[Around The World In 69 Days]

You think back on the past month with a mix of emotions.

When you were 14 your parents, sisters, brother, aunts, uncles, and cousins were attending the family reunion in North Carolina when a freak storm caused a mudslide that killed everyone at the event. You were only spared because you were at space camp.

For the next seven years, you lived with your maternal grandparents in Cambridge Massachusetts and attended high school, then college. They were your only family, and though you mourned the loss of your brothers and sisters they helped you move on. You graduated from MIT with a masters degree in astrophysics just three days before it happened, one morning, Gramma and Grampa didn't wake up. The cause of was listed as 'heart attack' but you know the truth, they just decided it was time.

The reading of the will happened three weeks later, and you were shocked. It wasn't that you were the sole beneficiary, other than a few select charities, it was that you were now a billionaire. Your grandparents didn't have a mansion, not even a 'McMansion', it was a three-bedroom house in a bad part of town.

As the will was read you learned the family history...

In 1742 Alistair Groze came to America, 'Massachusets Colony' then, and married a young heiress called Ethel Lourdes. They settled in what would later become part of Cambridge, with a diverse farm that produced everything from apples to pumpkins, milk to mutton, and cheese to chestnuts. The family prospered, for a time, with seven sons, all of whom went on to attend Harvard.

Then, around 1777 something went profoundly WRONG. Family legend says that Alistair and Ethel's firstborn son, Gregory Groze, a Native American shamaness, but that's just a legend, however, for the past seven generations, ill luck has stalked the clan at every turn.

As one among many examples your great-grandfather and all his brothers died in WWII, leaving your great-grandmother a widow with twins to raise and a farm to run by herself. Then, just after the war, the ancestral house burned down, forcing them to sell the farm to a developer. That was when the new ancestral home was built, one among hundreds...

Your grandparents became rich with the of the rest of the family, the combine inheritances allowing them to make very stable investments, and now, with their passing, it all falls to you. You were just numb for days, paralyzed by indecision. Your parents and grandparents instilled in your habits of thrift and industry, but, what can someone who's one of the top tenths of a percent in the world do for a job? Ok, sure, you could become Elon Musk, but Elon Musk already IS Elon Musk, "You Do You," as your father used to say.

So, you've sat here in your grandparent's house, now just 'your house' you suppose, thinking about it, and came up with a plan.

You're going to hire a private security company, someone reputable, and travel the world, documenting your adventures and publishing them in yearly memoirs. Along the way, you will help the impoverished, rescue those in danger, and be an all-around awesome person! There's a secondary reason for this decision though, you've never told anyone, but you've always had a yen for 'exotic' partners. People of other ethnicities light your fire in a way you both can't exactly explain, but also can't deny...

So, you've done a little research online, tacked a big map of the world to a thick corkboard on your living room wall, and thrown three darts at it with your eyes shut. The one that landed on land was the one you would visit...