“I saw the others traveling alone and I said to myself: “why not me?” “. If Eléonore Vern, aged 30, asked herself this question ten years ago, it is because she was not destined for a life of travel. Born prematurely in Paris, she died “twice by stopping breathing for more than eight minutes”. “It created lesions on my neuronal connections and my cerebral palsy,” explains this survivor. Suffering from a motor disability, she now uses a wheelchair.
To travel, you have to “plan everything, anticipate everything,” she confides. A challenge for this young woman, since she decided to go around the world alone. “This idea has been dormant in me for a long time, it is the fruit of a long reflection,” explains the woman who already has around twenty countries to her credit, including Canada, the United States and Costa Rica.
Travel Travel…
Eléonore made her first trip in 2015, during an Erasmus year as part of her journalist training at EJCAM. She then lived in Granada, Spain. Dreaming of seeing the Spanish capital, she suggests that friends go there but no one can accompany her. Without a backpack or a suitable chair, she leaves alone for a few days. This will finally be the trigger, the first solo journey in a long series.
“Even if I go alone, I am always surrounded by people ready to give me a helping hand,” she explains, with a smile on her lips. And to remember her trip to Madrid, when she found herself stranded without any possibility of accessing the metro. A boy he met there carried him into the escalator. “I knew him for two hours and he had my life in his hands,” she laughs.
“I want to tell people that it’s possible! I break all the limits, the mental barriers, she enthuses. This is my sophrologist side speaking.” A trained journalist, she reoriented herself in sophrology during Covid. “This period brought me face to face with my contradictions and I turned to a quest for meaning,” explains Éléonore. Cliché, right? “.
Positive, but “it’s not easy every day”. “When you travel, especially with an armchair, you have to plan and anticipate everything,” she admits. Several obstacles therefore stand in his way towards the world tour: organizational but also financial. An all-terrain wheelchair costs more than 10,000 euros. This is why the thirty-year-old launched a jackpot. Her current armchair, which has accompanied her since her early days as a globetrotter, no longer has the original robustness and comfort. Its wheels are not suitable for all situations.
“If I’m still here, it’s because I have something to do on this planet”
“I have two solutions in life: either I get depressed in my bed, or I accept the situation as it is and I act,” she continues. From the morning, I think: give me ease! » . So, she finds strength, in her readings such as the books of Alexandre Jolien which she particularly appreciates, in her travel memories or in those around her.
For Éléonore, this world tour is obvious since it combines her three loves: travel, journalism and sophrology. During her adventure across continents, she will share “a travel diary” on her Instagram account, on a website or with media in order to satisfy her desire to write. She will also nourish her soul and body by giving sophrology courses in French and Spanish remotely. And for the rest, following the next episode…