Aloha Wanderwell. It’s a name so perfect for an adventurer it sounds invented. Because, actually, it was. But Wanderwell, a 1920s traveler often billed as the “Amelia Earhart of the Auto” and the “World’s Most Traveled Girl,” was such a marvel, so game for exploration and adventure, regardless of discomfort or danger, she more than earned the stage name.
Wanderwell was born Idris Galcia Hall in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1906. After Idris’s father, a British Army reservist, was killed at Ypres, Belgium, in June 1917, her mother moved the family to Europe. Idris quickly grew into a restless tomboy, devouring her father’s adventure books and challenging authority. She’d also physically grown quickly, six feet tall as a teenager, with a shock of blonde hair. Her spunk made her ill-suited to life in the convent school where she’d been enrolled by her mother.
“I ached for action, but I did not know in which direction to go,” she wrote in a memoir.
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