# Don Parrish (adventurer)

Donald "Don" Maltby Parrish Jr. (born October 27, 1944), is an American adventurer and former technical manager at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He is best known for his prolific worldwide travels.

## Early life and education

Donald Maltby Parrish Jr was born on October 27, 1944, in Washington, D.C., to Donald Maltby Parrish and Herdis Borgny Anderson. After moving to Iowa a few months before his fourth birthday, the family then moved to Dallas where he would spend the rest of his childhood.
Parrish graduated from W.W. Samuell High School in 1962. He continued his education at the University of Texas, graduating in June 1966 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics. In June 1968, He graduated from the University of Chicago with a Master of Science degree in Computer Science.
After retirement, Parrish studied Web design and Spanish for two years at the College of DuPage from 2001 to 2003.

## Career

Parrish began working for Bell Labs in Holmdel Township, New Jersey. In June 1966, before being transferred to Bell's new Indian Hill Laboratory in Naperville, Parrish worked in the call processing group designing programs that switched telephone calls under computer control and provided new services to subscribers.
In 1972, Parrish was transferred from Bell Labs to Illinois Bell to be the Switching Manager responsible for Aurora, Illinois, a position he stayed in for two years. In 1977, AT&T decided to sell its Electronic Switching Systems overseas. Parrish volunteered to work in the International Switching Development Organization in a newly created role as its planning manager.
In 1984 and 1985 Parrish made three trips to China to secure the first 5ESS Switch project to enter the local switching market. Parrish initiated the development of the 5ESS International Gateway Switch for Singapore. In late 1990 Parrish was assigned to help break into the Japanese market.
Parrish retired in 1996 at the age of 51 and continued working for another five years as a consultant before quitting for good in 2001.

## Travel

In 1965, when Parrish was 20, he visited West Germany for the summer and worked as an unskilled laborer in a metal factory in Hanau near Frankfurt. Parrish purchased an old motorcycle and lived in a room in the home of a German family. By 1969 he was exploring the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Parrish visited the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. He made his first trip around the world in 1971.
Parrish has 13 passports and has visited more than 60 islands by ship. He has also flown 5 million air miles.
In 1983, Parrish completed his first major travel objective: visiting all 50 U.S. states. In 2011 he completed visits to all 193 member states of the United Nations. In February 2017, he completed the Travelers' Century Club (TCC) list of 325 countries, becoming the 26th person of the TCC club to do so. He has also visited 937 of the 1013 locations on the Most Traveled People list. He has been considered the 3rd most traveled person in the Most Traveled People Club and the 17th in the Nomad Mania travel blog list. He is ranked #1 on the Most Traveled People list as of July 2022.
Throughout his travels, Parrish has encountered many life threatening and otherwise harrowing situations. These include cheating death on a Nepali road, being detained by Jamaican authorities, and falling while rock climbing in Wisconsin. Despite this, he says: "I've never regretted any of it because I haven't been on a single trip where I didn't learn something new."
During his trip to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Parrish, who knows Hangul, and his fellow travelers experienced the guided sights of North Korea, including the war museum and monuments to Kim Il Sung, the founder of the North Korean republic. Parrish was selected by his group to place flowers at the grave of Kim Il Sung's wife, Kim Jong-suk.
Parrish visited the South Pole on the 100-year anniversary of Roald Amundsen's Expedition of 1911. When he was 66, Parrish visited the last United Nations country on his list - Mongolia - in 2011.
After visiting Conway Reef, located 280 miles from the main islands of Fiji, on November 2, 2013, Parrish was ranked number one by World's Most Traveled People. In 2017 his friends from a small group of travelers called ETIC awarded him the title of "the world's most-traveled man".
Parrish has sometimes traveled with fellow Illinois resident and businessman Robert Bonifas. According to Bonifas, "travel is all Don talks and thinks about." Writing for the BBC, Dave Seminara said of Parrish, "For him, travel is an adventure akin to a sacred experience. It is about learning, but it's also about connecting with people in order to form lasting friendships and to better understand the places he visits."
In his 2014 piece for the Circumnavigators Log, writer Kevin Short said of Parrish, "He's a veritable information sponge that finds something to learn everywhere and from everyone." In the same article Parrish is quoted as saying he enjoys travel because of the "emotional bonding that you occasionally get when you travel."
Along with fellow top travelers from MTP, Parrish is considered to have traveled more miles than Ferdinand Magellan and Captain James Cook.

## Personal life

Parrish is unmarried and has no children.
He lives in the suburbs of Chicago.
Parrish is co-founder of the Libertarian Party of Illinois. He was the Libertarian Party candidate for the United States Senate election in Illinois, 1986.

## Media

Parrish was profiled by the Daily Herald in 2014. He was profiled by the BBC in 2015 and by Die Zeit in 2016. In 2017 he was interviewed by Ric Gazarian for the Counting Countries podcast. Parrish has been featured in: Chicago Tribune, NBC , Daily Herald, Emirates Airlines magazine, The Daily Telegraph and CBS Radio. In December 2019 he was mentioned in the Colombian magazine Avianca.

## Accomplishments

* Parrish holds a US patent for Dynamic network automatic call distribution.

## Awards

* Parrish received the ETIC Award for 2018. Presented to him in Baghdad during the "Extreme Traveler International Congress", Parrish was dubbed the "Champion of the World" among extreme travelers, for his lifetime achievements within the Extreme Traveler community.
* Parrish was presented with an award by the Travelers' Century Club president on March 11, 2017. The award includes an engraved plaque on a pedestal of European crystal and a globe that rotates by Solar power. Parrish received the award for completing the TCC travel list of 325 countries.
* In 2015, BBC Travel named Parrish as one of six travel pioneers for 2015.