Canadian-American Internationalist explorer, author, filmmaker, and aviator. In the 1920s, while still a teenager, she traveled 380,000 miles across 80 countries, becoming the first woman driver to circumnavigate the globe in a Ford 1918 Model T. Beginning when she was just 16 years old, the journey took the five years 1922–1927 to complete.
The first woman to circumnavigate the world in an automobile was Harriet White Fisher in 1909–1910, but she used a chauffeur and did not drive herself.
Idris began her adventuring career when she met her traveling companion, Walter “Cap” Wanderwell, in 1922. They married in 1925 and had two children. In 1932, her husband was shot and killed on their yacht Carma in Long Beach, California.
Wanderwell married Walter Baker in 1933 and continued her travels. The couple traveled to New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, India, Cambodia, Wyoming USA & Indochina, with Aloha later recounting being surrounded by five herds of elephants and having to shoot their way out.
Ultimately she visited over 80 countries and six continents, and drove over 500,000 miles in Ford vehicles.
She died on 4 June 1996 at age 89 in Newport Beach, California. She wrote an autobiographical account of her travels, Call to Adventure!, which was published in 1939, and republished in 2012.
She was known at various times as Idris Welsh, Idris Galcia Hall, Gilvis Wanderwell, Aloha Wanderwell, or Aloha W Baker.
Link to Wikipedia biography