on the road and how well they faired as travel companions.

Adrien and Sam head out west. Adrien talks to managers of Indy Hostel in Indianapolis and Food of the Mountain Motel in Boulder to see how COVID has effected their business and how they have learned to roll with every changing mandate. We discuss post-covid travel predictions, roadside attractions, and never ending stretches of desert.…

This episode kicks of Strangers Abroad Road Trip mini-series. Listen to why Adrien had a sudden urge to go into the desert and how she started planning her trip across the country with her intrepid partner Sam.

Although our American passports give us all equal access to the world, we don't come back with the same experiences. In light of the Black Lives Matter protests and shifts, we talk to travelers of color who share their stories about being a person of color abroad. We discuss common frustrations and how to be a good ally at home and onboard. Feature…

We talk to travelers to reexamine their relationships with themselves and their home as they wait through quarantine. Adrien get's used to seeing more of her family and long walks through the woods. Featured Guests: Ticket to Anywhere Podcast

Adrien escapes to upstate, and we speak to travelers who had there plans canceled due to the pandemic Featured Guests: Full Time Travel and Delux Life Media

Thank you to all of my listeners and guests for an incredible second season! I hope you all enjoyed it and I would love to hear your thoughts and desires for the next season. Email me at strangersabroadpodcast@gmail.com PLEASE RATE AND REVIEW THE SHOW You can do it by going to Strangers Abroad under Apple Podcasts LASTLY, if you love what we do her…

The more we travel, the more we find that home becomes more illusive. Home is a place we crave in our most harrowing moments and forget in the spontaneous bliss. But, the farther we travel from it, the more foreign it seems. It slowly becomes but a dream to us. Our lives consist of backpacks and tickets instead of a bed and a mortgage. Many of us l…

Home is hopefully a wonderful place to grow. But it can keep us stagnant. Never challenge us for bigger things in life. Travel has ways of challenging us and forcing us to grow in ways we couldn’t have anticipated. We see what we are good at and where we can improve and reveal to us what our full potential is. But growth is not a singular moment- i…

When we travel, many of us come back with more photos on our phones and souvenirs in our bags. We may feel a deeper shift within us. We have experienced things that we cannot unsee. We have to do better; we know we can. This could be as simple as giving more compliments to people, being kinder. Or it could be enough to evoke a humanitarian career. …

Sometimes we don’t know we are sick until we have left our homes. New environments have ways of challenging us. We can push our strengths to a new limit. We can see how adaptable our bodies are in new territories. We get over the limitations our bodies and minds put on us. We see what we can and cannot do without sacrificing our joy and need to tra…

Travel invites us to climb mountains, internal or external. And once we leave the small backyards we were raised in and are exposed to the great landscapes of the world, something shifts within us. Our egos crack. Our minds quiet. Our true selves show up. Today on the episode, we are humbled. We talk to people who begin the transformational process…

“What are the chances?” is how it always starts. We bump into a middle school friend in Prague, book the same hotel as a high school friend in Argentina, or end up sitting next to someone from home on a bus in Ireland. When we travel, we sometimes find ourselves running into people we already know but didn’t expect to see. Your brain is shocked bec…

Strangers are an inevitable part of our trip. Their presence is like oxygen: invisible but breathes life into our trips. These random interactions Being pointed in the right direction ( or often wrong) by someone sitting next to you on the bus. Sharing a dessert with someone you met on a tour Having a small laugh with the barista in a cafe Make a q…

er, it seems that when we travel to new lands, what we are afraid of is more that we don’t know our surroundings. We are unfamiliar with the customs, our surroundings, the cultural mannerisms, the speed of the city, or even how to order. Our discomfort in a new place can prick our brains to believe that mischief looms behind every door. But that’s …

It isn't about the destination, it’s about the journey is one of the most overused, cliche, eye-roll sayings around travel. But it reminds us to not take for granted what gets us from point A to point B. The buses, the planes, the cars, the trains, the conductors and all of the wonderful and weird people you met along the way. But it is when we are…

