This is the life-affirming story of how Downs, newly married and established in her career as a journalist, quits her job, sells her belongings, and embarks on the solo trip of a lifetime: Her mother's. Over the course of one year backpacking through seventeen countries - visiting all the places her mother, struck with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, cannot visit herself - Maggie faces some of the world's most exotic locales while confronting the slow loss of her mother and the close bond they shared. Interweaving travelogue with memories of her family. She takes the reader hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, whitewater rafting down the Nile, volunteering at a monkey sanctuary in Bolivia, praying at an ashram in India, and fleeing the Arab Spring in Egypt. By embarking on a global journey, Downs embraces what it means to make every moment count - traveling around the globe and home again, losing a parent while discovering the world.