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How an Agoraphobic Traveler Wanders the Earth - Atlas Obscura
When anxiety set boundaries on her life, this adventurer found solace and excitement in Google Street View.
Her physical adventures have been curtailed by agoraphobia and anxiety, but from her home in London, Jacqui Kenny has seen the world. Since 2016, she has wandered beneath cerulean skies in the American Southwest and among the shadows cast by tapered trees in Puebla, Mexico. She has visited horses on windswept expanses in Mongolia and ambled along a snow-flanked road in Kyrgyzstan. She has done it all through Google Street View, and collected some 40,000 snapshots of her travels.
At the peak of her web-based wanderlust, Kenny devoted up to 18 hours a day to her wanderings. “I kind of felt like I just jumped into this world, and then came out a couple of years later,” she says. “I was going through a time in my life where I just needed to go into another world.” Her roaming has decreased recently, as her agoraphobia has abated a bit, but she still posts snapshots from her digital travels on her Instagram, the Agoraphobic Traveller.
When anxiety set boundaries on her life, this adventurer found solace and excitement in Google Street View.
Her physical adventures have been curtailed by agoraphobia and anxiety, but from her home in London, Jacqui Kenny has seen the world. Since 2016, she has wandered beneath cerulean skies in the American Southwest and among the shadows cast by tapered trees in Puebla, Mexico. She has visited horses on windswept expanses in Mongolia and ambled along a snow-flanked road in Kyrgyzstan. She has done it all through Google Street View, and collected some 40,000 snapshots of her travels.
At the peak of her web-based wanderlust, Kenny devoted up to 18 hours a day to her wanderings. “I kind of felt like I just jumped into this world, and then came out a couple of years later,” she says. “I was going through a time in my life where I just needed to go into another world.” Her roaming has decreased recently, as her agoraphobia has abated a bit, but she still posts snapshots from her digital travels on her Instagram, the Agoraphobic Traveller.