Travel has a way of redefining our romantic needs and helps us expand more than our horizons. What can travel tell us about this silent connection. An eye glance or whiff of someone's pheromones can magnetize us to someone we might not normally be attracted to. We will talk to travelers who adjust their romantic needs, desire, chemistry, and commit…

The whiff of challah bread or bite into roasted corn can transport you back to journeys you had long ago. Nothing like food can stir a deep hunger within us to trekk thousands of miles to find the perfect spring roll. It not only motivates our travels but helps us understand where we are and who we are with. Invisible lines portion Moroccan tagine …

Now comes the time that most travelers anticipate the most: the wandering. The musing through streets for hours, the hidden staircases, the gardens behind bookstores, and random conversations with locals. All of the things we find outside of the guide book make our trip. We enjoyed these surprises more because we had no expectation to find them. An…

Travel is the truest test of a relationship. It bonds unlikely people together and tests old relationships. It puts it to the test and finds the weak spots in a relationship like a raccoon sitting on a chicken coop, trying to find the weak spots. But it also bonds you in ways that you couldn’t have imagined. In this podcast episode, we are travelin…

Out of all the states that we will travel to, traveling alone usually brings up the most trepidation in people. To many, that idea seems as foreign as the places they want to travel to. Why would you do anything alone? Why not just wait for someone? But that underlying fear might be because solitude is often misinterpreted as loneliness. Both menta…

One of the largest plights of traveling is not knowing exactly where you are. It doesn’t matter how many websites you have on a travel board on Pinterest or how long you have stared at Google Maps, once you land it is easy to take a wrong turn. Your internal GPS glitches out because you have no idea where you are. Nothing is familiar. Everything is…

Our identities shift when we go abroad. When we leave the familiar surroundings of home, we start to see ourselves from a new light and angle of the sun. What will going abroad show us about ourselves that we couldn't see and help us take control of our own identities? Guest Travelers: Michelle Carlo, Tayo Rockson, Vanessa Valeria, Alexandra Tracy,…

This mini episode is the prologue to the second season of Strangers Abroad. We all experience moments of anxiety during or around the planning of our trip . The planning. The packing. The waiting. And then the day arrives when our flight is about to take off. Carry us to far off corners of the world. Maybe new adventures or repeating affairs. But t…

This is a sample clip of Strangers Abroad by Adrien BehnVon Adrien Behn

Three years ago, I was sitting on an uninspired carpet on my living room floor in Portland,OR and was planning my trip for Latin America. I was living in a sterol apartment with a partner who didn’t understand me, a job that was exhausting my passions, and a parasitic feelings of having no direction, which would leave me crying on that irksome carp…

I met Doron at the beginning of his journey and in my last days of traveling. Although we were at the opposite ends of travel, we still shared one striking commonality: home. Where he had been walking around just hours earlier, was a place I hadn’t stood on in months and while he was ready to jump out into the big wide world, I was ready to cozy up…

Blanca, from Spain, and I met at the top of a mountain overlooking Machu Picchu. I know how that sounds. As we walked around the town of Machu Picchu, I was immediately captivated with her storytelling of the ancient man mad feat and with stories from her adventures around the world. At the time, her and her partner, Heiko, from Germany were travel…

On the morning of my father's 58th birthday, I woke up at 4 in the morning on a full bed next to an Austrian boy I had met 16 hours ago in the middle of the Andes. Thomas hopping into the bus within the first few moments of beginning my trek to Machu Picchu. Thomas hoped into the bus and I were the first on a bus from Cusco to Hydroelectric. He was…

Matt and I met under extreme circumstances on evening when we were trapped inside of the chocolate shop due to aggressive protests in the streets of Arequipa, Peru. We were stuck in the cafe for a few hours, and being the only Americans, it was an opportunity for Matt and I to reflect upon our culture and country. We continued the conversation once…

Cindy was my Spanish tutor whom I met through Thomas ( from the previous episode) who worked with him through HOOP- the non-for-profit that provides lower-income students with opportunities for higher learning. Cindy’s primary job was to teach English to children living in lower socioeconomic areas and provide them with the tools to learn English a…

