
Photo By Jazz Zamb / Natura Vive
Katie Santoro was a little girl with big dreams of exploring the world. This year, she’s completing her bucket list item of visiting all seven continents before her 30th birthday by traveling to Australia.
“Growing up, my dad had a giant globe in his study, and I would spin it around and stop it with my index finger and dream of all the places I wanted to go,” the 29-year-old Fort Lauderdale resident recalls. “I wanted to do something spectacular in terms of travel and I wanted my goal to be achievable, but challenging. I was born with a sense of wanderlust.”
With an innate desire to step out of her comfort zone, immerse herself in new cultures and expose herself to different languages, Santoro embarked on her first international excursion in 2013 at age 16, traveling to Thailand on a vetenarian training trip. During her visit to Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, she helped drain the abscess of an elephant and neutered a dog.
She followed this with trips to Italy in 2014, Morocco and Peru in 2018 and Antarctica in 2024. Along the way, the thrill seeker has camped overnight on the summit of a volcano, hiked the Inca Trail, hang-glided in the Swiss Alps and taken a polar plunge in Antarctica.
One of her most memorable experiences was sleeping at Skylodge Adventure Suites in Peru — a transparent capsule attached to the side of a mountain. “I looked up at the stars and wished I could freeze time,” she says.
What makes this travel accomplishment even more remarkable is that Santoro was diagnosed with autism at age 24. Before her diagnosis, she struggled to maintain steady employment after earning her bachelor’s degree in global studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Today, she works as a Medicare clinical note reader at Cardinal Health as her primary source of income and has various side jobs to fund her travel.
Santoro’s autism went undetected for so long because she is verbally gifted and a master masker. “Masking is when you suppress parts of yourself to match what other people expect of you,” she explains about playing a role daily to blend into societal norms.
At airports, she wears earplugs or noise-canceling headphones to reduce stimulation and a lanyard with sunflowers on it, which signals to TSA that she has an invisible disability and may require additional patience and compassion.
For Santoro, her journey is about more than just the destination — it’s a testament to resilience, curiosity and breaking barriers.