From Secrets to Compassionate Journeys

Kerri Johnson is telling this story the night before she flies to San Francisco on a business trip, raising a simple question: Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life?

The answer doesn't matter as much as the story, which seems to have lifted itself from the annals of a tortured family mystery or a Cinderella fairy tale into real-life light of day.

But unlike in the fairy tale, her happy ending, if there is such a thing, has depended entirely on Johnson's heart, business acumen and gritty instinct for perseverance. Not on a prince who rescues her.

A registered nurse of 34 years now living on the Southwest Florida coast, six years ago she conceived of a plan to wrest control of her working life selling surgical spine implants by starting the business she calls GOMO Travel, short for GO MORE. She put the business in literal motion starting in 2019.

At first, and right through COVID in the spring of 2020, when air travel was undertaken only out of necessity by most, the idea and the execution were simple in concept, although sometimes difficult in practice: She would escort people unable to travel on their own to their destinations.

"It is our mission to provide solutions to complex travel challenges for those who need it most," she said — and in practice, that often means a nurse traveling with a client. "We travel with seniors or anyone with age or health restrictions, folks of all ages, from 21 to 101," she explained.

Where? Anywhere. And now, more than five years into the business, she has 25 contract employees — travel companions — and the company has escorted clients to and from 37 states and 10 nations, including China, Turkey, Spain, Switzerland, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Canada and four islands in the Caribbean.

"We provide safety and comfort. There is an enormous need for assisted travel and I see people absolutely terrified in an airport. They should not feel marginalized or fearful."

The "we" in this case is usually a nurse, not because they dispense medical care, but because "they have attention to detail, they're able to assess when somebody may start to deteriorate, they can pick up on that, and they 're used to things being thrown at them and being able to respond properly. We use nurses for those reasons, not because we're medical providers."

Clients may have dementia, Parkinson's or cancer requiring treatment out of state or country, or any of a host of other problems, including massive anxiety.

Origin story

Simple as that notion may appear for a business filling a specific need she could employ her skills to fill, the idea sprang from a seeming world of dark secrets in her own life, secrets long hidden from her.

Johnson grew up on her grandparents' farm in central Minnesota, where her dad worked for a lumber company and her mother drove school buses. She was the youngest of four girls, a little blonde creature with a pixie haircut who looked nothing like her older sisters, all brown-haired girls, in an old family photo.

As a young nurse, she married a U.S. Navy pilot stationed at Pensacola, which brought her to Jacksonville, where she raised her two daughters, Hannah, now 30, and McKenna, 28. The couple divorced but she carried on with her working life.

Then, in 2013, her dad became dangerously ill with heart disease. She flew home to Minnesota to help him.

"He'd had cardiac surgery and a heart pump put in place, and as a nurse, I would sleep in his room overnight," she recalled.

"One night, he was getting a blood transfusion, and it was O positive." She knew her mother was O positive, too.

In that instant, her life changed.

"It was like out of a movie," she said. "It was dark in the room, about 3 a.m. The machines were beeping. I looked up, and the moment I saw that, I knew."

Two O-positive parents make an O-positive baby. Not a B.

Johnson's blood type is B.

"My dad died a week later," she said — and her mother, with whom she'd never had a close relationship, refused to discuss what had happened in her own life when Kerri was born.

It might have ended there but for another crossroads moment: Johnson's daughter McKenna, then 19, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes (juvenile diabetes), a dangerous autoimmune disease sometimes associated with other systemic diseases, requiring lifelong insulin treatment to survive.

At that point, it became paramount for Johnson to find her biological father, she explained. By doing so, she could track a genetic health history that might shed light on what McKenna would have to face, and provide direction in how to face it.

But still, she said, her mother wouldn't discuss the matter of her birth, or talk about her biological father.

So Johnson went into action to find him.

She considered hiring a genealogist to track him down, but at the time ancestor.com charged a $10,000 retainer to use one of their genealogists, with no guarantees. Too steep.

