Joy Kennelly's life story as a #travel adventurer as told in her own words.:)

Joy Kennelly’s excitement about travel was cultivated by her adventure loving parents from a young age. When she was five, her parents packed her and her two younger sisters, Grace and Glori, into a converted Pepsi Cola truck/motor home and hit the road for a sabbatical year driving through Mexico and Central America to Panama. Leaving the motor home behind in Panama, they then traveled by plane, boat, train and bus all throughout South America.

In the 7^th grade, her father took the family once again on another sabbatical and moved them all to Kenya, Africa where her parents taught at a missionary boarding school called Rift Valley Academy for a year while Joy and her sisters attended there.

The year-round school (three months on, one month off) offered the opportunity to explore East Africa more fully and during the breaks, as a family they explored Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Victoria Falls, visiting wild animal parks, missionaries working in villages, and many other unique locations, often traveling with the African locals on their transportation and staying in local African guest houses.

On the family’s return to the United States, they landed in Europe and visited England and Ireland before returning to CA to drive cross-country in a station wagon from New York. During summer vacations, Joy and her family also toured throughout Eastern Canada and several cities in the U. S.

Prior to moving to Seattle, WA for college, Joy worked for both Alaska and Delta Airlines and enjoyed the Virgin Islands, Jamaica, and more of the United States and Europe on her own. After college, she volunteered with Hungarian orphan children for a month before backpacking in Europe alone for an additional two months with just a travel guide and a few friends to visit along the way.

A year later, she was invited to fly to West Africa to write a script with an African college friend and used her insurance settlement from a car accident to fly with her to Burkina Faso. One of the few Americans to travel there, Joy immersed herself in the culture, met with the FESPACO film organizers and sang in public.

As a travel writer who has experienced 27 countries and most of the United States both on her own and with her family, Joy has written publicity materials, tour guides, blogs, scripts and website copy. Her articles have been published in the Pulitzer-prize winning newspaper, Coastal Traveler, and in Healthcare Traveler magazine; while her publicity materials about ten of the top museums and most of the major attractions in Los Angeles have been used by the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau as promotional materials for media outlets and photographers world-wide.

She has also blogged in her page one Google blog: Pure, Unadulterated Joy, about her experiences in four-star hotels such as the former Scottsdale Mondrian, the Hotel De Anza in San Jose, CA and the Joule in Dallas, TX while attending and speaking at conferences. She has covered her former client, Chef David Linville's involvement in Food & Wine festivals nation-wide as he presented at the Grand Food & Wine Affair, the 38th Annual Scottsdale Culinary Festival and Los Angeles Magazine's Food Event. Her blog coverage on Big Sur and Hearst Castle also appeared to inspire a TV travel episode.

As an airline industry professional, she wrote the script and appeared in a "Beating the High Cost of Travel" infomercial featuring Travel Expert, Tom Parsons, and Radio Personality, Casey Kasem, as her first job in entertainment. Her interesting experiences abroad earned her the “Spirit of Adventure” honor from the Youth Hostels of America Organization.