My friend Jen has always been restless.

We met more than 25 years ago at Ohio State University. After graduation, she worked for a year on a farm in Kansas cultivating native prairie plants. Then she joined the Peace Corps and worked for two years with farmers in Honduras.

She met Milan after returning from the Peace Corps. They moved to the East, got married, changed their last names to Marvelous and settled in Philadelphia. When their first two children were still small, Jen insisted they move to the countryside near Ithaca, N.Y. They bought property, had twins, and raised their four girls and some chickens while Jen worked on a nursing degree.

A few years later, they moved back to Philly. Jen is a hospital nurse while Milan runs their properties, fixer-uppers that he fixes up and rents out. He also home-schools the girls. Occasionally, Jen flies off, volunteering her nursing skills in places like Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

But for many years, maybe all along, her deepest desire was to circumnavigate the globe with her family. And you know what? She did it. They left when their girls were 15, 12, 9 and 9.

It was August 2015 and I was pulling weeds in our garden when she called. “We’re on the highway in Colorado, driving an Auto Driveaway car from Philly to San Francisco. Then we’ll head up to Canada.”

“Wait, you mean now? You’re leaving now?” It’s not that I didn’t believe they’d actually do it, but Jen had talked about this trip and documented the extensive preparations on her blog, Tripping Fantastic, for so long it felt like an ever-receding horizon.

In Vancouver, they boarded a cruise ship, spent 16 nights at sea, disembarking in Shanghai. From there, they took a train, buses and taxis to Laos, where they stayed for a month before heading to Thailand.

In January, when I was in Detroit for job-related training, I sat in my hotel room reading Jen’s blog. Her family settled in Bangkok, a temporary home base from which they explored the Malay Peninsula including volunteering at an elephant sanctuary and watching the sun rise on the first morning of 2016 at the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

They arrived in India in February. I studied ancient Indian art and architecture at OSU, but have never been to the Asian subcontinent. As late winter gray prevailed outside my office window, saturated colors exploded from my desktop screen — Jen’s photos from the state of Rajasthan.

Post after post left me with a mix of longing to take such a trip with my family and yet also feeling inadequate to the challenges of such travel. This was not a curated tour by way of Hilton hotels. With lots of research beforehand and during the trip, it was done on the cheap and, after the initial cruise, never plush. Once they journeyed on a train in China with no seats, only bunk beds flanking the walls, making it impossible to sit upright. The photo made me queasy with claustrophobia.

By spring, they had traveled from India through Nepal and back to China. I saw these countries in ways I had not imagined from listening to the news. China looks modern and efficient. In India, ancient civilizations remain impressed upon the hustle-bustle of the present day.

When they backtracked to China, I thought maybe they were returning home. But instead they took the Trans-Siberian Railway from Beijing to Russia. From the eastern countryside beginning with Lake Baikal, they traveled to Moscow, stopping in Mongolia along the way. And from Russia they went to Istanbul just after the attempted coup.

Last summer, they wended their way through Europe: Romania, Greece, Croatia, Italy, France, England, Ireland and, finally, Spain where they boarded a ship in Barcelona. It brought them across the Atlantic to New York City.

Thirteen months, $86,000, six people. They circled the Earth.

Jen’s parents live in Northeast Ohio. She visited them soon after returning and we met for lunch.

“I keep thinking how a trip like that would completely change the way your children view life, the world, everything!” I told her. I have traveled with my children to many places, but nothing like my friend had done.

“Yeah, well, we’ll see. When they weren’t crying that we’d ruined their lives, they liked most of it. I think.”

“What!?!”

“Seriously, it was hot in Istanbul, so they didn’t want to leave our hotel and just laid around the room. But when they Facetimed their friends, they stuck their phones out the window to show them where we were, like it was fabulous. It could be frustrating at times.”

Ah, kind of like all parenting.

If you do your job right as a parent, it’s impossible for your kids to appreciate it. This is true of both the quotidian — say, providing nutritious meals, helping with homework, regular bedtimes — as well as the exceptional, like a trip around the world.

You don’t do it expecting them to say, “Thanks for buying organic food and cooking a delicious dinner for me yet again.” You do it because that’s what it is to be a parent and they don’t appreciate it because it’s all they know.

However, on the days when your children seem particularly ungrateful, remind yourself that one day they will have to take care of themselves and perhaps children of their own. It is then that they will truly appreciate all you’ve done for them and want to tell you so.

Certainly one day, if not already, Jen’s girls will.

This was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, June 3, 2017.