Updated by: May 11, 2026
The Trip That Changed Everything
My Dad took me around the world when I was 16 years old. Two months. Just the two of us.
It wasn’t a typical holiday. It was a sporting pilgrimage — the kind of journey that only makes sense when you’re a father who loves sport and a son who will follow him anywhere.
We stood on Centre Court at Wimbledon. We were there in France for the 1998 World Cup. We flew over the Grand Canyon in a Cessna, the canyon walls dropping away beneath us into something that didn’t look real. And we stood at the bottom of the Twin Towers in New York and looked up until our necks ached.
Two months away at 16 is an eternity. Long enough that when I finally walked back into school, my Year 9 teacher looked at me as though she was seeing a ghost. “I thought you were a figment of my imagination,” she said.
I was three shades darker than when I left — the kind of tan you only get from an entire European and American summer, absorbed slowly across stadiums and canyons and city streets.
That trip lit something in me that has never gone out. A restlessness. A certainty that the world is meant to be moved through, not just read about.
My Dad made it happen. My Mum let us go. I am forever grateful to both of them.
So I’ll ask you — what created your love for travel?
Paul Mercuri
Wake Up Here Founder
