Cassie De Pecol was nervous as she rode a bus from Oman across the border to Yemen one day early last month. Not only was she a single American woman traveling alone into a war-torn nation, but once she set foot in Yemen she would set the record for the fastest person ever to travel to all 196 countries in the world.
Watch the video above to hear how she pulled it off!
The news was made official this week, when Guinness World Records confirmed March 13 that De Pecol, 27, set the record for visiting all 193 sovereign nations, plus Taiwan, Kosovo and Palestine, in the fastest time: one year and 194 days.
“The financial and emotional hurdles I faced along the way had me at the edge of my seat, worried sick really up until yesterday,” the Connecticut native wrote on Instagram March 14. “That something would go wrong and I wouldn’t have obtained the record, something I devoted the past 3 years of my life to make happen. Now I can finally breathe.”
For a year and a half before she left, the single college graduate worked 85 hours a week at two babysitting jobs in Los Angeles and managed to save $10,000.
She set off on her record-breaking trip, which she estimated would cost about $200,000, on July 24, 2015. She had some sponsors and figured she could get more on the way.
“About eight months in, I completely ran out of money, I had to come back home,” she tells Us Weekly. “I didn’t tell anyone, and it was really embarrassing, I thought I was going to have to quit 60 countries in.”
But the determined world traveler was ultimately able to drum up more sponsors for her project, called Expedition 196.
She is now writing a book about her experiences, from running in the snow in Kazakhstan to visiting the ruins in Petra, Jordan, to having “the best chai latte of my entire life” that afternoon in Yemen, where she finished the journey on February 2.
“I don’t really have any fears when it comes to these countries,” De Pecol tells Us, having just returned from a trip to Antarctica. “People are genuinely kind, and so long as you have an open mind to understanding or appreciating or learning their story or accepting who they are, then you will experience good. And that’s what I’ve experienced.”
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