Brad Ryan has made his grandmother's dreams of seeing mountains, the ocean, and sand dunes come true.
Joy Ryan, 89, lives in Duncan Falls, Ohio, and never did much traveling. After Brad Ryan, now a vet at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C., graduated from college, he started going on more and more trips, and his grandmother shared that she regretted not going on adventures when she was younger. That's when Brad decided it was time for his grandmother to see cacti, ocean waves, and mountain peaks in person, not through a television screen.
In 2015, they went on their first trip, a spur-of-the-moment trek to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He wanted to take Joy to all 61 U.S. National Parks, so Brad set up a GoFundMe to help cover costs, and they have since traveled to 29 parks, covering 25,000 miles in 38 states. "We've seen grizzly bears, we've been charged by a moose ... we've had all these dramatic experiences and seen all this wildlife that she's never set eyes on in Ohio," Brad told CBS News. During their visits to the parks, Brad said he's realized that for his grandmother, she's seeing a lot of things for the first and last time, "and that has dramatically changed the way I live my life as well."
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