"So, I decided I was going to take the $10,000 and put up a billboard with an award offer for information leading to my biological father in that (Minnesota) town" — the town where she was born.

"I Googled 'billboard-to-find-biological father' and up popped the story of a man in England who had put one up, with an email address. I reached out in an email to him and asked if it worked. He responded: It didn't work, but he'd found a genealogist in West Virginia who'd helped him. And he shared the contact with me."

So Johnson hired the woman. The search took exactly one night.

The discovery

"She was up all night solving this puzzle. She was able to narrow it down to my biological grandparents. But she couldn't tell if they'd had just one son or several; if it was several, my biological father would be one of them," Johnson said.

"They were in Minnesota, so I called my cousin, who worked at a library, and she looked up the birth records and determined that my grandparents only had one son. And I found out that this man, who was my biological father, had a son and a daughter."

What to do now?

"I found my half-sister on Facebook and my half-brother on LinkedIn," she recalled. "Saying, 'You don't know me, but this is who I am, I have DNA proof we share a father,' I contacted each of them."

She also told them about her daughter's affliction and her need to determine a health history for their father's side of the family.

"A few weeks later, my brother reached out to me," she said — a careful calculated response.

She learned not only that her biological father had dementia and his wife had divorced him after nearly decades of marriage, but that they would plan a family reunion for her to meet him.

Johnson was able to talk to him, finally, she said, and he told her he'd never known her mother was pregnant in the once upon a time. "But," she added, "my half-sister is four months younger than I am" — so the likelihood is, he knew.

Perhaps the most defining moment in her saga, however, came while talking about their father one day with her half-brother.

The father was wealthy, a banker and he owned a house in Arizona where he spent winters, she learned.

"He was living alone, and he fell. He didn't show up for Bible study — he was outside in the sun for three days, nearly dead when they found him and got him to the hospital."

Telling her the story after the fact, her brother also described "how my half-sister and her husband had to fly to Arizona, and get him on the plane home. I said, 'That would be so easy for me to have managed.'"

And suddenly, a new life, a new vocation and a new way forward dawned on her, she said — GOMO Travel.

Her half-brother told her something else, too.

"He said my half-sister, whose name rhymes with mine and whose middle name is my mother's, was a type 1 diabetic. So immediately we knew this was genetic, not viral, and we learned that no other diseases were associated with my father's family health history," she said — a massive relief both to mother and daughter.

And now Johnson and her employed travel companions can do things like fly a client with advanced Parkinson's home from Hong Kong to New York in specially reclining seats; or get another client out of Miami during severe flooding by hiring a special vehicle to transport him to Orlando, fly out and reach a medical appointment elsewhere in the country on time, rather than waiting three days for the Miami airport to reopen; or get a grandmother with dementia gently to Savannah to appear at her granddaughter's wedding when family members couldn't accompany her; or perform countless other feats of pragmatic compassion and skill in traveling that could defeat some other folks.

It's a lot. And it has a happy ending.

"By creating this business from all that, by taking a tragedy — that I never knew my real father while growing up — by taking everything that came about from my newfound family and making this business out of it, I've (experienced) this positive impact on the lives of those we have helped.

"I don't think about this (her true-life fairy tale) negatively, even if I still have some pain marks."

She has to go now, because she has to finish packing for San Francisco — but one more thing: "I feel like I've risen above it," she said. ¦

In the KNOW

· For more info about GOMO Travel, visit gomotravel.com

· Johnson on the costs of a traveling companion: "Our pricing is based on cost and time — airfare, amount of time, where the companion is coming from and whether they need a car service or a wheelchair van. There are many factors. So every trip is different."

· Johnson on the reason for picking Southwest Florida for the business: "I always wished the business could be headquartered somewhere between Marco Island and Tampa — because of all the snowbirds. It's a destination. We're an assisted travel business, and we wanted to be near the aging."