Thomas, from England, and I met at my first “hangover ceviche” which was always the Sunday morning after a late night of dancing and drinking around Arequipa. He mentioned to the table that a wonderful coworker was teaching him Spanish, and it was refreshing to hear another English speaker find it important to learn the countries language, while so…

Rodrigo was a local Peruvian teen who worked at Chaq Chau. While working together, we would do our own twist on language exchange: he helped me with my spanish slang and I helped him create clever DJ names in english. He was always wonderful to talk to about Peruvian culture, identity, and history. But as much as he loves his home country, working …

If you have ever had any hesitations about traveling- I highly suggest you listen to this episode. Michelle is the archetypal advocate for long distance travel and is brimming with enthusiasm over the challenges, uncomfortableness, and struggles one experiences while traveling abroad, which to many may seem bizarre. Michelle is an individual who li…

Despising the complacency that is socialized into Italian youth, Rachel from Milan willingly thrusts herself out of her comfort zone which pushes her to rethink who she wants to be in the world. I vividly remember one time while eating alfajores, having one of the best conversations about how we have used our mothers as an example of what not to do…

We have finally arrived at our final destination, Peru, where I find the people who are so similar to me I was surprised we aren’t blood-related. This episode is with my chocolate soul mate, Jen, whom I shared a room with while working at a chocolate shop in the south of Peru. The friends you meet on the road are a special breed- they see you at yo…

This is an excerpt of our conversation with Graham Hughes where we both get kind of ranty and I wanted to give it its own space now at a time when our thoughts about the world have been challenged. We recorded this conversation pre Trump and pre Brexit- so neither of us had the knowledge to know the outcomes of those elections but as you can here w…

He holds the Guinness World Record for visiting every United Nations recognized country by traveling by land and sea. Like a turtle, Graham carried his home on his back for the better part of four years over every sanctioned United Nations country. Like the Mansa Musa, Marko Polo, or Zheng He, who only had their feet, a boat, or a few camels to fur…

What would you do if everything you worked for- successful company, healthy body, living in a great city-was suddenly taken away from you? Many survive the setbacks of unpredictable chaos and unpleasant events and are able to return to a normal life. But what about those who not only get back to where they were at, but grow even more? Who see life …

I met Gaby while I was volunteering in a hostel in Costa Rica. Born and raised in San Jose, Gaby thought she was going to go down the traditional path of education right into a career. However, her choice to work in a hostel, just to get some dinero on the side, has unintentionally challenged the way she thinks about her future. She has formed a ne…

Sara and I also met at the hostel in San Jose, Costa Rica where she was working at a program that teaches English to locals. Sara says exactly what's on her mind and has a specific pep about her that is emulated by the bounce in her curly red hair. Although far from Scotland, Costa Rica was not her first rodeo. As a well-traveled woman, she is attu…

Sarah and I met in Costa Rica while I was working at hostel Beku. From the moment we met, we immediately broke into a long conversation, as if it was unfinished from years ago. Like a hummingbird, flying from one flower to the next Sarah gave a scattered synopsis of what brought her to Costa Rica and how she was leaving in a few weeks. Keeping my f…

Karyn and I bumped paths while still working in a hostel in Costa Rica. She is hard to miss between her immeasurable height, voice, and personality to match. As boisterous as her presence is, she is attracted to the relaxed, Caribbean sway that is hard to come by in frigid Minnesota. I bring her on initially to tell a regional American joke that I …

Tina, from Finland, needed to find a place that was a 180 from her 9 months of snow, before becoming complacent with her beautifully simplistic life above the arctic circle. She decided to go and explore a climate and people on the other end of the world away from her reindeer eating folksmen. Flying in with a come what may attitude, Tina has not b…

Do you resist office jobs the way cats resist pools of water? Do you need a life that keeps you moving, questioning, and searching for yourself outside of the bounds of the conventional path? David had those same questions and drives. In this episode, he opens up about the struggles and exhaustion of not fitting in or knowing what to do, which resu…