After a stint as a sky swooping aviatrix, Helen Skinner got a bug for travel, which would change the course of her life.

Her adventures took her around the world a couple times over, the first time going solo via freight boat just as WWII was breaking out. On that ship — when she wasn’t learning Morse Code and ship navigation for fun — she was being courted by a handsome engineer and race car driver 10 years her junior… they zipped around on motorcycles in South Africa, danced to Gershwin docked outside Singapore, with war planes buzzing overhead, and married as soon as they returned to familiar shores. She kept vivid, witty journals and letters (along with decades of pictures, somehow colorful even in black and white). But I don’t want to give the whole story away. That’s what the blog is for. Just know the adventures didn’t stop when the boat docked. She’d see those ports (and beloved planes) again, and then some.